Gender Was Made For White People

On sports, scientific racism, and the logical conclusion of transphobia.

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*Content notice: transmisogynoir, brief mentions of sexual assault*

“Tested” is the latest podcast series from documentarian and “Flash Forward” host Rose Eveleth. Eveleth has spent the past ten years researching sex testing in sports, interviewing dozens of experts on medicine and sports policy, as well as the women who are impacted by rules about who is allowed to compete in sports. I strongly recommend listening to the whole series, especially if you want to understand the debate around trans people in sports as well as the context behind the recent Imane Khelif “controversy”.

In case you missed it, the corners of the Internet that are passionate about trans people were set ablaze this week after an Olympic boxing match between Imane Khelif of Algeria and Angela Carini of Italy. Khelif had a good match, knocking out Carini in under a minute. After the match, Carini started crying, partially due to her losing one of the most important matches of her career, but also due to being punched “harder than she had ever been punched in her life”.

The rest is a story that repeats itself over and over: white woman tears leading to bullying and harassment thanks to a right-wing media ecosystem. How does this keep happening, and what does it say about the staying power of racism?

First, The Facts

One an image for Carini crying hit social media, rumors started circulating in the anti-trans Internet that Khelif was “actually a man”; in other words, a transgender competitor who had an unfair advantage. These claims have never been proven; all evidence, including photos from her childhood, points to the fact that Khelif is a cisgender woman (she was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman). The only detail they needed, though, was that Khelif had apparently failed a “gender test” issued by the International Boxing Association (IBA), a different governing body than the International Olympics Committee (IOC) who uses different standards for sex testing. The specifics of this test were not specified at first (was it a testosterone level test? karyotype test? a genital exam? something else?), but on July 31st the IBA clarified that she “did not undergo a testosterone examination but [was] subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential.” Then, on August 5th, the story changed again at an IBA press conference: apparently it was a testosterone test that she was given, and that she has “men’s level of testosterone”.

It’s still not completely clear what the truth is regarding this test, although it doesn’t change the fact that Imane Khelif was cleared for the Olympics; the IOC even released a statement clarifying their eligibility criteria and affirming Khelif’s right to compete. It’s also worth noting that the IBA is an incredibly shady organization, with a history that includes having ties to the Kremlin, and as such has been banned from the Olympics since last year.

Imane Khelif, photographed by Vadim Ghirda. (AP)

None of this stopped the anti-trans Internet from doing its thing. Despite the fact that being transgender is illegal in Algeria, conspiracies swarmed about Khelif’s true identity, including transvestigations and inflammatory, transphobic posts from the likes of JK Rowling, Elon Musk, and Logan Paul. Clearly, they thought, she must have been born a man if she beat a woman that easily! The speed with which they targeted an African woman is terrifying, yet nothing at all new.

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A post shared by @pinkmantaray

Those who’ve been watching sports through an anti-trans lens for a long time may have noticed a recurring trend in these sorts of accusations. From Serena Williams to Caster Semenya to Imane Khelif, the women accused of being “too masculine” or having “too high a level of testosterone” are almost always women of color, especially Black women. I talked about this in my own podcast about transphobia in sports a few years ago, but it’s worth going over again here.

Race and Gender Are Inseparable

We should all accept that gender is, to some extent, a social construct. Gender is definitely entangled with biological sex—if it weren’t, we wouldn’t have so many people, cis and trans, pursuing gender-affirming medical care—but at the very least, we know for a fact that our ideas about “what makes a good man/woman” fluctuate depending on history and culture.

If we can accept this, then we can also accept that race and gender are inseparable in our current culture. Let’s go back in time to consider the brutal, oppressive race-gender system that was invented during the colonization of America…

• White (cis) men are the most superior—biologically more intelligent—thus more suited to owning property (including human beings) and running the hetero nuclear family unit, which always contains a man, woman, and children (the latter two of which are also owned by the man). A certain elite class of them should be able to run society and make up laws for the betterment of the current power structure, but most men simply perform the productive working class labor that actually keeps society running. 

