Victoria Smith at The Critic on the Olympic boxing row, and the absurd argument that those complaining are doing so because the two boxers concerned just don't look very feminine – don't conform to "conventional standards of femininity”.
Many of those seeking to defend Khelif and Yu-ting’s inclusion have wilfully conflated concerns about female safety with prejudice regarding the boxers’ supposedly unfeminine appearance. The Labour MP Zarah Sultana has declared they are under attack for not conforming “to conventional standards of femininity”. In an article for the Independent, Kat Brown claims that being 6’1” and having her “dad’s jawline” would put her in the firing line, too, due to not being “your classic example of 1950s femininity”. These are ludicrous arguments. Not one female boxer can be described as gender conforming (the clue is in “being a female boxer”, something the Olympics did not even allow until 2012). The red flag isn’t hair length or jawlines; it’s those failed eligibility tests.
These women’s arguments do more than trivialise a serious issue, though. They insult every single female victim of male violence who has felt shame at not being able to fight back, not because they were too feminine, but because they were female and their attacker was male. It becomes about so much more than two individuals, or boxing in general. It’s about the myth that male people don’t physically dominate female people because they can but because we let them — because it is in our natures.
The stranger who attacked me was no prime specimen of masculinity. Even so, I couldn’t move his arms — his basic bog-standard arms, stuck to his basic, non-athletic body — off me at all. This is not because I was too busy “conforming to standards of femininity”. The fact that I had half the upper body strength of my assailant is not evidence of some secret desire to join a Facebook tradwife group. That I am writing about it now is not some performance of feminine victimhood, aimed winning male protectors. There is nothing “feminine” or “conforming” about noting the strength disparity between male people and female people. Once you start claiming there is, you are inches away from full-on victim blaming….
Whether or not Khelif has XY chromosomes, it is not whiny or manipulative to note that it matters — in the boxing ring, on the street, in enclosed spaces — whether or not someone does. This is an issue that goes way beyond sports. Women and girls are not subjected to an unprecedented degree of male violence because we are too busy policing the boundaries of heteronormative patriarchy to fight back. We don’t identify with being weak; we don’t love it really. There is no connection — none whatsoever — between not being able to hit as hard as a man and being gender conforming.
The argument also comes with added racism.
The sheer racism of suggesting non-European women look more like men. https://t.co/JqFfUlAoBB
— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) August 6, 2024
Mick Hartley 
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