What would the Olympics be without another controversy surrounding the gender of an athlete to remind us that despite the air of happy celebration of sporting achievements, the world is as it is? Last week, the Web and the press were inflamed about the performance of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, after one of her opponents, Italian Angela Carini, burst into tears in front of journalists after a quick defeat against the Algerian, claiming to have never taken such hard blows in her entire career.
It didn’t take much more for the whole world to get up in arms, once again, about the suspect femininity of a woman of African origin. Personalities as prominent as Donald Trump, Elon Musk and JK Rowling jumped at the opportunity to scream scandal on the loudspeaker, deploring “that a man” had been admitted to the Olympic boxing competition. The sign, according to them, of a new advance in the vast conspiracy led by trans people and their allies. In subtext, this idea that a trans woman is always just a man “disguised” as a woman.
We could talk at length about the violence of this rhetoric, which today justifies the exclusion of trans women and girls from organized sports, as well as their progressive erasure from civic life, from public space, not to mention their constant exposure to hatred and threats. The fact that the fachosphere jumped at the opportunity to play body police, by sowing doubt about Khelif’s biological sex, tells us a lot about the current position of the cursor.
For the record, let’s recall that Imane Khelif is not trans. She was assigned female at birth, she is legally a woman, she presents herself as a woman. But here’s the thing: that didn’t stop her from being the object of the wrath of the extreme right. This completely uninhibited outburst is the monstrous fruit of the encounter between anti-trans hatred and pure and hard misogyny, which intends to punish femininity deemed “inadequate”.
High-performance sports, and particularly the Olympic Games, have a long history of obsessive control over the femininity of athletes. Long excluded from the Olympics, women have been, throughout the 20th centurye century, admitted on condition that they prove that their femininity remained (ironically) a barrier to athletic performance. Basically, athletes had to prove that they were not too strong, too fast, too skilled, otherwise they could be suspected of being in reality men or, at the very least, wrongly women.
On this subject, CBC recently broadcast a series of podcasts on the history of the control of women’s biological sex in high-performance sports, entitled Tested: Tracing the Surprising 100-year History of Sex Testing in Elite Sports (a co-production with NPR). The series looks at how the “femininity tests” imposed on athletes have evolved over time.
We recall the sordid ones nude parades prescribed to female athletes at some international athletics competitions in the 1960s, where they had to undergo a systematic examination of their sexual attributes. These examinations were later replaced by chromosomal and hormonal tests – tests that were less intrusive, certainly, but which still had an element of arbitrariness.
The series is excellent at popularizing science and, above all, at exposing the pseudoscience behind the sex classifications used for the purposes of sports competitions. When we look closely, we see that the biological binarity becomes less obvious, and that the line we choose to draw is indeed political. We establish two poles that we would like to be clear, and we erase, or seek to modify, what is located between the two.
In this regard, it discusses the hormonal treatments imposed on athletes whose testosterone levels are considered too high. Very recently, Namibian runner Christine Mboma, a medalist in the 200 meters at the Tokyo Olympics, resigned herself, as Paris approached, to taking medication to reduce her (natural) testosterone level in order to participate in competitions, following the adoption of new rules by World Athletics, the international athletics federation. A clearly intrusive treatment, which causes considerable side effects.
The control of the bodies and sexual attributes of athletes, contrary to what the fachosphere suggests, is already particularly tight. It is also based on a long history marked by misogyny (the fear of strong and capable women), racism (the “correct” femininity is a priori that of white women) and whiffs of eugenics (correcting “non-conforming” bodies). This obsession also aims to categorize sexual attributes in a way that reinforces the hierarchies established between the genders. This history is not over, and the rise of anti-trans hatred, at the time of trad wives and constant assaults on reproductive freedoms, creates a “perfect storm.”
Those who experience and fight anti-trans hate have long warned us that the desire to control gender expression and physical attributes related to gender is not just aimed at trans women. The control of trans identity, the desire to eradicate trans people, relies on the same levers that are used to control the expression of femininity, the bodies of all women. The Olympics are a perfect context to observe these dynamics at work. We must know how to read them with discernment.