• White (cis) women exist to perform reproductive labor; making more white babies, instilling white supremacist values in that youth, preparing boys to become laborers, and preparing girls to become breeders like them. They also serve as a standard to which women of color are never allowed into, as well as an excuse to enslave/genocide other races (“what if they defile our pure women?”) They are allowed relative comfort since they serve these important roles, but they can never truly have the power to change culture, only reinforce it. 

• White people are more sexually dimorphic than people of color, which is part of what makes them superior. In other words, white men and white women are more different from one another than men and women of other races, which is a sign of their advanced evolutionary status. See: Black women being stereotyped as masculine, Asian men being demasculinized, etc.

• Black people should be enslaved because their mentally inferior brains and physically stronger (“brute”/“savage”) bodies are more suited to perform physical labor for their white owners to extract value from. White people are seen as “saving” them from their primal roots. Black women are only unique from Black men in that they can reproduce to make more enslaved people and can help rear white children since they are seen as slightly less of a threat to white children than Black men. Nonetheless, they are denied humanity, and thus true womanhood.

• Indigenous people should be eradicated because they threaten the philosophies of Manifest Destiny/terra nullius, that the white ruling class have a God-given right to own everything. 

• Queer and trans people should be eradicated because they threaten the colonial (binary, white supremacist) gender system as outlined above. Societies that recognize genders outside the binary (Two-Spirit, Hijra, etc.) are particularly degenerate, because the two genders represent the two sexes’ biological destinies as outlined above. 

This is a simplified version of colonial gender relations, and obviously we’ve made a lot of progress as a society since the 1600s, but it’s worth sitting with the fact that many of these ideas still persist to this day. Consider our stereotypes about women: that they’re feminine, demure, asexual. These may seem universal to all women, but in fact, Black women have a different set of stereotypes: masculine, aggressive, hypersexual. These sets of stereotypes emerge from our ideas about the social role of each type of women in society; white women as docile caretakers of white children who only have sex to further the white race and please their husbands, and Black women as brutish (to work the fields), masculine (to contrast with traditional femininity, which was constructed around white womanhood), and hypersexual (easy to rape, and also a threat to whiteness which required enslavement to subdue). Black women, even Black girls, are still seen as more “adult” and more of a threat than their white counterparts.

The construction of white femininity didn’t just lead to qualitative social stereotypes, though. The need to differentiate the white race from other races produced the Western Science concepts of body-mass index (BMI), phrenology, polygenesis, and other eugenicist concepts which ultimately justified slavery. “Science” was made up to argue that African people were physically stronger but mentally weaker, inherently lazy and unevolved, “needing” to be enslaved to give them purpose. “Science” was used to place white people at the top of a racial hierarchy, with sex differences inextricable from these dark equations.

A racist political cartoon, depicting Serena Williams as jumping up and down on her tennis racket like a gorilla. (Mark Night, as reported in Vox)

Back To Sports

With this context, it’s no wonder that Black women are always failing sex tests in sports: the parameters for womanhood, including quantitative metrics such as circulating testosterone levels, were built around white women’s bodies and the expectations thrust onto them. In reality, all women have testosterone and estrogen in their bodies, and these fluctuate over the course of the day, over the course of a month, and over the course of their lifetimes. Some women have higher testosterone levels than others due to conditions like PCOS or even DSDs (differences in sex development). The science is inconclusive about whether African women have “higher testosterone” than white women on average, or whether African women are more likely to have DSDs. (All of this science is covered in much greater detail in Tested.) It’s possible that African women, by virtue of having worse health care access on average compared to white women due to the underdevelopment of their continent, are less likely to realize that they have a DSD until they’re already an athlete and it’s time to get tested. It’s also possible that the attacks on African women in sports are completely cultural, that a strong white person is simply seen as a good athlete whereas a strong Black person is seen as a threat that needs to be stopped.

