The Paris 2024 Olympic Games are the first in history to welcome 50% female athletes. A strong symbol for the city where women athletes were first allowed to compete in 1900, in only five sports. This year, the Olympic program includes 152 women’s events, 157 men’s events and twenty mixed events. This means that more than half of medal competitions are open to women.
It must be said that for a while now, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has been committed to gender equality in sport. It is written in the Olympic Charter published in 2023 that the role of the IOC “is to encourage and support the promotion of women in sport, at all levels and in all structures, with the aim of implementing the principle of equality between men and women”.
And there were many sportswomen who made us dream during these Olympics. We of course think of the American Simone Biles and her four medals in gymnastics, a return to majesty after a surprise retirement in 2021 in Tokyo; to Kaylia Nemour, who shone for Algeria, winning the first medal in the history of gymnastics for the African continent; to Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, who completed her impressive record with gold in mountain biking. But also to Camille Jedrzejewski, who won the only charm of the French delegation in shooting, or to Lisa Barbelin, who won the first French Olympic medal for women’s archery – in bronze.
But throughout these Games, female athletes have also been publicly exposed for more than their sporting performances. Simone Biles had to justify her hairstyle, which some considered not neat enough. Egyptian fencer Nada Hafez was cyberbullied after she revealed she competed while pregnant. I will spare you the long tirades on clothing inequalities within the same sport, and the various sexist comments to which athletes have been subjected – we are used to that.
What we are a little less used to is that an athlete is the target of millions of people because her femininity is called into question in the middle of an Olympic competition. I am of course talking about the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, at the heart of a global debate on the criteria of femininity at the Olympics.
Russia and the far right are spreading rumors
Let’s summarize the matter. The 1er August 2024, two boxers face each other in the round of 16 of the -66 kg category, the Algerian Imane Khelif and the Italian Angela Carini. After barely forty-six seconds, the second forfeited after receiving a blow to the face which she described as “too strong”. She leaves the ring without greeting her opponent, in tears. On social networks, the Italian far right is quick to accuse the IOC of having left a match “inequitable” take place. Implied: if Imane Khelif hits so hard, it’s because he’s a man. A conspiracy theory that doesn’t come out of nowhere.
In March 2023, a few hours before her fight for the gold medal at the world championships in India, the International Boxing Association (IBA) disqualified Imane Khelif on the pretext that she did not “does not meet the eligibility criteria to participate in women’s competitions”. In the process, the president of the IBA Umar Kremlev declared to the Russian press agency TASS that the boxer would have “XY chromosomes”. Its alleged male karyotype would increase testosterone production, and therefore performance.
This statement is made hardly credible by the character himself – this portrait of Umar Kremlev published in Le Monde will allow you to form an opinion. We learn in particular how this close friend of Vladimir Putin uses the IBA as a political tool, and that he is at war against the IOC, which imposed sanctions on Russia following the “state doping” revealed after the Sochi 2014 Games.
Clearly, Imane Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting – also accused by the IBA of having XY chromosomes – are the instruments of a communications war, in which the IOC publicly defended them. If the Olympic organizing committee authorized them to compete in Paris, it is because they respect the criteria of femininity imposed by high-level sport.
But anyway, what are these criteria? What do the tests look like? And why do women have to prove their femininity to be able to compete in major international competitions? All the answers can be found in one episode of the podcast Balls on the table by Binge Audio, which deals with the categorization of men/women in sport.
What is a “real woman”?
In this episode, journalist Tal Madesta receives socio-historian Anaïs Bohuon, author of “Ladies” categories – The test of femininity in sports competitions. A specialist in the history of women’s sport, the researcher begins by noting that women do not compete with the same demands as men. The weights or javelins are lighter, the distances to be covered are shorter, the sets are fewer, the protections are stricter… “Women do not have the right to move their bodies in the same way as men. “Feminine” sport must have the value of grace, flexibility, fluidity, play, elegance, leisure, gentleness. We are clearly very far from the cardinal values of sporting confrontation, competition, records, performance, faster, higher, stronger.
