The problems with gender panic in sports media

Hard hits are a normal part of the sport of boxing, but this past week, nobody hit harder than social media pundits after a controversial Olympic fight that never should have been controversial at all.

Earlier this week, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif defeated Italian boxer Angela Carini in a 46 second victory in which Carini pulled out of the match. In the immediate aftermath, the internet exploded with disingenuous takes from Donald Trump, JK Rowling, Logan Paul, Pat McAfee, and more, who claimed that Khelif is a man, based on past disqualifications due to high testosterone levels. Carini’s claims that she’d “ never felt a punch like this,” following the match also contributed to widespread speculation surrounding Khelif’s chromosomal makeup and sex assigned at birth.

Although Khelif was disqualified from past events, there’s a significant political context behind her story. In 2023, the IBA abruptly banned Khelif from competing after she defeated Russian boxer Azalia Amineva. The AP notes that the IBA is controlled by Russian Umar Kremlev, who “brought in the state-owned energy supplier Gazprom as its primary sponsor and moved much of the governing body’s operations to Russia.” The context surrounding Khelif’s past disqualification was described by the IOC as “a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA” in which Khelif and fellow boxer Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan “were suddenly disqualified without any due process.” Add in the IBA’s lack of transparency surrounding its disqualification standards, and the situation gets even murkier.

But as most gender hysteria goes, the context was ignored and the current discourse is riddled with baseless accusations, blatant falsehoods, and obvious misogyny . And an unfortunate reality that accompanies such discourse is that at best, it’s ignorant, but at worst it’s downright dangerous.

Although Khelif doesn’t identify as trans, the discourse surrounding her looks similar to conversations surrounding female trans athletes like Penn swimmer Lia Thomas, who was the center of similar controversy in 2022. Carini’s post-fight tears, and her claim that Khelif punched her harder than she’d ever been punched fanned the flames of this conversation, and just like in past discourse, many similarly cried out for the “protection” of cisgender female athletes in the aftermath of the fight.

Although the criticism of trans women competing in women’s sports (which, again, Khelif does not identify as trans), is fairly new, questioning the gender of dominant female athletes is not, and this discourse predominately centers on women of color, through no fault of their own. We’ve seen it happen to the Williams sisters who couldn’t properly enjoy their ascent to tennis fame because of fans who claimed they were men because their physiques didn’t match those of their predominately white counterparts. Serena Williams described how that and similar commentary on her body impacted her in her docuseries Serena Williams: In the Arena:

“ They were used to seeing women that didn’t have a figure, and I was a Black woman with a figure, and that doesn’t make you bad, or doesn’t make you well. It just makes you a girl with a butt and a small waist.”

Both Serena and Venus Williams have been embroiled in sexist and racist attacks on their muscular physiques, which are fueled by eurocentric beauty standards in the sport of tennis. Maria Sharapova, one of Serena Williams’s longtime rivals, once said that lifting weights and adding muscles were “unnecessary” for her and “I always want to be skinnier with less cellulite; I think that’s every girl’s wish.” These mindsets dominated women’s sports for decades and such beauty standards still exist to some extent, as the discourse surrounding Khelif and others in recent years confirms.

Although Sharapova’s sentiments are now outdated, as more and more women and girls are encouraged to strength train and build muscle, there has always been significant pushback on women who don’t fit society’s narrow definition of femininity and binary gendered expectations. Female athletes who don’t look “feminine enough” for any variety of arbitrary reasons often generate accusations that because they have, say, visible muscles, they must be men.

Take Caster Semenya, a South African middle distance runner who has naturally high testosterone levels, and was caught in a similar controversy in 2009 when she was subjected to gender testing by the IIAF in spite of no prior history of doping. Semenya described the timeframe as “hell” as she had to begin a medication routine to suppress her natural testosterone levels to maintain qualification standards, an ordeal she described as damaging to her health.

“I would say it was hell because each and every day you live under stress,” Semenya said about taking the medication.

Unfortunately, even Semenya’s case and ensuing fight against the IIAF’s standards hasn’t stopped the IIAF from disqualifying Namibian sprinters , Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi from competing in the 400m at the Tokyo Olympics due to their naturally high testosterone levels in 2021. The accounts of female athletes who have been scrutinized, criticized, and policed accounts highlight an uncomfortable dynamic: hysteria over gender in women’s sports often emphasizes western, white, Eurocentric health and beauty standards, which should not factor into sports performance at all, and puts athletes who do not fit into these narrow boxes at heightened risk for harassment and punishment. So, too do the IIAF’s acceptable testosterone limits for women, which have been put on blast for being discriminatory and “blatantly racist”–and it’s easy to see why. According to anthropologist and bioethicist, Dr. Katrina Karkazis , “all of the women who have been identified and targeted under the regulation are women from the global south.”

