For women athletes of color, scrutiny of gender and identity rules is part of a long-standing trend

PARIS (AP) — An emotional Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif, left the ring in tears after a resounding victory this weekend. Khelif faced days of hateful comments and false accusations about her gender after her first fight with an Italian opponent who surrendered after a few seconds of the fight.

“It’s because she’s African, because she’s Algerian,” Algerian fan Adel Mohammed, 38, said Saturday after Khelif won her Olympic medal. “These comments come from white people… it’s a kind of racism.”

Women of color athletes have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination in terms of gender testing and false accusations that they’re male or transgender, historians and anthropologists say. Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting, who won her fight Sunday after similar abuse and questions on her gender, are the newest examples of women of color finding themselves in contentious debates concerning the regulation and perception of gender in sports.

More women from the Global South or developing countries are affected by gender testing in sports, said Payoshni Mitra, director of the Center for Sport and Human Rights, a Switzerland-based human rights organization that has worked with dozens of female athletes in Asia and Africa to combat gender testing practices.

“Sports is very Eurocentric — it’s not necessarily a global approach,” Mitra said. “We need to accept women in all their diversity. And right now we’re not seeing that.”

Mitra and other proponents of the speculation and anthropologists note that international sports federations haven’t tended to advertise an understanding of diversity in terms of sex and gender identity, and that gender testing has often been conducted on athletes of color who don’t conform to typical Western, white ideals of femininity.

In 2009, after winning the 800 meters on the world championships, South African runner Caster Semanya was sidelined for 11 months because of track and field rules regarding hormone levels. She spent years in a legal battle against the requirement that she suppress her natural testosterone with the intention to compete.

Semenya was identified as female at birth, raised as a girl and has been legally identified as a woman her entire life. She has one of several conditions often called differences in sexual development, or DSD, that cause naturally high levels of testosterone.

World Athletics, track and field’s governing body, said Semenya’s testosterone levels gave her an athletic advantage comparable to a man competing in women’s events and that rules were needed to account for that. Critics of the rules — which were introduced in 2011 and tightened through the years — see naturally high testosterone levels as a genetic gift, likening them to a basketball player’s height or a swimmer’s long arms.

“Nobody was disqualifying Michael Phelps because of the specific biological characteristics that allowed him to be successful swimmers,” said medical anthropologist Danyal Kade Doyle Griffiths, an associate professor on the City University of New York.

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Indian sprinter Dutee Chand also faced a ton of scrutiny and was thrown out of the 2014 Commonwealth Games after reports of elevated testosterone levels. She underwent rounds of testing and eventually took the international track and field federation to court, difficult regulations that placed a limit on naturally occurring testosterone levels in female athletes.

Regardless of differences in gender or hormones, women of color—and Black women specifically—have often been subjected to stereotypes that portray them as more masculine. This dehumanization and objectification dates back to slavery, when enslaved Black women were auctioned off based on their physical appearance and skills, which were perceived as more masculine or more feminine.

Conspiracy theories and misinformation have circulated online around tennis superstar Serena Williams, falsely claiming she was born a man. In 2017, she wrote an open letter to her mother, thanking her for being a role model in standing as much as individuals who were “too ignorant to understand the power of a black woman.”

Basketball star Brittney Griner has also faced similar false accusations amid criticism of black women and their bodies that is rooted in historical racism: they are sometimes seen as not feminine enough, too muscular, intimidating or masculine.

“These examples strike me as particular cases where racism, transphobia and intersexphobia are inseparable,” Griffiths said. “This speaks to a much longer history of the way race is gendered, where black women are seen as more masculine compared to white women.”

The definition of femininity “is often based on Western notions of white femininity or standards of white beauty,” said Cheryl Cooky, a professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Purdue University. If a female athlete doesn’t fit those white, Western standards, “she’s subject to those questions and those accusations.”

In Khelif’s case, the banned International Boxing Federation disqualified her from the 2023 world championships after it said she failed unspecified qualifying tests for women’s boxing events, citing elevated testosterone levels. The Russian-dominated organization — which has been at odds with the International Olympic Committee for years — has refused to offer any information concerning the tests.

“The entire process is flawed,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Sunday. “From the conception of the test, to the way the test was made available to us, to the way the tests became public, it is so flawed that it is impossible to engage with it.”

Adams has previously said Khelif “was born a female, was registered as a female, lived as a female, was treated as a female and has a female passport.”

The Olympic body published a 10-principle approach to gender and gender inclusion in 2021 that recognized the necessity for a “safe, harassment-free environment” that respects athletes’ identities while ensuring the integrity of competitions. Advocates like Mitra hope they will likely be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, Algerians have come out in support of Khelif, defending her from the hateful comments. Algerian hammer thrower Zahra Tatar called Khelif’s fight “beautiful” and said “we all hope she wins the gold medal.”