Gender Was Made For White People

Hello, reader! Normally this week would have paid post, but this topic seemed important enough to make public. Next week I’ll have a post exclusive to paying members. By becoming a paying member, you’ll get hours of backlogged reading material, plus you’ll be helping my friend Ghazal and her family flee Gaza. In June 2024, we raised $91.72! Click “Subscribe” to access a paid tier.

*Content notice: transmisogynoir, brief mentions of sexual assault*

“Tested” is the latest podcast series from documentarian and “Flash Forward” host Rose Eveleth. Eveleth has spent the past ten years researching sex testing in sports, interviewing dozens of experts on medicine and sports policy, as well as the women who are impacted by rules about who is allowed to compete in sports. I strongly recommend listening to the whole series, especially if you want to understand the debate around trans people in sports as well as the context behind the recent Imane Khelif “controversy”.

In case you missed it, the corners of the Internet that are passionate about trans people were set ablaze this week after an Olympic boxing match between Imane Khelif of Algeria and Angela Carini of Italy. Khelif had a good match, knocking out Carini in under a minute. After the match, Carini started crying, partially due to her losing one of the most important matches of her career, but also due to being punched “harder than she had ever been punched in her life”.

The rest is a story that repeats itself over and over: white woman tears leading to bullying and harassment thanks to a right-wing media ecosystem. How does this keep happening, and what does it say about the staying power of racism?

First, The Facts

One an image for Carini crying hit social media, rumors started circulating in the anti-trans Internet that Khelif was “actually a man”; in other words, a transgender competitor who had an unfair advantage. These claims have never been proven; all evidence, including photos from her childhood, points to the fact that Khelif is a cisgender woman (she was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman). The only detail they needed, though, was that Khelif had apparently failed a “gender test” issued by the International Boxing Association (IBA), a different governing body than the International Olympics Committee (IOC) who uses different standards for sex testing. The specifics of this test were not specified at first (was it a testosterone level test? karyotype test? a genital exam? something else?), but on July 31st the IBA clarified that she “did not undergo a testosterone examination but [was] subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential.” Then, on August 5th, the story changed again at an IBA press conference: apparently it was a testosterone test that she was given, and that she has “men’s level of testosterone”.

It’s still not completely clear what the truth is regarding this test, although it doesn’t change the fact that Imane Khelif was cleared for the Olympics; the IOC even released a statement clarifying their eligibility criteria and affirming Khelif’s right to compete. It’s also worth noting that the IBA is an incredibly shady organization, with a history that includes having ties to the Kremlin, and as such has been banned from the Olympics since last year.

None of this stopped the anti-trans Internet from doing its thing. Despite the fact that being transgender is illegal in Algeria, conspiracies swarmed about Khelif’s true identity, including transvestigations and inflammatory, transphobic posts from the likes of JK Rowling, Elon Musk, and Logan Paul. Clearly, they thought, she must have been born a man if she beat a woman that easily! The speed with which they targeted an African woman is terrifying, yet nothing at all new.