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Unrepentant fear of trans bodies
Paris 2023 has been dominated by two women accused of having bodies which fall outside normative female forms. No medical evidence has been presented, only a hidden test by a disgraced governing body that has not been made public. The social media and mainstream media discourse has focused on those rumours and seeming half-truths, and no amount of evidence from either women’s lives is enough to stem the gender critical hate thrown in their direction. This narrative has been dominated by people who have a very particular political perspective: to stoke fear of trans bodies and perpetuate their own version of what female bodies should look like.
None of this is new. Sex tests originated in the 1936 Olympics to stop a trans man from competing, the National Socialists bringing their desire to control all women’s bodies into international sport. Since then various tests have been used to police and enforce women’s sports within a normative understanding of women’s bodies, with most of the women caught out coming from sub-Saharan Africa and the Asian-subcontinent. Non-normative bodies are not trans, yet in the age of the gender critic they have been lumped in with the demonisation of trans women.
Sharron Davies lost to East German athletes who doped, some of whom later transitioned to men due to the levels of testosterone they were given. Davies has used her victimhood to build a career out of demonising trans women who dare to compete, every time a trans woman athlete appears Davies trots out her victimhood to show why trans women are cheats. Yet, the reality is that she is co-opting her own fears to stoke public disgust. Every trans woman is a cheat in waiting, is tainting women’s sports, makes a mockery of fairness, those are the narratives perpetuated because Sharron and other retired female athletes see a chance to retain a modicum of personal power.
April Asheley’s 1969 court case drew out the poison in the British contextualising of trans female identities, institutionalising the divide between what a “real” woman is and what a fake trans woman should be seen as at law. Yet, her case was deeply flawed due to the personal biases of the judge and the reluctance of the UK government to step in to safeguard trans rights. From 1970 onwards trans people were treated as spectacle, outing trans women became a pubic service…
