Last week, gender at the Olympics took a new (but familiar) turn when Algerian boxer Imane Khelif defeated her Italian opponent Angela Carini, who withdrew from the bout after a mere 46 seconds. Immediately, attention turned to Khelif’s eligibility – and the validity of her sex identity. Journalists and pundits also raised questions about another Olympic boxer, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting.
The two boxers had previous Olympic experience. But both were disqualified from participating in last year’s International Boxing Association (IBA) World Championships, reportedly when testing revealed high testosterone levels.
While Carini insisted that her withdrawal was neither premeditated nor a political statement, she refused to shake Khelif’s hand after the bout. The Italian boxer later expressed remorse for not shaking her opponent’s hand, and expressed regret over the controversy.
Social media blew up
Quickly and predictably, a social media uproar ensued. Pundits and politicians alike used rhetoric commonly deployed to denounce trans athletes’ participation in women’s sports. Anti-trans author J.K. Rowling referred to Khelif as “male” in a post attacking the “misogynist sporting establishment” for letting her compete. Tennis legend Martina Navratilova amplified Rowling’s remarks, claiming that Khelif’s inclusion “makes a mockery of women’s sports.”
The U.S. Republican presidential ticket weighed in, with Donald Trump promising to “keep men out of women’s sports.” His running mate JD Vance described the bout as “a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match.”
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) defended Khelif’s and Lin’s inclusion in a Aug. 1 statement, asserting that Khelif and Lin complied with Olympic boxing eligibility regulations, which are based on the gender listed on competitors’ passports. The statement further noted that the disqualification of these two boxers from the IBA World championships in 2023 was an “arbitrary decision” made “without any due process.” A chaotic IBA press conference on Aug. 5 offered ample evidence to that effect.
Waves of support also spread across social media, much of it pointing out that Khelif and Lin were assigned female at birth and were therefore cisgender athletes appropriately competing with other members of their sex.
The Olympics have a long history of gender disputes
The dispute over who “belongs” in women’s sports is not new, of course. Moreover, the idea that athletes might engage in gender fraud to gain an advantage is intimately tied to the history of the Olympics. Michael Waters documents the development of sex-testing at the 1936 Olympics, which took place in Germany despite international protest that doing so would implicitly condone Hitler’s Nazi party. Waters shows how Olympic officials concerned about a spate of transgender athletes, such as Poland’s Zdeněk Koubek, borrowed from Nazi eugenic practices, like blood testing and phrenology, to exclude women who were not “woman enough” from athletic competitions.
More recently, South African track athlete Caster Semenya came under close scrutiny. Officials from World Athletics subjected her to medical testing in 2009 that revealed a genetic condition (5αR2D) consistent with the presence of XY chromosomes. (Semenya had been assigned female at birth and had always identified as a woman. According to Semenya’s 2023 guest essay in the New York Times, she asserts: “I’m a different kind of woman, I know, but I’m still a woman.”) She went on to compete in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, winning two gold medals along the way.
As Elizabeth Sharrow’s research points out, athletic competitions tend to rely upon, uphold, and naturalize the gender binary. Sex-segregated sports (and the gender testing that frequently accompanies it) serves to cast suspicion not only upon transgender athletes but also intersex, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people. The focus on testing can also ostracize those deemed to have “unnaturally” high hormone levels – even when an athlete’s body naturally produced them.
Cultural and social-scientific understandings of sex and gender have evolved over the course of Olympic history. But the world of sports has not found ways to evolve with them. Moreover, when sports authorities act as gatekeepers to the realm of women’s sports – typically usually using testosterone levels as the measure of “womanhood” – they often do so to the exclusion of women of color. Indeed, Khelif, Lin, and Semenya are all non-Western women of color. These exclusions occur despite the lack of scientific consensus over the link between testosterone levels and athletic ability.
Testing has become invasive
Research shows that sex-segregated sports creates the backdrop for invasive sex testing. Legal scholar Nancy Leong points out that the justification for sex-segregated sports is to ensure a level playing field for women, which reinforces the idea that men are naturally stronger and faster than women. This justification traps women into a subordinate position even while it claims to ensure fairness for them, and it opens a lane for right-wing pundits to police gender under the guise of protecting female athletes.
At its core, defenders of Khelif and Lin – like defenders of Semenya before them – are correct that the Olympic boxing controversy is not centrally a question about the presence of transgender athletes in women’s sports. They are also correct that these athletes have faced unwarranted discrimination. Yet it is not necessary to aggressively assert that the two boxers are cisgender athletes. That approach subtly justifies the discrimination that trans athletes face when they participate in athletic competitions.
This controversy reinforces discrimination
At issue is what Heath Fogg Davis has termed “sex-identity discrimination.” This form of discrimination occurs wherever public judgment is cast in a manner that calls into question individuals’ worthiness of fitting into the categories of “male” or “female.” Anti-trans sentiments serve as prominent examples of this form of discrimination. But sex-identity discrimination casts a much wider net; it is a social force that calls for adherence to norms of self-presentation based upon biological sex. This phenomenon plays out not only at sporting events, of course, but in public bathrooms across the world, where laws reinforcing sex-segregated bathrooms invite users of these spaces to cast judgment upon the validity of other users of these facilities.
The concept of sex-identity discrimination reveals how sex-segregated sports, rigid gender expectations, and white supremacy created the conditions for launching Khelif into the spotlight. Although news outlets that erroneously stated Khelif is transgender have since retracted their statements, there is little doubt that the scrutiny she faced will endure as long as sex-segregated sports are the norm.
Matthew Dean Hindman is associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Tulsa. His research focuses on interest groups, inequality, and LGBT politics.
Stay up to date on all things politics and political science. Sign up for Good Authority’s weekly newsletter by entering your email address in the box below.
