Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is guaranteed a silver medal in women’s boxing. She might even win gold tonight. But any celebrations of her achievement are being drowned out by a ‘debate’ on whether Imane is a woman or a male imposter who stole what rightfully belonged to women.
The people leading the charge against Imane are very powerful and influential.
Oligarch Elon Musk is one, declaring that a “biological male” has “no place in women’s sports.” The celebrated author JK Rowling calls Imane “a male punching a female”, and declares that she could see, on Imane’s face, “the smirk of a male who knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.”
Rowling calls transwomen ‘men’ – but Imane, as many have pointed out, is not a transwoman. Why did Rowling denounce her as one? The only reason can be her appearance. Rowling calls herself a feminist.
But what does a “woman” look like to Rowling? We may recall that in 2015, a Twitter troll said tennis player Serena Williams won because she was “built like a man.” Rowling retorted by sharing a photograph of Serena Williams in a figure-hugging dress. Her tweet suggested that Serena in a dress looked womanly – and a man – say her husband – would not look “just like this in a dress.”
In Rowling’s eyes, why does Serena seem womanly, yet Imane manly? Is it because her test of womanliness is a soft face, and a curvy bosom and hips, in a clinging dress?
Imane doesn’t look like this: is this why she excites Rowling’s disgust and malice? Seen in the light of her affirmation of Serena’s womanliness, her bile against Imane looks like bullying and bigotry. And her crusade against trans identity and equality begins to look like garden-variety fear and hatred towards people who are “different.”
And Imane is Not the Only Victim of This Blatant Misogyny
Rowling insists on a ‘biological’ definition of a woman as “a human being who belongs to the sex class that produces large gametes.” In other words, women as a class are defined by their ability to bear children: a definition that conservative patriarchs would likely welcome. The image of curviness in a clinging dress as a visual line separating women from men is also a patriarchal stereotype – if Rowling doesn’t subscribe to this, what explains the difference in her reaction to Serena as compared to Imane?
I note this, not to “gotcha” Rowling, but because in the world of sports, feminine “appearance” and “biological” definitions of gender have been inseparable. Why has the sporting establishment (not Twitter trolls) questioned Imane’s gender identity and not Serena’s? Imane Khelif, Lin Yu-ting, and before them, Caster Semenya, Santhi Sounderrajan, and Dutee Chand are all athletes who were assigned at birth to the “sex class that produces large gametes.”
Yet, as soon as they began to win medals, their outward appearance brought their achievements and their biology under scrutiny. They seemed too strong, too muscular, breasts too small, hips too narrow to look sexy in a dress, to attract a man, and to bear children. And this led them to be ‘tested’: stripped of clothes, of dignity, and some of them, of their medals.
And then, they’ve been told to take hormones or get surgery to alter their body to conform to the prevailing (and ever-shifting) tests of female-ness – or else give up their career and retire in a cloud of shame.
Caster Semenya, for instance, was told that she would have to undergo hormone-suppressing medications and surgery to “lower her testosterone levels” to what the International Association of Athletics Federations (now World Athletics) declared to be a “normal” level for females. To do so, “she would have to take unnecessary contraceptive pills, have monthly injections of an androgen antagonist, or have surgery to remove internal testes, any of which could have adverse consequences on her health.”
Likewise, India’s Dutee Chand too was told she could race only by “either taking hormone-suppressing drugs or having surgery to limit how much testosterone her body produces.” Dutee said it was wrong to demand that she must “change your body for sports participation.” Declaring “I’m not changing for anyone,” she successfully challenged the ban on her participation.
Caster Semenya said, “I don't want to be someone I don't want to be. I don't want to be someone people want me to be. I just want to be me. I was born like this. I don't want any changes.”
Santhi Sounderrajan, born in a Tamil Nadu village to a family of brick kiln workers, was stripped of her 2006 Asian Games medal for failing a “gender test”. She says the humiliation and injustice left her “physically and mentally totally broken.”
Bogus Biology Continues to Prop Up Racism – Including in Sports
Defenders of the borders between “biological” Men and Women, like Rowling, oppose gender-affirming medical care - hormone therapy, surgery, and other interventions to align anatomical, physiological or biological features with their gender identity. But they seem okay with demands that sportswomen subject themselves to medical/surgical alteration to align with sports authorities’ definitions of biological gender.
Such authoritarian intrusion into women’s bodily autonomy and violation of their self-determination is systemic misogyny and violence by the sporting establishment. Those who demand laws and rules to enforce their idea of “biological gender”, have some unlikely bedfellows.
Patriarchal society has always insisted that there are two genders, each with its corresponding binary biological and social rules. Biologically-assigned gender identity must correspond with socially-assigned gender roles. These identities and roles are declared to be in keeping with “nature” – failure to conform is not only “immoral”, it is deemed “unnatural.”
