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Women’s sport has always been unfair
Imane Khelif’s involvement at the Paris 2024 women’s boxing has raised a storm of protest because she beat one opponent. Targeted by gender critical voices she has been demonised as a man, a cheat, and an abuser of “real” women. It is telling that all those who speak out against her are speaking without knowing all the facts, making assumptions about her body and eligibility without seeing redacted evidence which has never been publicly shared. Imane is the latest woman to be targeted for having a non-normative female body, treated as the enemy to women’s sports. Champions such a Katie Ledecky and rugby player Ilona Maher have also been transvestigated on the socials simply because their bodies fall outside the norm. This is where gender critical discourse has led us, to the point where any female body that people do not agree with is treated as potentially “male”, then hounded. What these gender critics forget is that women’s sport has always been unfair because women are not clones of each other, each having their unique biology.
This matters because the policing of women’s bodies has been a core part of human civilization for millennia. To be a woman is to become hyper aware that society has a stake in your body, how your body should appear, clothed and gazed upon. Susan Sontag critiqued our obsession with shaping and reshaping women’s figures, highlighting that to be a woman in the world is to be policed by the world. Be fat, be thin, wear this, not that. Never good enough, always made to have a complex to buy more, starve more, go under the knife more. Female athletes have all those pressures, then the added pressure to conform to being female enough for society to accept them as women.
Gymnastics, swimming, cycling, and field hockey have all come under pressure because coaches force women and girls to conform to certain aesthetics for the sake of performance. British cycling was castigated over the last Olympic cycle for bully women, part of which included body shaming. American gymnastics faced its nadir when Larry Nassar was convicted of sexually abusing girls and women in his care, their bodies preyed upon. It took courage for women in both sports to come forward and call out the abuse. Not a single gender critical voice has spoken out about the abuses heaped up on young girls in the pursuit of perfection. It is telling that…
