The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women From Women’s Sports

The far right and its fellow gender fascists typically focus their attacks on trans people. When it comes to women’s and girls’ sports — a terrain cherished by anti-trans crusaders — the exclusion of trans women has been a Republican legislative priority, leading even to proposals for abusive genital testing requirements on girls whose assigned sex at birth is questioned. The fact that the latest high-profile case of gender policing is aimed at athletes who were indeed assigned female at birth should, however, come as no surprise.

Right-wing extremists — including Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk — alongside gender-binary zealots like J.K. Rowling are currently hurling vitriol at a cis woman boxer, Imane Khelif of Algeria, following the athlete’s swift defeat of her Italian opponent in an Olympic match in Paris on Thursday. Khelif is a female athlete who was deemed by the International Olympic Committee to be eligible to compete. She is only the latest woman of color in sports to be deemed insufficiently female by a right-wing commentariat obsessed with forging the strictest gender binaries, contrary to social, biological, and medical realities.

Attacks on Khelif — like previous discriminatory treatment of other female athletes like South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya — reveal the right’s gender ideology for what it is: intellectually untenable and racist. Pointing this out will not stop their vile gender policing; it should, however, give pause to anyone who might entertain Republican and trans-exclusionary positions on gender as worthy even of debate.

On the New York Post’s homepage yesterday, a story by Douglas Murray decried Khelif’s fair win as the “tragic result of letting biological men compete in women’s sports.” (The tabloid published at least five articles about the controversy Thursday, showing the eagerness with which far-right media latches onto anti-trans sentiment.) Across social media, thousands of posts echoed, calling Khelif a “male” or a “biological man” and thus unfairly advantaged. Bigots were swift to glom onto the fact that Khelif, along with another female Olympics competitor from Taiwan now facing attacks, had previously been found ineligible to compete by the International Boxing Association — an organization that has been broadly discredited and officially unrecognized by the IOC.

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Khelif was assigned female at birth. The controversy stems from biochemical tests by the IBA that resulted in her removal from their competition, likely because either high testosterone levels or some chromosomal variation was found. We don’t know the details about the IBA’s testing, and Khelif is entirely eligible to compete in the Olympics per its rules. More to the point, high testosterone levels and the presence of XY or XXY chromosomes do not make a person male, or biologically a man. This is a right-wing fantasy, aided in these cases by the practice of so-called sex-testing in sports. I say “so called” because these tests in no way actually test for something so dependent on multiple characteristics and determinations as a person’s sex. 

This is worth clarifying only to emphasize the incoherence of the right’s allegedly biology-based sex-gender ideologies, laid bare in the attacks on athletes like Khelif. Firstly, for a political stance so insistent on the capacity to “define woman” in order to distinguish readily, in everyday life, who is and is not a woman, it should be troubling to these gender authoritarians that only the vagaries of sports testing revealed chromosomal or hormonal variations in these adults who had previously lived unchallenged in their assigned sex-gender categories. “​​In many cases, these athletes had no idea they had chromosomal variations until the Olympic gender-verification authorities gave them their results, right before their events, and found them ineligible to compete,” noted Slate’s Christina Cauterucci.

Were such “sex testing” more widespread, Republicans and their anti-trans fellow travelers would perhaps be disturbed to learn that biology is not on their side: People with chromosomal variations outside the XX, XY binary are not extremely rare — around 1 in 100 people, more common than identical twins.

As New York Times Magazine writer Ruth Padawer noted in an extensive feature on “sex-testing” in sports, endocrinologists and geneticists have for decades challenged the delineations and exclusions such practices purport to draw: “Relying on science to arbitrate the male-female divide in sports is fruitless, they said, because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw.”

Not that this has mattered to numerous regulating bodies and gender conformity zealots. Nor has it mattered that their application of this flawed methodology has a foul legacy of excluding athletes of color.

In what Human Rights Watch calls “practices that violate fundamental rights to privacy and dignity,” sports governing bodies have overwhelmingly selected successful Black athletes for invasive chromosomal, hormone, and genital testing, in order to potentially exclude them from competing. Human Rights Watch reported that the athletes targeted for sex testing are “overwhelmingly women of color from the Global South.” 

The fact that cis women are the victims of this discrimination gives no pause to those committed to trans elimination. In the same vein, women both cis and trans have been attacked in the street by extremists obsessed with identifying and eradicating anyone they feel should not count as women. Strict gender conformity requires expansive authoritarian enforcement far beyond the policing of trans and queer communities and individuals. That it is so often Black and other women of color — the women long excluded from the protections bestowed on white womanhood — who are consistently victims of violent gender policing is not merely a happy accident for the racist far right. Sex-gender exclusions cannot be disentangled from the historically colonialist, white supremacist project of strict sex categorization and gender enforcement. 

It would be foolish to suggest that the far right has ever been interested in either biological sciences or, of course, protecting women and women’s sports. If questions of fair competition were really at stake, the fact that Khelif has lost nine previous career fights against other women, including losing to Irish gold medalist Kellie Harrington in the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics, would surely give lie to claims of her indefeasibly unfair advantage. The outcry exposes the illogic and intellectual failures of fascistic gender ideology. This does not mean, however, that such reactionary campaigns are best defeated with better arguments based in science and reason, in the form of political debate. The misogynistic, racist policing of bodies deserves only our contempt and fierce opposition.