The Need for Inclusion and Equity: Consequences of the Moral Panic over Transgender Athletes

The outline of the controversy around Imane Khelif’s participation in the Paris Olympics and accusations of her being a man, steeped in both transphobia and misogyny, have proven to be extremely damaging to all the individuals involved. It has revealed the still-ugly debate about the inclusion and status of transgender people, this time in sport, a debate which is characterised by blatant dishonesty, ulterior motives, and media manipulation. It has also exposed the mileage that is to be gained by mining the deep seams of latent and not-so-latent transphobia that exist, and the benefit derived from turning it into a veritable moral panic about gender roles in society. Most importantly, it demonstrates that while a simple gender binary is inherently unstable and needs to be transcended to allow the fair inclusion of transgender people; the very prospect of this evokes hysteria and fear amongst those unwilling to accept this fact.

Khelif herself has stated that she is a “biological” woman and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has recognised and accepted this. Despite this, Angela Carini’s claims — after having conceded defeat after only 46 seconds — that she had never been hit so hard in her life, and feared for her safety, were given wide credence with the added implication that Khelif was a male athlete competing against women. This led to an open season on Khelif with the usual suspects joining in from JK Rowling to Elon Musk, both of whom posted in support of Carini’s claims and questioned Khelif’s status as a woman. Her next opponent, the Hungarian boxer, Anna Luca Hamori, joined in by posting an appalling image of a hulking minotaur towering over a much smaller woman boxer, as a representation of the match between her Khelif. The dishonestly was exposed more clearly, when Khelif stated that she had trained in Italy, along with Carini’s coaches and indeed had training sessions with her in the ring without any concerns being raised. Carini and Hamori’s subsequent mealy-mouthed apology to Khelif after these incidents does little to alleviate the issue that they had placed a large target on her back, not only for the abusive online transphobic campaign against her but also risking her personal safety, given the status of transgender people in her native Algeria. Carini’s protestations that her move was not pre-meditated and that she wasn’t directly questioning Khelif’s gender status thus seem extremely hollow. The expected nationalist battle lines were also drawn with the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni raising a complaint to the Olympic authorities on Carini’s behalf, as did the Hungarian national boxing federation on behalf of Hamori. It was fortunate that both wider Algerian society and the Algerian government backed Khelif completely and without hesitation, supporting her throughout the tournament and celebrating her eventual gold medal.

The chorus of bad faith actors was increased by the intervention of the International Boxing Association (IBA) an organisation backed by the Russian energy giant Gazprom, who had been derecognised by the IOC owing to serious concerns over its lack of democratic functioning, proximity to the Russian regime and corruption; most notably by its president Umar Kremlev. The latter weighed in with claims that Khelif had failed an unspecified gender test in the 2023 Women's World Boxing Championships along with another boxer. What these tests exactly were was not stated; what the results were was also not shared; but what did happen was that these disqualifications only came when Khelif had defeated a Russian boxer (her only defeat to date) and before she was to compete in the finals and the other boxer had won a bronze medal. Concerns over gender it seems only become an issue when athletes under such scrutiny win; not otherwise it seems- both boxers had participated in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics without such concerns being raised but then neither had performed as well in that competition. The Irish boxer Amy Broadhurst who had defeated Khelif in 2022, defended her, saying that she had no unfair advantage and could not be accused of cheating, pointing out that she had been defeated by 9 other women boxers previously. That Russia, already banned from the Olympics due to their invasion of Ukraine; was able to insert itself into this debate so assiduously, stoking the flames of controversy, speaks to its cynical understanding of just how divisive and easy it is to stir up heated passions over these hot button issues in the on-going culture wars within the West for its own ends. The IBA’s declaration that it would award Carini $50,000, as if she had won her match with Khelif, with a further $25,000 to the Italian Boxing Federation and $25,000 to Carini’s coaching team, despite having nothing to do with the boxing at the Paris Olympics and been prevented from managing future such contests by the IOC; show that the intention is less to show any faux sympathy for Carini but more to delegitimise the Olympics and further an agenda sympathetic to Russian interests.

Lastly, it’s not possible to overlook how this moral panic over transphobia has strong racist roots; it’s no accident that amongst the swathe of women athletes who have had their gender questioned the vast majority have been women of colour; from the Indian athletes Dutee Chand and Santhi Soundarajan to the South African sprinter Caster Semenya, whose long struggles to be allowed to participate in women’s sports is well documented. All too often the established gender binary is based on racial conceptions of femineity which see women as conforming to an aesthetic visual type that is predominantly Euro-centric. The colonial roots of medical accounts of female and male embodiment and the construction of femininity through conflation with whiteness needs to be both acknowledged and interrogated as well as superseded.

For while Khelif’s struggle was to be accepted as a woman, rather than a transgender athlete, this speaks to the elephant in the room — which is the actual participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports. For if we accept that trans-women are women — and make no doubt about it, they are — then their exclusion becomes a matter of bias and bigotry, not science or some historically and dubious constructed notion of femininity. This cannot be sustained if we are serious about having public spheres of activity that are truly inclusive and welcoming to all members of society, not just conforming to cis-gender stereotypes.

What we can be assured of going forward is that trans-women in the public eye will continue to be targeted and subjected to transphobia and both cis-women and trans-women athletes who don’t conform to the conventional gender binary that exists in many people’s minds and who achieve success in their respective sports, instead of being feted and met with acclaim will be met with suspicion, allegations of cheating and vitriol. Removing this poisonous discourse from public life and ensuring that all women athletes, whether transgender or not, are not subject to it will be a truly Sisyphean task but one which must be undertaken nonetheless. A genuine commitment to fairness and equality must resist the drive to read bodies along racialised gendered lines. We need to expand our understanding of athletic ability, which depends on a lot more than the features which have traditionally been regarded as determinants of gender (eg genitals, chromosomes, hormones). It cannot be left to traditional and inherited aesthetic ideas of what makes a woman and what compromises womanhood, an approach which historically has excluded and indeed denied the actual existence of transgender people. When observers such as the UK Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy describe the match between Khelif and Carini “an incredibly uncomfortable watch” they are feeding into this bias and perpetuating such a system of exclusion. As Nandy said, we do need to get the “balance between inclusion, fairness and safety” right but that also entails accepting and coming to terms with the fact that this cannot be subject to the visual “uncomfortableness” or prejudice of cis-gender people. Inclusion and fairness always exacts a cost; it is time we pay it.

Conrad Barwa is a senior research analyst at a private think-tank, and a senior research associate at the Birmingham Business School