The Politics of Sex and Sport
Imane Khelif’s case reflects a broader historical pattern of empire projecting its unresolved anxieties about gender and sexuality onto “misfit” bodies and contexts.
Donald Trump’s final advertisement during his 2024 presidential election campaign appealed to perseverance, patriotism, and the revival of core American values. The one-minute ad features American cityscapes and Americans of diverse racial backgrounds and occupations, including military figures, construction workers, and police. The ad opens on a somber note, stating that four years prior, America had lost its purpose. It ends with footage of Trump’s survival of his assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, and highlights an emphatic slogan: “We fight.”
Every featured individual in the ad appears to be American, with one peculiar exception: the Algerian professional boxer and 2024 Olympics gold medalist, Imane Khelif. Footage of Khelif appears after the soot-covered faces of construction workers, with a narration reading: “Our patriotism was called toxic. Men could beat up women and win medals, but there was no prize for the guy who got up every day to do his job.” It reflects one of Trump’s core campaign promises to “keep men out of women’s sports,” and builds on a precedent of attacking gender and sexual minorities in the United States. But why, of all people, did the Trump campaign elect to feature Khelif, a non-American who did not even compete against an American during her welterweight boxing event at the 2024 Olympics? And how did Khelif, a boxer who has identified as female her entire life, become embroiled in a controversy over her gender identity during the Summer 2024 Olympic Games?
Trump’s “We Fight” ad deliberately strips Khelif of her agency in order to insist on the image and message of a stable, idealized, national-masculine identity. Khelif, as a presumed “man,” destabilizes and threatens gender categories through her “invasion” of women’s sports and “beating up” of women. What Trump’s ad suggests is that, rather than a regular boxing competition between two females, the Olympics somehow unfairly pitted a vulnerable female against an advantaged and aggressive male. What happened between Khelif and her opponent then ceased to be a match (which inevitably involves hard punching) and was transformed into a racialized event in which an aggressive brown man mercilessly harmed an unassuming white woman. By not performing a certain expectation of femininity, Khelif’s body was made into an illegitimate actor violating a woman-only space.
Testing Sex
Khelif’s troubles did not begin with the Trump campaign nor even in the 2024 Olympics. In 2023, Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting were both disqualified from the Women’s World Boxing Championships because they “failed” their mandated gender eligibility tests (as determined by the Russian-led International Boxing Association). Following Khelif’s clearance to compete in the 2024 Olympics and her gold medal win, she faced fierce scrutiny in the media. But Khelif and Yu-ting are not the first to be disqualified from international sporting competitions on the basis of failed sex tests. Anne Fausto-Sterling recounts the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) former sex test mandate as applied in the 1988 case of Maria José Martínez-Patiño, a Spanish female hurdler who competed for twelve years before her disqualification for failing a sex test.1 Martínez-Patiño was found to have a Y chromosome in her cells, and instead of a uterus and ovaries, testes within her labia. This variation in sexual development was due to Martínez-Patiño’s condition of androgen insensitivity, which means that her cells cannot detect or respond to testosterone. She therefore developed other physiological characteristics and grew up as a female. After undergoing extensive evaluation, and after two and a half years, Martínez-Patiño was reinstated for competition, and in 1992 represented Spain in the Olympics. She became the face of the sex testing controversy within the Olympics and sports more generally.
Fausto-Sterling says there are two reasons why the Olympics mandated sex testing and formalized the policy in 1968. The first was political: sex testing occurred against the backdrop of Cold War paranoia of “Communist infiltration” and cheating in competitions through the insertion of men into women’s sports. Yet sex testing was also implemented due to a general policing of appropriate gender norms that rebuked women participating in Olympic sports altogether.
Fausto-Sterling writes:
If women were by nature not athletic competitors, then what was one to make of the sportswomen who pushed their way onto the Olympic scene? Olympic officials rushed to certify the femininity of the women they let through the door, because the very act of competing seemed to imply that they could not be true women. In the context of gender politics, employing sex police made a great deal of sense.2
Since 1999, the IOC has discontinued its testing requirement, opting for a more decentralized approach by delegating the decision to individual sports federations. It also adopted a more inclusive approach that prevents the exclusion of athletes based on an “unverified, alleged or perceived unfair competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical appearance, and/or transgender status.”
More recently, Caster Semenya, a South African middle-distance runner, endured similar criticism to Khelif and was required to undergo a sex test in 2009 after she won gold at the World Championships. Semenya was born with what is called “differences in sexual development” (DSD), which involves high levels of testosterone, undescended testes, no uterus or fallopian tubes, and an inability to menstruate. Although persons with such conditions are typically deemed to be “intersex,” Semenya herself has rejected this label, asserting in a New York Times op-ed, “I’m a different kind of woman, I know, but I’m still a woman.” She has since been embroiled in legal disputes due to the 2019 International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF)/World Athletics mandate that athletes with DSD must take testosterone-suppressing medication as a precondition for competing.
