Olympic Boxing “Controversy”: Misogyny and Gender Policing
The Olympics women’s boxing “controversy” downplays women’s strength - and the impact of domestic violence.
The manufactured “controversy” around the Olympic women’s boxing dominated news cycles for days on end, and is still, despite repeated debunking, rumbling on. Boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, who have both competed in women’s boxing for years without issue, had their gender questioned following their controversial disqualification from an earlier boxing event by the discredited IBA. Both women were deemed eligible to compete in the Olympics, sparking complaints from several notorious anti-trans pundits, which exploded into accusations of cheating, bullying, and even domestic violence after Khelif’s opponent, Angela Carini, dropped out of their match after 46 seconds. Gender policing news articles and social media comments screamed about “a male beating a woman to a pulp for entertainment”, even though Carini stopped the match before she was injured. Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting have faced a level of international abuse rarely experienced by athletes - although we have seen such vitriol before, aimed at other strong women of colour who are exceptionally good at their chosen sports, such as Caster Semenya. The underlying tones of bigotry are clear. An exceptional man is a god; an exceptional woman, particularly a woman of colour, is a monster - or a man.
Beneath the racism and sexism of the speculation about Khelif and Lin - the question of whether they have unusually high testosterone, or are intersex, because of their physical appearances - is an undercurrent of transphobia, which sadly has infiltrated both sides of the debate. Many of Khelif and Lin’s defenders have stressed that they were both assigned female at birth, which is true - but this framing once again casts trans women in the role of impostor and aggressor. “No, the Olympic boxers aren’t trans - they were born women!” is an argument that upholds transphobia, rather than challenging it. It endorses the myth that trans women have an unfair advantage over cis women in sports, something frequently claimed by anti-trans campaigners, in spite of increasing evidence to the contrary. Trans women have been legally allowed to compete in the Olympics for 20 years, and if, as anti-trans activists claim, this inclusion would mean “the end of [cis] women’s sport”, we would have seen a majority of trans women in women’s events since then. In reality, the only trans woman who has ever competed at the Olympics was weightlifter Laurel Hubbard in 2020, who was beaten by the cis women she competed against. Trans women athletes should, of course, be allowed to excel as well as compete - but the examples of Hubbard, and swimmer Lia Thomas, who was accused of being a “cheater” in a race where she placed joint fifth after four cis women, prove that any future trans woman athlete who medals at the Olympics will do so for the same reason as her cis counterparts - because of her training, and skill at the sport.
The Olympic boxing “controversy”, despite not featuring any trans women athletes, has been one of the most eye-opening examples of the misogyny of the anti-trans movement. A common refrain by anti-trans activists is that allowing trans women to participate in women’s sports will result in cis women “losing their rightful places to mediocre men”. The implication that a mediocre man could stand even the slightest chance of winning against an elite cis woman athlete would be laughable, if it wasn’t so deeply sexist. None of the cis male runners I know could keep up with Sha'Carri Richardson, and a “mediocre man” who stepped into the ring with Cindy Ngamba would be knocked out before he could land a punch. Policing gender, and trying to exclude women (cis or trans) who are “too muscular”, “too big”, and “too masculine-looking” from sport, implies that you believe women’s contact sports are dainty, wishy-washy parodies of men’s events. The reality is that women’s contact sports can be just as high-impact and dangerous as the men’s versions. An all-AFAB rugby league will still see a large number of injuries, some of them life-changing - Verity Smith, a trans man rugby player, suffered a spinal injury that has led to him becoming a wheelchair user after being tackled by a cis woman player. Women’s boxing, unsurprisingly, often results in bruises, cuts and contusions, as well as broken noses like the ones that Carini’s supporters were afraid she had suffered. In roller derby, one of the few sports where the women’s game is more prominent than the men’s, skaters experience bruises, sprains and broken bones; this is true whether they are skating in the women’s division (which allows cis and trans women, as well as non-binary people comfortable skating in a women’s league), or the men’s division (which is an entirely open category - many cis women skate with men’s teams). The “gender critical” insistence that men’s and women’s sports must be segregated by sex assigned at birth, in order for cis women to stand any chance at all, not only leads to transphobia and gender policing - it also downplays and insults cis women’s strength and skill. A look at history shows that many sports became segregated not because cis women were losing, but because they were winning.
The vitriol against trans athletes, intersex athletes, and endosex cis women athletes who are perceived to be the former, downplays cis women’s strength - including when that strength is used for harm. So-called “gender critical” accounts shared inflammatory graphics claiming that the Olympics had “made domestic violence a sport” by “allowing a male to batter a woman in the ring” - a particularly disgusting jab when you consider that Lin Yu-ting began boxing to protect her mother from domestic abuse. This rhetoric was not only inaccurate - it undermines the severity and complexity of domestic violence. In a domestic violence situation, unlike in a sporting bout, the person who is being harmed does not willingly enter the situation in full knowledge that someone will attempt to punch them. People experiencing domestic violence do not get to call time-out, as Carini did, or end the situation just by saying that they wish to - with no retaliation, and with the full support of everyone around them. Comparing a contact sport, where athletes participate with full knowledge, training and consent, to domestic violence, is insulting both to those athletes and to domestic violence survivors. It also frames domestic violence in a dangerously simplistic way - a man hitting a woman. Cis male violence is a structural problem, and the majority of domestic violence cases do involve a cis man abusing a cis woman; however, this is not the only form that domestic violence, or other forms of abuse, can take, and assuming otherwise leaves many vulnerable people in danger. Coercive control can mean that an abusive partner never raises a hand to the person they are abusing - this does not make the abuse any less serious. The cisheteronormative view of domestic violence has led to LGBTQ+ people experiencing abuse being overlooked and denied essential resources. The people who loudly claimed that Carini sparring with “a male” was reminiscent of domestic abuse failed to take into account that, for some cis women, the people punching them were cis women partners or relatives, with no doubt, manufactured or otherwise, about their sex assigned at birth. There have also been cases of cis women abusing cis men, something that the “men are always the abusers, women are always the victims” ideology would deem impossible. Violence enacted by AFAB people may not have the widespread systemic structure behind it that violence by cis men has, but it still happens, and should not be overlooked simply because it affects a minority of people.
The “controversy” over the Olympic women’s boxing has not only illustrated how it is impossible to “just know” someone’s biology; it has also shown that applying simplistic categories both to sport and to wider society helps no-one, and instead opens the door for greater harm. Women, whether cis or trans, intersex or endosex, are complex. Women can be powerful and strong, can be naturally gifted and build on it with training - and women can also enact harm, whether that harm involves physical violence against a loved one, or the psychological and social violence of targeting an athlete for hate, vitriol and abuse. If women’s sports are to flourish, we need to focus on the former, and refuse to tolerate the latter. The true threats to women’s sports are the lack of funding and respect they are given in society, the dearth of training opportunities, and the prevalence of sexual abuse by professionals within the sporting world, not trans women or muscular cis women. Let’s tackle these issues, instead of policing the bodies of exceptional women.