For the Catholic Church, its dogma on social actions and biological gender are both “natural” and moral. Having an abortion, same-sex love or marriage, transgender identity – all are unnatural, threatening both biological and social “realities.” So the Catholic Church insists that “a postoperative transgender man is still a woman,” (Angela Saini, The Patriarchs) and cannot be ordained as a priest.
Rowling also insists that a transgender man is a woman, and a transgender woman is a man; and they must be confined to the social spaces (sports, bathrooms etc) assigned to their natural, “biological” gender. And those who identify as trans and question these confines, and even those like Imane whose looks and strength don’t conform to Rowling’s beliefs, will be publicly shamed, profiled, and dehumanised. She will call them “Men”, and accuse them of wanting to erase women, steal women’s achievements, of infiltrating women’s loos/hostels etc in order to rape them.
The Islamic Republic of Iran also insists that ‘biological’ gender and gender-appropriate social roles must match up. This violently misogynist and homophobic regime maintains these biological-social lines by encouraging and incentivising gender-affirmative surgery for transgender persons! But after surgery, transgender men and women in Iran "are expected to meet the moral and social obligations consistent with their gender. For transgender women, this includes wearing a veil in public" (Angela Saini, The Patriarchs).
Enforcing a biological gender binary by insisting it is “real” is as wrong as enforcing a social gender binary by insisting it is “real.”
The lesson from sports isn’t that Santhi, Dutee, Caster Semenya or Imane were persecuted in spite of not being transgender. The point is that the insistence that “sex is real,” ie those binary definitions of sex/gender are ‘real’, is both unscientific and misogynistic. These women – as well as transgender persons – require us to urgently acknowledge their identity as “real”. “Biological sex” is a complex combination of genetics, body, brain, and hormones – and there is no ‘binary’ in any of these areas.
A concise summary of these realities concludes, “The science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary, transgender people are real. It is time that we acknowledge this. Defining a person’s sex identity using decontextualised “facts” is unscientific and dehumanising. The trans experience provides essential insights into the science of sex and scientifically demonstrates that uncommon and atypical phenomena are vital for a successful living system.”
Angela Saini in her book The Patriarchs quotes sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi: “The idea that biology is destiny—or, better still, destiny is biology—has been a staple of Western thought for centuries.” Think of those who insist that recognising non-binary pronouns is an instance of Western/westernised liberal ‘cancel culture’ and imperialism. And then hear Professor Oyewumi explain that before European colonisation, there were no separate personal pronouns for men and women in the Yorùbá language in Nigeria, because “gender was not an organising principle” in society.
We should also remember that this isn’t the first time that false and prejudiced certitudes of biological difference have claimed scientific authority. Bogus biology continues to prop up racism – including in sports.
In 2013 an Italian gymnast who lost to Biles suggested that she won because of bias towards her skin colour. Rationalising this racist remark, an Italian Gymnastics Federation official said there was “a trend in gymnastics” that privileges a technique favourable “to athletes of colour (well-known for power)” and unfavourable to “the more artistic Eastern European style.” The official had suggested that swimming was unsuited to the “physical characteristics” of “blacks,” and asked if the nature of gymnastics was being changed to favour “black” racial characteristics.
There is no biological basis for race. In Inferior, Angela Saini writes “The concept of race was as slippery as jelly, defying any effort to pin it down. In the end, academics had to concede that it probably wasn’t an accurate or reliable way to think about human variation.” Gender identity too is “slippery as jelly” and defies definition – as the stigmatised sportswomen’s experience shows us.
Rowling says transgender identity will result in the erasure of women as a category. In an earlier era, some feminists accused lesbians of doing the same. Rowling’s fear-mongering against transwomen: “if they are allowed to enter loos or hostels they may rape women” is also old wine in a new bottle. Segregation (including in bathrooms) was once defended as necessary to protect white women from rape by black men. The criminalisation of homosexuality was rationalised by saying “gay men will rape boys in bathrooms”, “gay men must not be teachers because they will groom male students”, and so on. In India, Hindu supremacists fearmonger against inter-faith and inter-caste relationships, profiling Dalits and Muslims as rapists of Hindu women.
No, Rowling isn’t being ‘cancelled’ by extremist trans activists. In fact, she and her fellow Protectors of the Gender Borders provide the language and arguments for far-right and conservative law-makers and politicians; the same that criminalise abortion and persecute homosexuals. Putin, in his wartime speeches, said Rowling is a victim of cancel culture for defending biological gender. Republican leaders in the US invoke her while opposing Bills protecting LGBTQIA rights. Trump promises a law to erase and dehumanise transgender identity by decreeing that there can be only two genders, male and female. Sexuality and gender are at the top of the playbook of anti-democratic leaders worldwide. To resist such politics, it’s important to recognise how they are enabled by seemingly liberal/feminist figures.
(Kavita Krishnan is a women's rights activist. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
