The recent vicious campaign of harassment against Algerian boxer Imane Khelif has been a case study in predictable outcomes: the gender-critical movement was always going to become a burden, not just for transgender people, but for all women who fail to neatly slot into the ever-shifting goalposts of who can be a woman. 

Imane Khelif mostly flew under the radar during the 2024 Summer Olympics, until Italian boxer Angela Carini abandoned their group of 16 fight after only 46 seconds, saying the blows she received from Khelif were the hardest she had received in her life. Following this, it was widely reported that in 2023, Khelif and another boxer, Taiwanese Lin Yu-Ting, had been disqualified from the boxing World Championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA) for failing an unspecified ‘gender test’. This prompted a wave of outrage, led by tragically public figures like JK Rowling, Elon Musk, and Logan Paul.

It’s important to note, off the bat, that these tests conducted by the IBA were part of a pattern of illegal and unprofessional conduct that has plagued the organisation for years. So too was the decision to disqualify Khelif and Lin from the 2023 championships: having competed in competitions under IBA governance since 2018, Khelif was taken out in the middle of the tournament and forced to undergo an unspecified ‘gender test’ three days after she beat previously undefeated Russian boxer Azalia Amineva. As the International Olympic Committee (IOC) put it in a statement released after Khelif’s 46-second victory, their disqualification was “contrary to good governance,” and undertaken “without any proper procedure.” The IBA has also, in recent years, come under intense scrutiny for President Umar Kremlev’s links with Vladimir Putin, and was recently derecognised by the IOC for “lack of financial transparency,” including significant sponsorship it receives from Russian energy firm Gazprom. 

To be clear, Khelif and Lin are not transgender. There is no reliable evidence to suggest they have XY chromosomes, or higher than average testosterone, or any intersex trait. But even if they are intersex, and even if those traits do give them a demonstrable advantage, why should they be disqualified? 

Fairness in an unfair playing field

Victor Wembanyama, the tallest athlete at the Paris Games, is 7’3”. He undeniably has an advantage when he plays basketball. Simone Biles can jump twelve feet in the air. Nearly every single outstanding athlete has some sort of physical edge which they got through luck, not training, and in most cases they are praised for it. It goes against the core of sporting spirit to ask athletes to either withdraw or suppress any genetic advantage they might have in order to uphold this myth of a ‘level playing field’. But not, apparently, if you’re intersex. Not if you’re trans. 

The problem with sex testing is that you can’t test for sex. Any proposed defining feature of ‘biological sex’ is subject to exceptions that seem to disprove the rule. It’s often said that biological sex is defined by chromosomes, but this isn’t universally true; take, for instance, women with complete androgen insensitivity, who usually have ‘male levels’ of testosterone and XY chromosomes. By this standard of sex testing, these people are male, even though they have entirely female external sexual characteristics, and no difference in strength conferred on them by their testosterone levels, because their body doesn’t process it.  

In the absence of reliable and consistent sex tests, from 2000 to 2011, the IOC adopted a policy of “suspicion based testing” where only women whose appearance or sporting achievement were ‘suspicious’ were subject to medical evaluations. This system was criticised for the disproportionate scrutiny it placed on women of colour, since the normative definition of typical femaleness that ‘suspicious’ athletes were compared to was based on a Western standard. Regardless of hormone levels or chromosomes, women of colour, in particular Black women, are often stereotyped as masculine, or as outside femininity, in the same pattern of historical dehumanisation that was used as a justification for slavery and segregation. 

What, then, is the purpose of sex testing? To maintain fairness in a playing field that has never been fair? To protect women’s safety? But women who don’t conform to an acceptable standard of Western femininity are not protected. Instead, they are subjected to invasive examinations and interrogations that seem to set out, in brutal detail, who is subject to principles of bodily autonomy and privacy — and who is not.

I don’t think the backlash to Khelif and Lin comes from a desire to uphold any principle of safety or fairness; it comes from a general unwillingness to confront the inherent failure of sex-segregated sports in the first place. Sex, as it is treated in sport, is binary and immutable. In reality, it isn’t. So why does this unwillingness persist, if the exclusion of trans and intersex people doesn’t protect anyone? 

