The International Olympic Committee (IOC) on Friday renewed its support for boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, who are competing in the Olympic tournament after being banned from last year’s World Championships for failing a gender test.
Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was “born a woman, registered as a woman, lives her life as a woman, boxes as a woman,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said at a news conference on Friday. “This is not a transgender case,” he reiterated.
The type of Mme Khelif was heavily criticized after reports emerged that “high testosterone levels” would have led to his disqualification from the 2023 World Championships hosted by the International Boxing Association. The organization, which is also on the outs with the IOC, denied that his test consisted of a testosterone analysis, but did not specify its exact nature.
Female participants in Olympic events must undergo femininity tests to prove that they are “really women,” explains Lou St-Pierre, principal researcher at the Laboratory for the Advancement of Women in Sports in Quebec. The testers examine, among other things, their body constitution, their musculature and their strength. “We look at the physical aspect!” he exclaims incredulously.
Only women have to undergo such assessments, the researcher notes, and there is no masculinity test because of the prejudice that “men are systematically better than women in sports.” Added to this is the fear that men will “disguise” themselves as women in order to win top honors, the researcher says.
What standards?
Canadian Women and Sport CEO Allison Sandmeyer-Graves says these femininity tests, while designed to protect women, are actually harming them. “There’s a big spectrum of sexual development that these tests don’t take into account.”
Some women have naturally high levels of testosterone, she notes, and “because they don’t fit the norms that scientists have set and the notion of what makes a woman a woman, they get sidelined.”
Non-Western women are also more often affected by this situation, says M.me Sandmeyer-Graves, because “so much of our conception of femininity is rooted in Western and white female norms.” The muscles, jawlines and more pronounced facial features of some racialized athletes are some of the characteristics that could be considered unfeminine, she says. “So athletes who don’t fit those ideals are often singled out.”
This was the case for South African runner Caster Semenya, who was forced to take medication to counter her “high” testosterone levels as soon as she rose to prominence in 2009. Three years earlier, Indian runner Santhi Soundarajan had been stripped of her silver medal in the 800 metres at the 2006 Asian Games because of “abnormal results” observed during a gender test.
Everyone wants “a simple explanation,” but a “black or white” explanation does not exist, “neither in the scientific community nor elsewhere,” the IOC spokesman argued on Friday about the femininity tests.
Mr. St-Pierre shares this opinion. “Human bodies are magnificent machines that cannot be summed up in the classification in which we would like to confine them,” he explains. “Biology is complicated.”
With Agence France-Presse