As with Semenya, the controversy surrounding Khelif goes beyond the simple question of fairness in sports—it underscores how norms about gender and identity are imposed on athletes’ bodies. Khelif’s story is particularly strange because she was singled out among many athletes who faced similar pressure and testing, suggesting that racial and ethnonational biases were at play. Regulatory inconsistencies among the International Olympic Committee and other sports bodies, like the International Boxing Association and World Athletics, further complicate the issue. These organizations apply conflicting standards on gender eligibility and create instability that, in practice, disproportionately impacts athletes from the Global South. At its core, Khelif’s case reflects the ongoing struggle over how international sports bodies regulate identity and fairness, and reveals a broader system of biopolitical control that reinforces inequities tied to race, gender, and global power dynamics.
Scapegoating Khelif
During Khelif’s match against her Italian opponent Angela Carini in Paris, Carini withdrew after 46 seconds, appearing in tears and exclaiming, “It’s not fair” to her team. British author J.K. Rowling shared a photo from the match with the caption:
Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better? The smirk of a male who knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.
Elon Musk was more direct; he retweeted a statement reading “Men don’t belong in women’s sports.” Meanwhile, Trump initiated what would become a series of attacks against Khelif throughout his campaign. He spoke about Khelif on multiple occasions during his campaign, referring to her as “a man.” During one rally in August 2024, he referred to both Khelif and Yu-ting as men who had transitioned. In one interview on Fox News, he remarked,
They want to have men playing in women’s sports, you saw the boxer, the Italian female boxer … two shots, she pulled away and said, ‘I can’t fight this.’ She got hit with two jabs and a jab is not supposed to be that bad … two jabs, and she said, ‘No more’ because she got hit so hard … there will be no men playing in women’s sports when we’re elected.
During another rally, he framed Angela Carini, Khelif’s opponent, as a woman vulnerable to disproportionate male strength:
This young girl from Italy, a champion boxer, she got hit so hard she didn’t know what the hell hit her. It was a person that transitioned. He was a good male boxer … he hit her with two jabs, and she said, ‘I’m out.’ How crazy is it?
Trump, among others who engaged in online attacks against Khelif, incited not only fear of Khelif but hatred and disgust. As Sara Ahmed argues in her conception of “affective economies,” it is not the object itself that is “disgusting” but instead disgust emerges relationally and proximally—disgust works to reaffirm boundaries between self and other and is projected onto bodies that violate these boundaries.3 In this case, Trump and others incited affective responses, like fear and disgust, toward Khelif and her body in the name of preserving the integrity of women’s sports as well as gender stability under a certain nationalist imaginary.
The possibility of having XY chromosomes yet identifying as—and indeed being—a biological woman disturbs a certain theory of manhood and womanhood that Trump and other critics of Khelif insist is exclusive. Khelif’s existence poses an intractable dilemma: either her attackers’ concepts of sex and gender are wrong (in which case their entire sexual epistemological edifice is threatened), or her body is wrong. In other words, her critics face two options: either let the discourse die, or problematize the body, and they chose to do the latter because what is at stake is preserving the sanctity of a particular worldview by which to conceive and construe the gendered and sexed subject. Recalling Fausto-Sterling, certain essentialist views of biological sex enforce discrete physiological criteria such as testosterone levels or the presence or absence of sex chromosomes, and accordingly administer tests to ensure compliance. She argues, however, that rather than being objective characteristics affirmed by scientific practice, these criteria still socially construct biological sex to reflect narrow views of gender and sexuality.
Parallel to the Cold War context in which sex testing was deployed due to paranoia about Communist infiltration in the Olympics, the suspicion around Khelif served to reinforce a threat to the integrity of women’s sports that, for Trump and his likeminded critics, is externally imposed and from which the nation must be shielded. On the other hand, for Khelif’s advocates, her case represented Western right-wing transphobia, even though she is not transgender. In The Nation, Jules Boykoff and Dave Zirin write:
As trans activists have said, transphobia also hurts cisgender women who don’t conform to a narrow, Eurocentric vision of womanhood proffered by J.K. Rowling, Riley Gaines, or other high-profile purveyors of hate who cower behind the banner of ‘protecting women’s sports.’ Sports is an entry point to attack trans people in all walks of life.
Boykoff and Zirin are correct to point to the transphobic and Eurocentric views of these critics but do not address why they chose to single out Khelif and not Yu-ting or even other transgender athletes in the United States. Additionally, Boykoff and Zirin do not consider Khelif’s personal testimonies aside from insisting twice that according to her, she is not transgender. The problem in this controversy for Boykoff and Zirin still seems to be transphobia and not the larger picture of what Khelif represents: an “other” against which champions of the “traditional West” project their internal and unresolved debates on gender and sexuality. On the question of Western anxieties about sex and gender, Joseph Massad says that:
sexuality is a historically and culturally specific epistemological and ontological category and is not universal or necessarily universalizable—this includes sexuality’s derivatives, homosexuality and heterosexuality (and bisexuality), whose consolidation as medical, juridical, and later social categories in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Western Europe and the United States is their hallmark, and heterocentrism, heterosexism, and homophobia as socially and culturally specific companions to these developments at the level of “Western” ontology.4
For Massad, what distinguishes sexual epistemological frameworks in the Middle East is that they are not bound to fixed personal identities or identities altogether (like homosexual and heterosexual) but rather center on practices and behaviors. Yet for Trump, Khelif must be trans because that is the only box she fits as a sexed subject in contemporary discourses in the United States. Khelif’s advocates, on the other hand, defended her based on her potentially being transgender or intersex, or otherwise invoked transphobia as the primary threat to Khelif’s livelihood. Doing so still maps sexual and gender concepts onto not only a body that refuses, but also a setting in which sexual epistemology and ontology in relation to the self differ.