Anaïs Bohuon explains how even within the tests, “everything has been done to keep women in biological inferiority”to give the impression that they are naturally weaker than men. So we make them compete against each other, in smaller events compared to the men’s version. For the researcher, the non-mixed nature of the tests “is implicitly based on sexual hierarchy. Male superior to female, man superior to woman, masculine superior to feminine.” A postulate never questioned. But what happens when a sportswoman performs as well or better than a sportsman?
Sports authorities have in turn imposed nudity tests, gynecological examinations, strength tests and then blood tests.
“In the history of fate, as soon as a woman or women come closer to men, not only in their physique but also in their performances, the sporting authorities will panic, express doubts about their gender, and will try at all costs to maintain this gendered bicategorization within competitions”explains the researcher. How? By introducing femininity tests, of course!
To try to “prove scientifically what a real woman is”sporting authorities have in turn imposed nudity tests (during which doctors observed their bodies, including their genitals), gynecological examinations, strength tests and then blood tests to ensure the absence of an XY chromosome. A test deemed insufficient to ensure sacrosanct fairness in competitions, because karyotypes say nothing about physical strength. Today, femininity tests instead assess testosterone levels, although there is no scientific consensus on how it affects athletic performance.
To compete in the women’s category, athletes must be able to demonstrate a testosterone level of less than 2.5 nanomoles per liter of blood, over twenty-four months continuously. And if they secrete more, they have the choice between exclusion from competition or hormonal treatment. This is crazy, when we know that 8 to 13% of women of childbearing age in the world suffer from polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), which drastically increases the level of testosterone in the body…
Throughout this forty-seven minute interview, with the confidence of someone who knows her subject like the back of her hand, Anaïs Bohuon dissects the sexist biases that are the foundation of high-level sport. It also demonstrates the efforts made by sporting or political authorities since the start of the modern Olympic Games to discredit women who do not fit the mold of the male/female bicategorization. They therefore hide behind the argument of sporting fairness, brushed aside by the researcher: “To maintain an illusory wish for fairness and equality, sporting bodies generate an injustice of exclusion and segregation, only in the women’s category”men do not have to undergo the same hormonal tests.
If the interview is sometimes dense – it also addresses the issue of intersex and trans athletes, and paints the portrait of many sportswomen who have been victims of sexism throughout history – Anaïs Bohuon’s well-founded point of view sheds a new light on the world of sport, both scientific and feminist.
And Tal Madesta raises the million-euro question: what would a truly egalitarian sports space look like? To a space where all athletes could benefit from the same training, the same infrastructures, the same “prize money” and the same media attention regardless of their gender, retorts Anaïs Bohuon. We could add: where women should not be subjected to tests of femininity from another age which throw them into fodder for transphobes around the world.
Other works to read, see, listen to
- To explore the subject, I recommend the documentary Too powerful sports cars broadcast on Arte. Directed by Phyllis Ellis, a former Olympic hockey athlete, it tells how the International Athletics Federation opened the debate on hyperandrogenism, this natural production of testosterone above average in certain women. Looking at the testimonies of Caster Semenya, Annet Negesa, Dutee Chand, Evangeline Makena and Margaret Wambui, all singled out for hyperandrogenism, I could not help but notice that they were all racialized, successful in their sport and born in disadvantaged backgrounds.
- The newspaper Le Monde produced an educational video on femininity tests in sport and at the Olympics. In less than ten minutes, she summarizes well the controversial foundations of these tests without solid scientific foundation.
- This article on Slate clearly shows that the debate on the “sufficient femininity” of female athletes is not new. In modern sports history, many athletes have been accused of being men (or at least, of not being “real women”).
- The daily current affairs podcast World Time dedicated an episode to debates concerning trans sportswomen or intersex athletes. It asks a crucial question: is the exclusion of trans athletes scientifically justified?
- To end on a more positive note about these Games, I learned from this BBC News Africa article (in French) that for the first time at the Paris 2024 Games, an Olympic nursery has opened, where a space has been provided for athletes to express their milk if necessary. Everything is not perfect (there should be spaces of this type within sports facilities so that breastfeeding mothers can pump their milk before their warm-up, for example), but it is still a sign that maternity is increasingly taken into account in high-level sport.
