For Female Athletes of Color, Scrutiny Around Gender Rules and Identity Is Part of a Long Trend

Overcome with emotion, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif left the ring in tears after a resounding victory this weekend. Khelif has faced days of hateful comments and false accusations about her gender following her first fight against an Italian opponent who quit seconds into their bout.

“It’s because she’s African, because she’s Algerian,” 38-year-old Algerian fan Adel Mohammed said Saturday, when Khelif clinched an Olympic medal. “These comments are coming from white people … it’s a kind of racism.”

Female athletes of color have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination when it comes to sex testing and false accusations that they are male or transgender, historians and anthropologists say. Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting, who won her bout Sunday after similar abuse and questions about her gender, are the latest examples of women of color who have found themselves caught in the contentious debate around gender regulations and perceptions in sports.

More women from the Global South or developing countries are affected by sex testing in sports, said Payoshni Mitra, executive director of Humans of Sport, an advocacy organization that focuses on human rights issues for athletes. She has worked with dozens of female athletes across Asia and Africa to fight sex testing practices.

“Sport is very Eurocentric — the approach is not necessarily global,” Mitra said. “We need to accept women in all their diversity. And we are not seeing that at this point.”

Mitra and other advocates and anthropologists note that international sporting federations don’t tend to promote an understanding of diversity in sex and gender identity and that gender tests have often targeted female athletes of color who don’t conform to typically Western, white ideals of femininity.

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Regardless of differences in sex or hormones, women of color — and Black women in particular — have often been subjected to stereotypes that portray them as more masculine. Dehumanization and objectification stretches back to chattel slavery, when enslaved Black women were valued for auction based on their physical appearances and skills that were seen as more masculine or more feminine.

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“These examples strike me as particular cases where racism and transphobia and intersex phobia are kind of inseparable,” Griffiths said. “It ties back to a much longer history of the way that race is gendered, in which Black women are taken to be more masculine compared to white women.”

The definition of womanhood “is often reliant upon Westernized notions of white femininity or standards of white beauty,” said Cheryl Cooky, professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Purdue University. If a female athlete doesn’t fit into those white, Westernized standards, “they’re subject to these questions and these accusations.”

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