Tweet from user @carolinekwan. “Michael Phelps is literally referred to as a freak of nature because of his disproportionate wingspan, double jointed ankles, lung capacity twice that of an average human, body that produces half the lactic acid of a typical athlete, and he is rightly celebrated for being the greatest male swimmer in history. Meanwhile, female athletes with genetic differences are legally discriminated against and harassed to no end. This is not about “protecting women in sports” - this is about protecting a very specific idea of what a woman is.” (Twitter)

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A post shared by @autogyniphiles_anonymous

I would take things one step further: gender was made for white people. Remember, the gender roles created during the colonial era were made with white people in mind; Black women were never considered women because they were never considered human. Ruby Hamad, author of “White Tears/Brown Scars”, wrote an opinion piece for Al Jazeera that explains this very dichotomy: “Despite its centuries-long and ongoing dominance, the West continues to project an image of itself as a kind of underdog, a lone island of morality, purity, and civilisation under constant threat from barbaric Oriental hordes.”

Never is the demonization of Black women more clear than in this Imane Khelif debate, where a Black woman is being depicted…as a literal demon. Following Imane Khelif’s fight with Carini, Hungarian boxer Anna Luca Hamori (Khelif’s next opponent) posted this AI-generated image to her Instagram, only to later delete it. One can only imagine the prompt used to create this visual: probably something like “boxing match between short thin white woman and dark-skinned, male demon with big muscles and horns”. In a stunning moment of professionalism and grace, Khelif still shook her hand after their match.

An AI-generated image of a white woman entering a boxing match against a dark-skinned demonic figure with horns. This was shared to Hungarian boxer Anna Luca Hamori’s Instagram page following Imane Khelif’s match with Carini and just before Hamori’s fight with Khelif, which Khelif then won. (via news.com.au)

As the Tested podcast covers, humanity has tried over and over again to determine a single metric with which to assess whether a human being is Male or Female. Time and time again, they fail. This is because sex, as noted by Miyagi, Guthman, and Sun, is a context-dependent summary of a multidimensional variable space. In my view, we should embrace the fact that colonial gender oppresses not only our bodies, but our imaginations. We live in a universe of wonder, of spectrums, of discoveries; why try to collapse anything into Group A and Group B? Why choose a world of hate when we can choose a world of curiosity?

A detailed diagram showing the sex spectrum (Scientific American)

There’s a tendency to view the struggle against transphobia as independent from other struggles. But in fact, transphobia reveals the truths about gender that all people struggle against. Trans people reveal the ways cis men and cis women are both oppressed by a gender system that forces unreasonable expectations onto them. Trans people reveal how the colonial gender system works, so it’s in everybody’s best interest to advocate for trans people.

In the meantime, until we defeat transphobia—and by extension, misogyny and racism—all non-normative displays of womanhood will be rejected. Whether that’s being a woman with a certain skin tone, being gay, being asexual, having facial hair (however naturally-occurring), having small breasts, playing sports, being aggressive, or even wearing pants, no cis woman is safe; conform or die. The logical conclusion of transphobia is that all women will eventually revert back to their colonial gender roles, even if that means they’re killed in the process.

Imane Khelif may not be trans, but in making her out to be, the queer community and other pro-trans groups have rallied behind her, celebrating her continued victories and fighting for her in the trenches of social media. As I was writing this piece, Khelif won the Olympic gold medal for her weight class, and after she did, her opponent Yang Liu celebrated along with her. This is the kind of solidarity we need to see more of!

Yang Liu and Imane Khelif smiling and embracing after their Olympic boxing finals match. (Twitter)

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Watch History

• For a cis woman’s perspective on the matter, check out Rebecca Watson’s latest.

• Chris Fleming is my favorite comedian of all time, and their output has been incredible lately.

Currently Reading

• Impressive reporting about Facebook’s AI slop from 404 Media! I wrote about this in my piece about the Dead Internet Theory; turns out I was wrong, it’s just a get-rich-quick scheme!

• A Mother Jones piece about what drug policy advocates want from a Harris/Walz administration.

• UMass Amherst is still coming down hard on pro-Palestinian protestors. For a history of the college’s long and proud history of student protest, check out this PBS documentary.

And now, your weekly Koko.

Koko the cat, supervising as I play the new LEGO Star Wars game.

That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.

In community,

-Anna