The Right Wing Campaign to Sanitize Women in Women’s Sports

On the right and their fellow fascists have focused their attacks on trans people. When it comes to women’s and girls’ sports — a favorite area of ​​anti-trans crusaders — the exclusion of trans women has been a priority for Republican legislation, leading to even proposals for vetting requirements. genital malignancy in girls whose sex assigned at birth is questionable. The fact that the latest high-profile issue of gender policing is aimed at athletes who were actually assigned female at birth, however, should not surprise us.

Right-wing boxers – including Donald Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk – as well as sexists such as JK Rowling are currently lashing out at Cis boxer Imane Khelif from Algeria, after the athlete defeated an opponent his Italian at the Olympics. game in Paris on Thursday. Khelif is a female athlete who was considered eligible to compete by the International Olympic Committee. She is the only modern woman of color in sports who is not considered a misogynist by an idealistic person who is willing to create the most difficult gender relations, contrary to the conditions of life, nature and medical.

Attacks on Khelif – like the previously discriminatory treatment of other female athletes such as South African middle distance runner Caster Semenya – reveal gender privilege for what it is: irrational logic and racist. Pointing this out will not stop their evil gender policing; it should, however, give pause to anyone who would enjoy a Republican and non-inclusive position on gender issues in a negotiable manner.

On the home page of the New York Post yesterday, a story by Douglas Murray criticized Khelif’s great success as “the sad consequences of letting natural men compete in women’s sports.” (The tabloid published at least five articles about the controversy on Thursday, demonstrating the eagerness with which the mainstream media embraces anti-trans sentiments.) Across social media, posts thousands spoke, calling the Khelif a “man” or a “natural man.” and thus was unjustly good. The Bigots were quick to deplore the fact that the Khelif, along with another female Olympic competitor from Taiwan who is now facing attacks, was previously found ineligible to compete by the International Boxing Federation – an organization that was widely criticized and not officially recognized by IOC.

Khelif was assigned to a woman at birth. The controversy stems from the biochemical tests of the IBA that caused him to be removed from their competition, possibly because high levels of testosterone or some chromosomal difference was found. We do not know the details of the IBA review, and Khelif is fully eligible for the Olympics according to its rules. Furthermore, high levels of testosterone and the presence of XY or XXY chromosomes do not make a person male, or inherently male. These are valid assumptions, which are helped in these cases by the method of so-called sex analysis in sports. I say “so-called” because these tests don’t test something as subjective and subjective as a person’s sexuality.

This should be clarified only to highlight the incoherence of the notion of rights allegedly based on the biology of gender, which is exposed in the attacks of athletes like Khelif. First, for a political position that insists on the power to “define a woman” in order to easily distinguish, in everyday life, who is and who is not a woman, these people should be worried. those who have the power to order gender to reveal only the breakdown of sports analysis. chromosomal or hormonal differences in these adults who had previously lived unchallenged in their assigned gender roles. In many cases, these athletes did not know they had a chromosomal difference until the Olympic gender confirmation authorities gave them their results, before their events, and found them ineligible. competing,” noted Christina Cauterucci of Slate.

If such “sex testing” were more common, Republicans and their anti-trans co-hosts would be troubled to learn that biology is not on their side: People with chromosomal differences on the outside in XX, XY binary they are very rare – about 1 in 100. people, more common than identical twins.

As the writer of the New York Times Magazine, Ruth Padawer noted in the extensive section “examination of sex” in sports, endocrinologists and geneticists have been challenging for decades to explain and understand such trends. says: “Relying on science to solve the difference between men and women. They said that sports are fruitless, because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw.”

Not that this matters to many governing bodies and gender equality activists. It also doesn’t matter that their use of this flawed approach has a negative legacy of marginalizing athletes of color.

In what Human Rights Watch calls “practices that violate basic rights to privacy and dignity,” sports governing bodies have singled out successful Black athletes for invasive chromosomal, hormonal, and genital testing. in order to potentially exclude them from the competition. Human Rights Watch reported that the athletes targeted for sex testing are “women of many colors from the Global South.”

The fact that cis women are the victims of this discrimination does not give pause to those who are determined to push for change. Likewise, cis and trans women have been attacked in the street by extremists who are concerned with identifying and eradicating anyone they deem unfeminine. Strict gender equality requires a stronger bureaucratic process than the policing of communities and individuals. That it is often Black and other women of color — women long excluded from the protections afforded to white women — who are frequently the victims of gender-based policing is not a happy accident for racist people. Gender exclusion cannot be separated from the old colonial project, the white project of rigid gender segregation and gender equality.

It would be foolish to suggest that the far right was ever interested in biological science 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 fights against other women, including the loss of Irish gold medalist Kellie Harrington at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics delayed, would certainly give the lie to the claim of his inevitable opportunity. . This cry exposes the irrational and intellectual failure of fascism’s gender theory. However, this does not mean that such protest campaigns are better won with better arguments based on science and logic, in the form of political debate. Misogynistic, racist police officers deserve our only contempt and strong opposition.