Fair Competition

On 1 August, Italy’s Angela Carini abandoned her welterweight Olympic boxing match against Algeria’s Imane Khelif after 46 seconds. In tears, the Italian boxer said she was worried about her health as she had ‘never felt a punch like this’. Concerns about Carini’s physical safety spread fast. The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls tweeted that Carini ‘and other female athletes should not have been exposed to this physical and psychological violence based on their sex’. J.K. Rowling shared a photograph of Khelif, describing her as ‘a male … protected by a misogynist sporting establishment’.

Khelif is a seasoned boxer who has taken part in many competitions, including the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Her eligibility to compete only became an issue at the Women’s Boxing Championships in New Delhi in March 2023, when ‘laboratory results’ allegedly revealed that she did ‘not meet one of the eligibility criteria’. The meeting’s minutes do not specify what the laboratory tests consisted of. In a follow-up statement, the Russian controlled International Boxing Association (IBA) clarified that Khelif ‘did not undergo a testosterone examination’ but was ‘subject to a separate and recognised test, whereby the specifics remain confidential’. The test ‘conclusively indicated’ that Khelif had a ‘competitive advantage over other female competitors’. In a statement in March 2023, the IBA president, Umar Kremlev, informed the media that the reason for Khelif’s disqualification was that she had XY chromosomes. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Paris 2024 Boxing Unit rejected the IBA’s ‘sudden and arbitrary decision’. On 2 August, Carini said she respected the IOC decision to let Khelif fight and wanted to apologise to her opponent for not shaking her hand after their bout.

Androgen levels and chromosomal make-up have been among the markers that sporting bodies have used to ensure ‘fair competition’ in the female division. There is a long history of ‘gender testing’ in sport. From 1958 to 1992, all women Olympic athletes (except for Princess Anne, who was granted an exemption when she competed in 1976) were required to have their gender ‘verified’ by a chromosomal evaluation. Blanket tests have since been discontinued, but the IOC may still require athletes competing in the women’s division to undergo assessment if they are suspected to have an ‘unfair and disproportionate’ advantage over their competitors.

It is no surprise, and certainly not a coincidence, that non-Western athletes have been unfairly and disproportionately targeted by eligibility rules. Compulsory gender testing was instituted as a result of Western European and US athletes being outperformed by their Eastern bloc competitors during the Cold War. Western media accused Eastern athletes of not being true women and threatening the integrity of their sports. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, all the athletes who have been banned or restricted from competing internationally as women (that we know about; it’s supposed to be confidential) have been from the Global South.

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) required the Ugandan middle-distance runner Annet Negesa to undergo a gonadectomy, and banned the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand and South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya from competing on several occasions. Semenya was forced out of the 2020 Olympics, when the Namibian athletes Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi were also not allowed to compete in their preferred distances.

Khelif and the Taiwanese featherweight boxer Lin Yu‑ting, who both went on to win gold medals, are the latest (but won’t be the last) victims of the surveillance and policing of gender under the guise of fairness. Many people came to their defence by claiming that they are biological women legitimately competing in the category she naturally belongs to. The International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, put it clearly:

We have two boxers who are born as a woman, who have been raised as a woman, who have a passport as a woman and who have competed for many years as a woman. This is the clear definition of a woman. There was never any doubt about them being a woman.

All the same, those of us who are concerned about the reactionary weaponisation of gender might do better to rethink rather than cement our commitment to the category of womanhood. We should ask what being a woman means, how womanhood is defined, and against what (and whom) womanhood is ‘defended’. Instead of insisting that Khelif is a ‘real’ woman, we should ask how dichotomous ideas of gender have been solidified in the discourse that is being mobilised against her. We should interrogate the colonial roots of medical accounts of female and male embodiment, and the construction of femininity through (and conflation with) whiteness. We should listen to athletes whose womanhood is doubted not only because of their outstanding athletic performance, but because their bodies are at odds with Western notions of femininity. In 2009, when Semenya was banned from competing for eleven months after winning the 800m at the World Championships in Berlin, the head of South African athletics asked: ‘Who are white people to question the make-up of an African girl?’

A serious commitment to fairness and equality has to resist the drive to read bodies along racialised gendered lines. Instead, we ought to expand our understanding of embodiment and athletic ability, which depends on a lot more than the features which have been read as determinants of gender (genitals, chromosomes, hormones). Boxing already acknowledges this: there’s a reason that fighters compete in different weight categories.

An obsessive focus on physical traits that can been read as proxies for gender overlooks the extent to which being a competitive athlete is not only a matter of anatomy but also of resources and access. In order to become Olympians, athletes need a healthy diet, the time and space to train, opportunities to compete and financial support. Winning a gold medal is not an individual achievement that can be removed from its social and economic context: there is a clear correlation between Olympic medals and GDP. Khelif has described how, when she started training, she had to sell scrap metal while her mother sold couscous to raise the money for the bus fare to travel to the gym. But it is not the social and financial challenges she faced that have triggered a public uproar. It is her exhibiting the physical traits that make her competitive at her sport.