To answer this, I would like to propose an amendment to the question: what we should be asking is not who systems of regulating sex protect, but what. This is not a scientific divide; it is a political one.

Natural(ised) Labour

It all comes down to what parts of ‘being a woman’ are seen as natural, and what parts aren’t. Scholar Silvia Federici, in her 1974 essay ‘Wages Against Housework’ writes that domestic labour is not only “ imposed on women” but “transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character.” Times have changed since Federici wrote that essay, but less than we like to think. Even in straight households where women are the primary income-earners, they still tend to do most of the housework. 

This unpaid labour, Federici argues, is enabled by the naturalisation of the labour that women perform. In simpler terms, the idea of biological ‘womanhood’, as it is constructed under capitalism, is a tool used to justify and perpetuate the expectation that women should provide care, nurturing, and domestic work without compensation. This construction frames these tasks as inherent to biology rather than as work that should be valued and paid for. By making this labour invisible, capitalism ensures that it remains outside the formal economy, thus maintaining a supply of free labour essential for the reproduction of the workforce.

Make no mistake: transgender and intersex people pose a real problem to this picture. This is why when women fall outside Western ideals of womanhood, they must be scapegoated as criminals or medical outliers, lest the category of ‘woman’ as an economic position be delegitimized. If variations in sexual characteristics are treated as normal, then the categorisation of ‘woman’ is muddied; there is no clear grouping that can be used to naturalise women’s oppression. Inclusion and acceptance of transgender people creates a similar threat to essentialist views of sex. If someone categorised as a man can genuinely improve their life by becoming a woman, then the immutability of sex is called into question. So too is male superiority, and the idea of an inherent ‘nature’ based on physical characteristics. 

All this to say that the brutal online persecution of Khelif and Lin, two women who have done nothing except fail to appeal to Western standards of femininity, should highlight for everyone how the fight for transgender and intersex liberation affects us all. In some ways, I’m dissatisfied with the focus my argument has taken on intersex athletes, for the simple reason that the International Boxing Association has not presented any evidence that Khelif or Lin are intersex, or have high testosterone, or any other advantage the IBA links to their sexual characteristics. 

From the beginning, this discourse has not actually been about the right of intersex athletes to compete. It has been the product of an increasingly radicalised right-wing movement that cannot accept the public existence of anyone who, in their mind, insufficiently performs femininity, whether because they are trans, or because they are too muscular, or too tall, or too brown. Standing up for people who don’t fit into the popular ideal of womanhood is not a moral issue; it is a fight we are all materially invested in. 

Of the controversy surrounding her performance, Khelif has called for the harassment to stop. “It can destroy people,” she said in an interview. “It can kill people’s thoughts, spirit and mind. It can divide people.” 

She is right. Online, and in right-wing media outlets, a good deal of the discussion surrounding Khelif and Lin’s participation has been nauseating to read. These responses have been a frightening indictment of the current state of discourse around trans people, and of the anger that can be elicited at the moment by the mere possibility of someone being a transgender woman. 

Khelif won what may well be the last gold medal in the women’s welterweight category; boxing is not scheduled to appear in the 2028 Games, following the deregistration of the IBA. The gold medal match, attended by many members of the French Algerian diaspora, was packed with flag-clad supporters. After the winner was announced, Khelif was lifted on her coach’s shoulders and brought around a packed arena that was cheering her name.

I think there is hope in this picture. The tide will eventually turn. While undoubtedly a disturbing episode of online discourse, this saga has also brought a lot of the contradictions contained in the ‘gender critical’ movement into the limelight. I think it’s also illustrated for a lot of people how the anti-trans movement will only ever continue to shift the goalposts on who can be a woman in their book, and how its goal has never really been women’s liberation. In amongst the fearmongering, a lot of people have been rightfully praising Khelif’s remarkable perseverance and grace. The cracks in the gender-critical narrative are showing. Time to push back.