Mick Hartley

I gave up on the London Review of Books long ago, and this article on the Olympic boxing row by Mireia Garcés de Marcilla is not about to change my mind.

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.

Western European and US athletes were outperformed by their Eastern bloc competitors because the Eastern bloc competitors were being dosed with performance-enhancing drugs, including testosterone. Or were they perhaps being unfairly and disproportionately targeted, these muscly East German women, for their questioning of western gender norms? 

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?’

We know that Semenya has the 5-ARD DSD, with XY chromosomes and – having gone through male puberty -  male levels of testosterone. Nothing to do with racism. But here it all is, again – "at odds with Western notions of femininity". It's so….predictable. Such fashionable nonsense.