Consider the fact that Khelif was warmly and enthusiastically welcomed back to Algeria by thousands of Algerians and received consistent support from the Algerian president, who tweeted that she “honored Algeria, Algerian women, and Algerian boxing.” This speaks to the fact that the “controversy” with Khelif emerges mostly from American voices staking out their positions on her body. Before the—let us be frank—American-made controversy over Khelif’s sex/gender, she did not have to personally and publicly articulate her identity as a woman. Under ongoing scrutiny, Khelif nevertheless continued to assert that she was, in fact, a woman, insisting “I am a female, I was born a female, I was raised a female, I grew up as a female, and I played sports as a female.” She went as far as posting a video on social media in which she poses with boxing gloves and then transitions into a more “feminine” appearance, donning makeup, jewelry, and non-athletic clothing to make a statement. The caption of the video rebukes the pressure on Khelif to conform to societal standards of femininity and beauty, affirming her character and strength instead. Given the transition, however, the video could also be interpreted as her performing and reinforcing her own femininity. Notably, the process by which she marks her gender simultaneously contests and reinforces gender scripts. Still, what she had to say was inconsequential to the discourses circulating around her identity. Her engagement with the issue was siloed from the way she was taken up as an object of [mis]representation.
Can Imane Khelif Speak?
Gayatri Spivak writes that not only did colonial domination entail “epistemic violence” and the effacement of indigenous ways of knowing, but that non-Western subjects—particularly, but not exclusively, women—experience a double erasure through their representation by the colonizer.5 These asymmetrical representational practices endure postcolonially in various, often puzzling ways. This helps us understand why Khelif’s “utterance” gains little ground when she is thrust into the midst of Euro-American social, political, and cultural wars. As Le Monde writes in an exclusive interview with Khelif, she “has never claimed to belong to the LGBTQ+ community.” Yet the magazine still posted the article on Twitter with a caption calling Khelif “une icône LGBT malgré elle (an LGBT icon in spite of herself).”
Khelif does not identify as an LGBT icon, whether in the actual Le Monde article or on other platforms. This is simply an interpretation promoted by Le Monde on social media. For so many, the only way to make sense of Khelif seems to be in this framework. Yet, in an interview with the Algerian national channel El Bilad, Khelif states:
Frankly, I say to those politicians who wronged me: they have no right to say about me that I am transgender—this is something shameful, shameful, and a great shame for my family, my family’s honor (sharaf), the honor of Algeria, and the women of Algeria, and especially the Arab world—the whole world knows that I am a Muslim woman.
Khelif’s comments here will likely be interpreted by many as “internalized transphobia” stemming from her religious commitments. Others, perhaps, may claim that she cautiously intends to distance herself from certain gender and sexual identity markers due to the criminalization of transgenderism and same-sex relations in Algeria. Both of these readings miss something crucial.
There is a broader complexity to Khelif’s claims located in her repeated appeal to the concept of sharaf—a term that roughly encompasses both the moral honor and social respectability of her family and country. Simply put, Khelif ties her womanhood and femininity to sharaf by prioritizing societal cohesion and communal relations over personal identity and expression. For her, personal identity and expression seem to matter primarily insofar as they serve the collective. While sharaf can be understood as a framework that “constrains” individual agency, it also intertwines personal expression with kinship and broader social and moral structures.6 This presents a challenge to feminist political sensibilities, as Khelif’s stance could be seen not as subverting but rather as reinforcing heteropatriarchal norms.
Saba Mahmood challenges the assumption, however, that individual liberal agency is the only valid paradigm, arguing that autonomy and self-determination can be reconfigured by ethical aspirations that do not center resistance against societal norms.7 She asks: what happens when agency and resistance against patriarchal norms and structures are not the center of one’s ethical commitments? What if a subject had a different relationship to certain norms aside from resisting them? Moreover, how does this disrupt the liberal conception of agency, freedom, and the human as subject?
Khelif’s case not be reduced to a simplistic binary of unfreedom versus individual autonomy; she must be heard on her own terms. The point, here, is neither to put forward a relativist argument nor defend a particular communal and nationalist view of the self. Rather, it is to account for how Khelif herself articulates her own identity and commitments, and therefore recognize the limitations that representations of her case present when they unquestionably assume and attempt to enforce a preset configuration of sex, gender, and selfhood.
Notes
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 1–2.
Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 3.
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 84-89.
Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 216.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 280.
Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
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