Garte
«“We are about to celebrate one of the most important moments in the history of women in the Olympic Games and in sport in general,” declared Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), on March 8. Sold as the most gender-balanced edition in history, with 5,416 female athletes and 5,630 male athletes, the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games (POJ 2024) were supposed to be an ode to gender equality in sport. But after an opening ceremony that infuriated reactionaries around the world, the veneer of equality did not last long. From the first week, female athletes were the target of attacks targeting their bodies, with a clear message: you are being scrutinized, controlled and, in the event that you are too “covered” or too “masculine,” disqualified or repressed. A look back at several Olympic episodes which demonstrate the persistence of control over women’s bodies by our patriarchal societies.
What a woman should be
On August 1, 2024, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif faced Italian Angela Carini in the quarterfinals of the under 66 kg category. After 30 seconds of exchanges, a first interruption of play and a decisive hook at the restart, Carini forfeited. Angry and in tears, she repeatedly said ” it’s not fair ” as she leaves the ring. That’s all it takes for the controversy to ignite social media and for Internet users to attack Imane Khelif. Her fault? She is not a “real woman”. Her detractors accuse her of hyperandrogenism1, arguing that she was excluded from the 2023 World Championships in New Delhi by the International Boxing Association (IBA) after a failed eligibility test to compete in the women’s category – a test whose methods and results are not precisely known, and are kept confidential. On X (ex-Twitter), from Musk to Trump, from Meloni to British author JK Rowling, not to mention the fachosphere, everyone is sharing their expertise on what a woman should be.
Same refrain with Taiwanese Lin Yu-Ting, also deprived of a bronze medal at the 2023 World Championships by the IBA, for reasons similar to Imane Khelif. While she won the gold medal in boxing in the under 57 kg category at the 2024 Olympic Games, the former director of the IBA medical commission, Ioannis Filippatos, protested: ” The medical result of the blood tests – and this is what the laboratories say – shows that these two boxers are men. ” These remarks were strongly criticized by the IOC, which took the opportunity to point out that this organization has been excluded from the Olympic tournament since 2020 due to suspicions of corruption. But that is not enough to close this old debate which illustrates ad nauseam the fear of seeing women athletes perform well. Between pseudo science and arbitrary sentences, men reassure as best they can.
Sportswomen under the microscope
It was in the 1930s that some female athletes, particularly in athletics, began to be questioned: too much muscle, shoulders that were too square, or abnormally abundant body hair. Sports authorities feared the intrusion of men into women’s competitions. To allay these suspicions, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF, now World Athletics) introduced a femininity test in 1966, known as the Barr test. International athletics competitions then became the scene of body inspections that were as disconcerting as they were degrading, forcing female athletes to undergo an examination of their genitals. In his book Category “ladies”. The test of femininity in sports competitions (Éditions iXe, 2012), Anaïs Bohuon reports the painful memory of the French pentathlete Michelle Rignault: “ It was my first time having a gynecological visit. […] We were completely naked, crammed into the room. There were even girls who were on their periods, and back then there were no tampons or things like that. “This device, criticized for its reductionism and its low reliability, was finally abandoned in 1992.
With the new millennium, the measure of doubt becomes hormonal. Renowned for its ability to improve physical performance by increasing muscle mass and power, testosterone is in the spotlight. In 2009, the IAAF launched an in-depth investigation into a young emerging athlete: Caster Semenya. The federation doubted her belonging to the “women” category and discreetly sought to verify her “sexual identity”. But after her impressive performance and a title won at the World Championship in Berlin, the athlete became the target of a deluge of comments about her so-called “too masculine” silhouette. The federation then publicly announced that it was “investigating Caster Semenya’s sex”. Identified as intersex (with a naturally high production of testosterone and an XY genotype), this specificity cost her a suspension of several months. Re-authorized to compete in 2010, she was again prevented from taking the starting line of the 800m, her favorite distance, after 2018. That year, World Athletics decided to require hyperandrogenic athletes to lower their testosterone levels through hormone treatment, which Caster Semenya refused. Artificially reducing testosterone levels is known to cause serious health problems – depression, fatigue, osteoporosis, muscle atrophy, decreased libido, metabolic disorders, and even sterilization for women. This injustice will lead the athlete to take the fight to the highest international authorities2.
Fear of “superwomen”
« A man who performs very well is a superman, a woman who performs very well is necessarily a man. “, denounces the activist for the rights of athletes Payoshni Mitra, in the documentary Des sportives trop puissantes (2024)]3. She also recalls that it has never been proven that testosterone is the only molecule influencing performance. A fact that the Court of Arbitration for Sport also recognized at the end of the trial of Caster Semenya in 2018.
The documentary features Kenyans Evangeline Makena and Margaret Wambu, Ugandan Annet Negesa and Indian Dutee Chand: all athletes described as hyperandrogenic, caught up in controversies over their gender identity and their legitimacy to compete as women. All female athletes, but also, all racialized women… like Lin Yu-Ting and Imane Khelif. Enough to think back to another highlight of this bitter mixture of racism and sexism during the 2024 Olympic Games, when our beautiful country stood out internationally for being the only one to ban members of its delegation from wearing the veil4. Cock-a-doodle-doo.
By Gaëlle Desnos and Jonas Schynder
