“It is a fact that with the levels of testosterone present in the blood of the Algerian athlete, the fight should not be considered a fight at all ... I think that athletes who have male genetic characteristics should not be admitted into women’s competitions.”
So said Giorgia Meloni, Italian prime minister and president of the ultraconservative political party, the Brothers of Italy, which swept to power in 2022. She was responding to the defeat of Italian boxer, Angela Carini, after she abandoned her match against Algeria's Imane Khelif at the Paris Olympics earlier this month.
This was only one of the controversies in the long-running saga surrounding the Olympic Games and its treatment of female athletes. Khelif, the Algerian welterweight boxing gold medallist, and Lin Yu-Ting, the Taiwanese featherweight boxing gold medallist, were both the subject of insult, ridicule, and online harassment throughout the Games.
Former US president, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Meloni and JK Rowling were notable for their gross attempts to besmirch Khelif and Yu-Ting with a barrage of gender-based harassment and vitriolic speech at the moment of their greatest triumph.
Underpinning the criticism of Khelif and Yu-Ting is a thinly veiled agenda to ostracise female athletes who do not conform to traditional Western notions of femininity and womanhood. Unfortunately, such gender policing in elite sports is not a new phenomenon but rather a spectre that has lingered for decades.
Since women first stepped onto the Olympic stage at the Amsterdam Games in 1928, they have been subjected to unrelenting scrutiny that their male counterparts have largely avoided. In 1928, Japanese sprinter Kinue Hitomi was forced to undergo crude examinations to confirm that she was indeed a woman after winning a silver medal in the 800m.
Between 1968 and 1999, sex verification tests became the norm for elite female athletes. These degrading examinations became a prerequisite for competition, with refusal resulting in disqualification from competition. It wasn't until the 2000 Games in Sydney that women were relieved of the humiliation of carrying gender verification cards.
In recent years, sports authorities have moved on. Now, they wield testosterone levels as an arbitrary yardstick for defining manhood and womanhood, oversimplifying the intricate nature of human physiology.
These regulations effectively barred women with 46, XY differences in sexual development from international competition unless they underwent hormone treatment to reduce these levels. Those affected included Caster Semenya, the South African Olympic hopeful in the 800m.
When Indian sprinter Dutee Chand took the IAAF to court in 2015, and experts were forced to concede that there was “no definitive proof”’ of the link between testosterone levels and elevated athletic performance in women, Semenya stopped the treatment.
The treatment of Semenya and countless others reveals a fundamental misunderstanding — or wilful ignorance — of human biology. Variation within a population is a standard biological phenomenon, and any attempt to neatly organise athletes into binary gender categories is inconsistent with scientific reality. Human biology exists on a spectrum, with differences in chromosomes, hormones, and physical characteristics often defying simple classification. By imposing arbitrary limits on testosterone levels, sports governing bodies are not preserving fairness; they are enforcing an artificial and harmful (and Western) construct of gender.
Why do we draw a line under natural advantages for women but not men? No one has ever called for Michael Phelps to undergo treatment to suppress his natural gifts
Why do we draw a line under natural advantages for women but not men? No one has ever called for Michael Phelps to undergo treatment to suppress his natural gifts. Phelps is a fierce, dedicated competitor whose aquatic dominance would never have been possible without his hyperextended joints, unusually large wingspan, and low lactic acid production. Or Usain Bolt — with his unique ratio of fast-twitch to slow-twitch fibres — making him tailor-made for ruling the track. Yet, when a woman displays extraordinary capabilities, the alarm bells sound. Their message is clear and deeply troubling: exceptional performance in men is something to be lauded, while in women, it must be treated as a threat requiring correction. The stunning double standard is cruelly apparent.
The Olympics have always celebrated human extremes — the fastest, the strongest, the most tenacious. Athletes who compete at this level are, by definition, statistical outliers.
How can Olympic committees position themselves as guardians of equal competition, vigorously policing performance-enhancing substances, while they simultaneously mandate that women take drugs to suppress their natural genetic talents? This contradiction undermines the very spirit of athletic excellence and fairness — a dimming of natural-born talent in order to uphold an outdated, incongruous definition of femininity.
As we move forward, we must challenge the flawed logic and harmful practices of gender policing in all sporting competitions. Athletic greatness emerges in different shapes and sizes and attempting to enforce a narrow definition of femininity is not only scientifically unsound but ethically reprehensible.
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