This Olympics Moment Exposes the Hypocrisy of Anti-Trans Calls to “Protect Women” (2024)

This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read morehere.

For the past week, anti-trans advocates have waged a ruthless war of disinformation against Olympic boxer Imane Khelif. The Algerian woman, who is neither a man nor transgender, has been dragged by right-wing politicians and cultural commentators, who have called her a man and a biological male.

As Khelif has advanced in her weight class, these voices have gotten louder, arguing that the 25-year-old athlete should be disqualified and that airing her fights against female competitors is glorifying gender-based violence. Their lie has spread so quickly and penetrated the mainstream discourse so deeply that even the Boston Globe ran with it, publishing a print headline identifying Khelif as a “transgender boxer.” (The Globe later apologized and issued a correction, but the print issue had already gone out. The damage was done.)

It is a vicious, opportunistic campaign that has nothing to do with the truth of Khelif’s eligibility or her medical statistics. People who are ideologically invested in the demonization of trans and gender-nonconforming people—or who have achieved cultural relevance by stoking fear about the rising visibility of trans people in public life—simply saw a shady boxing organization make claims about a failed “gender test” and decided to try to ruin an Algerian woman’s athletic career. Even for those of us who have closely followed the rise of the anti-trans right in recent years, the pure bad-faith malice of this crusade is breathtaking.

It began when news resurfaced that the International Boxing Association had disqualified Khelif and another female boxer, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, from the 2023 world championships for allegedly flunking a gender test. The International Olympic Committee database originally noted that the IBA had found Khelif to have elevated levels of testosterone, but the IBA now claims that Khelif has XY chromosomes. However, the association has not produced any documentation of any test or published whatever regulations Khelif and Lin supposedly failed to meet. The IOC has reiterated that the two boxers meet every standard of Olympic eligibility for women’s boxing.

More importantly, the IBA should not be considered a reliable source. The IOC stripped it of its Olympic status back in 2019, amid concerns about poor governance, corruption, and the then president’s alleged connections to organized crime. Khelif has competed in women’s boxing for years without issue—she placed fifth in her weight class in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and won second place at the IBA’s 2022 world championships. The IBA disqualified her at its 2023 tournament only after she beat a previously undefeated Russian woman. It was suspicious timing for a Russian-led (and until recently Russian-funded) organization that had already been cast off by the IOC for being untrustworthy.

None of this matters to those who’ve been using Khelif as sacrificial fodder for their war on trans people. In recent days, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, various Republican senators, J.K. Rowling, and all manner of right-wing commentators have slandered Khelif. In a post on X, Vance called her “a grown man pummeling a woman.” Trump vowed on his Truth Social account to “KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!” They vilified Khelif with such fervor that her father felt compelled to release her birth certificate and childhood photographs, a degrading but seemingly necessary effort to prove that she was assigned female at birth and raised as a girl.

It’s possible that some of Khelif’s detractors didn’t know the facts of the situation when they posted—that they saw tweets and right-wing media headlines calling her a man and assumed she was transgender without bothering to confirm. That doesn’t make their actions any more defensible. It would be equally wrong to misgender a trans athlete and accuse them of fraud for competing in a sporting event for which they’re duly eligible. And if these conservatives don’t have enough faith in their arguments to check the facts, are willing to take the risk of smearing an innocent woman for the sake of political expediency, and refuse to correct themselves when others point out their error, they are just as vile as those who spread deliberate lies.

Of course, many of the people who’ve joined the pile-on, like Rowling, know exactly what they’re doing. Rowling shared an article about Khelif that explained the nuances of human sex—that, for instance, it’s possible for women to have XY chromosomes or higher-than-average testosterone levels—yet maintained that Khelif is a man who should be exiled from professional boxing. As evidence, Rowling and her ilk are posting photos of Khelif that supposedly show she is too masculine to be a woman. That these people, who claim to advocate for women’s rights—including those who, like Rowling and many other British anti-trans advocates, self-identify as feminists—are penalizing a woman for being too strong and insufficiently feminine should tell you everything you need to know about their intellectual honesty. The anti-trans movement is not just out to police and punish transgender people. Its natural conclusion is a society that enforces repressive gender norms for everyone.

Khelif should be an icon for supporters of women’s rights and girls in athletics. As a teen, she shone as a soccer player in her rural town in spite of cultural norms that discouraged girls from playing. Local boys had a problem with it; when they tried to fight her, she’d dodge their punches, which reportedly awakened her interest in boxing. She overcame barriers of sexism and poverty to excel in the sport, raising money with her mother to afford bus fare to training sessions because her father believed that it was inappropriate for girls to box. If anyone has suffered the classic hardships of women in sports, it’s Khelif.

Many of Khelif’s defamers have pointed to the tears of Angela Carini as evidence of the cruelty of allowing so-called “men” to compete in women’s sports. Carini, an Italian boxer who fought Khelif last week, abandoned their bout after just 46 seconds, complaining of pain in her nose. She refused to shake Khelif’s hand (she has since apologized) and began to cry in the ring. In the video of the match, Khelif looks confused as to why Carini is quitting and awkwardly tries to pat her on the shoulder. Rowling posted a screenshot of the moment on X. “Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better?” she wrote. “The smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head.”

To sum up the anti-trans movement, I’d like to present another image from the past week. On Saturday, Khelif beat a Hungarian boxer, guaranteeing herself at least a bronze medal. (She competes in the semifinals Tuesday.) After her victory, she addressed a press scrum while appearing to cry. “I want to tell the entire world that I am a female and I will remain a female,” she said.

This is where the anti-trans movement’s disingenuous calls to “protect women” have brought us: a woman in tears, having been ridiculed for her appearance and humiliated on an international stage, at the moment she achieves her Olympic dreams.