Imane Khelif & Lin Yu-Ting vs. the terrible transphobia of the TERFs
by Pauline Park
Women’s boxing became the site of greatest political contestation in the 2024 Olympics in Paris; there are five important facts one must take into account in order to understand the controversy.
First: Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting are both female-bodied and identify as women; there were no openly transgender-identified athletes competing in Paris nor were there any athletes known to be intersexed. Caster Semenya is in fact intersexed though she identifies as a woman.
The controversy started when Italy’s Angela Carini knowingly falsely accused Khelif of being a man (Tharwa Boulifi, “Cry more, Karen. Imane Khelif’s Olympic medal salutes Arab women,” the New Arab, 5 August 2024).
Second, all human bodies require both estrogen and testosterone; there is simply no such thing as a woman’s body that does not have some testosterone or a man’s body without some estrogen. There is a range of testosterone and estrogen in every human body and there is no magic number that makes a body ‘male’ or ‘female.’ The International Boxing Association’s ‘gender test’ that Khelif and Lin supposedly ‘failed’ has itself been thoroughly discredited: “The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has stopped recognizing the IBA. The IOC has called the gender tests that the IBA used irretrievably flawed and has defended both boxers since the start of the Paris games. Both passed the IOC’s own set of eligibility qualifications for the 2024 Olympic Games,” noted Elsie Carson-Holt in her report for LGBTQ Nation (Elsie Carson-Holt, “Imane Khelif files legal complaint over online harassers calling her a man,” LGBTQ Nation, 12 August 2024).
Third, the division of sports between male and female is a social construction and an entirely artificial and arbitrary one: men and women regularly compete in business, academia and every other area of life in every modern society. So to is the division of the human species into two sexes and two genders: sex as well as gender are socially constructed.Women’s boxing became the site of greatest political contestation in the 2024 Olympics in Paris. One of the important facts one must take into account in order to understand the controversy is that sex testing at the Olympics actually began when Nazi Germany hosted the Olympics in Berlin (Ben Tumin, “Sex Testing at the Olympics: The History of Discrimination Against Trans Athletes and Women,” Teen Vogue, 26 July 2024).
Obviously, the Olympics need to put this legacy of Nazi Germany’s hosting of the Berlin Olympics in the past.
Fourth, the controversy over Khelif and Lin was manufactured by right-wing reactionaries including transgender-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) — though a friend of mine thinks we should be calling them ‘TURDs’ instead — transgender-undermining reactionary dunces.
It is remarkable that the women’s boxing controversy has brought JK Rowling and nominally feminist TERFs together with Donald Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin; and yet, in so many ways, not surprising, since the increasing acceptance of transgender identity provokes inevitable backlash from those deeply committed to the sex/gender binary. Trump’s comments in this regard are revealing: the Republican presidential nominee and former president slandered Imane Khelif at a campaign rally in Montana, saying, “I’d like to congratulate the young woman who transitioned from a man into a boxer. You saw he won — she won — the gold medal. How about the beautiful young Italian boxer? She got in there, didn’t know what was going on… she was a very good boxer, against other women. She didn’t count on this. She said, ‘OK, I had enough.’ It’s crazy what they are doing… this person won the gold medal. How crazy is this? And she wants it. She wants men to play in women’s sports,” referring to the vice-president and Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris — who has never said anything about wanting men to play in women’s sports (Erin Reed, “Erin in the Morning”: “Trump Targets Trans People in Montana,” YouTube, 8.13.24). Trump went on to say of Tim Walz that “He signed a law letting the state kidnap children to change their gender so that they go home… I’m not talking about him, I’m talking about her. This is her ideology, this is why she picked him. And he signed a bill allowing pedophiles to claim human rights protections under the state law.” Of course, the governor of Minnesota — now the Democratic vice-presidential nominee — never signed any such bill into law: instead, he signed a bill into law that would give the State of Minnesota legal jurisdiction in cases involving youth transitions in which one parent resides in a state that bans medical transition for trans youth and the other parent lives in a state in which it is still available.
Fifth, homophobia and transphobia do not help women or those who identify as women advance in sports: such irrational prejudices only hurt women as well as LGBTQ people and obviously the transgendered to the extent that they are even allowed to compete.
“Khelif and Yu-Ting are not transgender nor are they secretly men. These women are victims of what is called a ‘transvestigation,’ an unfounded conspiracy theory that tries to prove that notable people — typically prominent female figures, especially athletes — are secretly trans,” wrote Alyssa Goldberg in an op-ed in USA Today, quoting Lydia X. Z. Brown, a disability rights activist and adjunct lecturer in the Disability Studies Program and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University, as saying, “There is a real clear nexus of anti-Black misogyny and transmisogyny,” they say. “These are not disconnected and unrelated forms of targeting those who fall outside the arbitrarily-defined norms of whiteness and specifically of white able (-bodied) femininity” (Alyssa Goldberg, “Olympic boxer Imane Khelif beat her opponent. Then she got ‘transvestigated’,” USA Today, 9 August 2024).
Imane Khelif filed a formal complaint after the close of the Olympics, her lawyer Nabil Boudi issuing a statement declaring, “After the sporting time, comes the legal time. Having just won a gold medal at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, boxer Imane Khelif has decided to lead a new fight: that of justice, dignity, and honor. Ms. Khelif contacted the firm which filed a complaint yesterday for acts of cyber harassment aggravated by the anti-online hatred center of the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office” (Elsie Carson-Holt, “Imane Khelif files legal complaint over online harassers calling her a man,” LGBTQ Nation,12 August 2024); added Boudi, “The criminal investigation will determine who initiated this misogynistic, racist, and sexist campaign, but will also have to focus on those who fueled this digital lynching. The unfair harassment suffered by the boxing champion will remain the biggest stain of these Olympic Games.”
One might add parenthetically that Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting was subjected to yet another humiliation: she and her compatriots from the Republic of China (ROC) had to compete under the absurd rubric of ‘Chinese Taipei’ because the People’s Republic of China (PRC) objects to the ROC even using the term ‘Taiwan’ (recognized universally as the name for the island) in competing in international sporting events.
Pauline Park is a member of the Out-FM collective that produces LGBTQ-relevant programming for WBAI at 99.5 FM; she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in April 2002 and became the first openly transgendered grand marshal of the New York City LGBT Pride March in June 2002. Park did her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics & Political Science and her Ph.D in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Pauline Park is a member of the Out-FM collective that produces LGBTQ-relevant programming for WBAI at 99.5 FM. She did her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics & Political Science and her Ph.D in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.