As gender panic becomes more and more widespread in women’s sports, it’s easy to wonder why folks who never watched women’s tennis, track, or boxing get so worked up over certain female athletes who win in these sports. One answer is surprisingly simple: gender panic in sports allows people to express misogynist beliefs under the guise of progressivism—or even chivalry. After all, the entire premise of the “Save Women’s Sports” movement in the United States is paternalistic protection and the political framing is done intentionally. Who can argue with legislation that seeks to support and protect women athletes?

The speculation surrounding which women are “true” women in sports therefore allows people to more freely express sexist opinions about femininity. While it is less acceptable to police womanhood at large in 2024, doing so for the sake of “fairness” in sports appears much more noble on the surface. In the context of sports, fairness acts as a shield from statements that would be considered misogynistic (e.g. “she’s a man”, or “she’s too masculine to compete with women”), because this discourse is being levied against the threat of the near universal value of fair play.

However, even though desiring fairness in sports is a good cause, the definition of who is and isn’t “feminine enough” to compete in women’s sports is subjective and speculation like we’re witnessing now has unsavory aftereffects for cis women, trans women, and women who do not fit into specific gendered categories due to their genetic makeup or gender expression both inside and outside the world of sports.

Although the majority of the current discourse centers on Imane Khelif, it also has wide reaching implications on what it takes to be a woman, or at least perform femininity well enough to avoid scrutiny. This requirement of feminine performance not only hinges on narrow ideals of femininity (e.g. that women are petite, submissive, delicate, and quiet), but now requires women athletes to live up to these impossible standards more than ever before, or face the wrath of public scrutiny, death threats, or disqualification from athletic events. This Olympics, cis female athletes like rugby star Ilona Maher and swimmer Katie Ledecky have been the targets of misogynistic speculation, where, as was with the Williams sisters, their sex assigned at birth is questioned because of arbitrary details like their natural bone structure, impressive muscles, strength, and athletic dominance.

Just days after helping secure Team USA’s first-ever medal in rugby, an old video of Maher resurfaced, in which she described the kinds of comments levied at her for simply being herself.

“I get comments being called a man and being called masculine and asking if I’m on steroids,” Maher said . “There will always be negative people out there. And they put women in a box. And they think women should be fragile and petite and quiet and meek. But that’s not the case.”

As Maher alludes to, profiling one’s sex assigned at birth threatens the mental health and safety of many women and girls–even if we will never see them compete at the Olympic level. In the United States alone, dozens of state-level bills have been introduced and passed that address the non-issue of men competing in women’s sports. The so-called “Save Women’s Sports” bills reflect the current ignorance we are seeing in sports media and social media, but, unlike ignorant tweets that we can brush off as ill-researched and uninformed, these bills carry significant legislative weight that put women and girls in all areas of the gender spectrum at significant risk.

Not only do many of these bills allow “gender testing” of underage girls following a “gender dispute” with no codified due process, but under these bills , gender exams are one requirement to prove one’s sex assigned at birth based on an athlete’s “internal and external reproductive anatomy.” The entire process sounds horrifically invasive, unnecessary, and potentially traumatic to a young girl who could be subject to such exams under law and demonstrates how gender panic is not just an issue that impacts trans women–it impacts all women and girls.

On a global scale, it’s even more important to understand the political context that surrounds what happens at the Olympics. For instance, in 2016, the Daily Beast ran an article that outed LGBT athletes when reporter Nico Hines used hook up apps like Grindr, at the Rio Olympics, to solicit dates with LGBT athletes at the Olympic village. Although the now-removed article didn’t name the athletes involved, it put those who hailed from LGBT-unfriendly countries at risk of being identified and potentially punished by their home countries. Khelif’s home country of Algeria, where homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment and gender-affirming care is banned, sits at a 13/100 on the LGBT Equality Index . Although the fact that Algeria bans gender-affirming care should put any speculation around Khelif’s sex assigned at birth to rest, the discourse surrounding her does not exist in a vacuum and could put her at significant risk once she returns home.

Not only that, but, like other Olympians, Khelif should be able to focus on her fights and her fights alone as she performs on the world’s most elite stage. Her competitors certainly are–and if anyone is worried for their safety, it’s clear they’re unbothered.

“I’m n ot scared,” said Khalief’s next opponent, Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori , whom she will face on Saturday. “I don’t care about the story or social media.”

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