Whelp, it’s happening again—this year to Lin Yu-Ting and Imane Khelif. It seems that this is what we have to look forward to now at every Olympics. One or more unabashedly strong and powerful women athletes will have their sex challenged, and outrage will wash over the gender-policing, transphobic sector of the internet. One or more women will be found to have an intersex trait, or in this year’s cases, be claimed to have an intersex trait—and out will spill the bigots. One pile of bigots will frame them as trans women—even though they were assigned female at birth, raised as girls, and lived all their lives as women. The second pile will claim they are intersex “freaks of nature,” bizarre creatures who should not be allowed to compete with “real” women.
Both groups of bigots will engage in the same cruel and ugly behavior. They’ll call the women athletes men and pronoun them “he.” They’ll present them as a threat to the “real women” competing—both in terms of “stealing” women’s medals and as a pure physical threat. They will claim the athletes’ bodies are ugly and disgusting.
It’s so depressing, as an intersex person, to witness this. So let me go over the reality once more. I’ll neatly number the points for you so you can be allies and use them in rebuttals!
1. 1. All women Olympic athletes used to be subjected to “gender testing,” while men have never faced this gatekeeping. Why? Because sex and gender policing always pretend to be protecting "real women" from "fake ones" who would somehow hurt them. But in fact, they boil down to preserving the power that has been given to people categorized as male, by insisting that "real women" are vulnerable, small, submissive, weak, and men innately superior to them.
2. 2. The Olympics no longer “gender test” all women competitors. Instead, this is left up to each sporting organization, and they all have different rules, or make them up on the spot when some woman’s status is challenged. And guess what? The women whose gender is challenged are now almost all women of color whose gender expression is androgynous or masculine. Typically, the challenges are initiated by femme white women athletes who claim to need protection from their competitors. This reflects ideologies of ideal womanhood held by conservative white people.
3. 3. Actually, femme white women are just as likely to turn out to have an intersex trait as anyone else! In fact, it’s quite common for intersex women with a Y chromosome to (1) have no idea they are intersex, and (2) have bodies that are considered especially feminine looking, because their bodies do not respond to testosterone much or at all, meaning, for example, that they grow little or no body hair on their legs or underarms or pubic area.
4. 4. We engage in magical thinking about testosterone, just as we do about Y chromosomes. Sex is a spectrum, and testosterone levels vary widely among people assigned the same sex at birth. In fact, when studied, it turns out that 17% of elite cis men athletes have testosterone levels below the bottom of the "male range." These men are not disqualified as "cheating by being intersex." They aren't regulated at all, probably because it's presumed that their low testosterone must be a disadvantage. Yet these men with low testosterone are not lesser athletes; they are just as extraordinary in their performance as the men with typical testosterone levels. This illustrates how there's no direct relationship between the amount of testosterone a person produces and their athletic abilities.
5. 5. If we really, truly, actually believed that testosterone levels determined ability, then we would test athletes of all genders and assign them to competition classes by testosterone levels. (The outcome of such a practice would immediately falsify the ridiculous premise.)
6. 6. All Olympic athletes have very atypical bodies. They may be endowed naturally with extraordinary levels of fast-twitch muscle, or unusually flexible joints, or huge hands, or atypically long legs. We do not police these biological differences, or require that to compete in the Olympics, you must have an average body. We don't randomly pick citizens of each nation to compete in international sporting events--we get to see average people running for the bus all the time. We don't find this exciting, and it's the very atypicality of elite athletes' bodies that enthralls us. It's only this very specific type of atypicality--being a woman with hormonal or genital or chromosomal variance--that is being policed. And it's policed intensively, intrusively, punitively.
7. 7. Today, in an era of surging transphobia, this policing of the bodies of muscular androgynous women of color is uglier than ever. Celebrities like JK Rowling are out there calling women assigned female at birth predatory men who must be shamed, banned, destroyed, claiming that they became boxers out of a “male desire to beat up women.” Elon Musk is claiming the Olympics have been infected with the “woke mind virus” and are letting “men compete against women.” They are misgendering cis women just as they do trans women, with disturbing gleeful outrage.
What it boils down to is this: bodies don’t cheat. Intersex statuses are natural, and found throughout the animal kingdom. Since sex is a spectrum, the division of it into a binary will always be arbitrary. When the gender police are allowed to demand that women athletes who don’t look feminine enough to them be subjected to sex testing, we are punishing women for looking strong and butch (and in practice, for not being white). Meanwhile, more-gender-conforming women and everyone classified as male are presumed to be endosex (not intersex), free from this ugly scrutiny, and not forced to confront the possibility that they too have intersex traits.
And that’s not fair!
