Eimear Ryan: I'm wary of policing women who don’t fit the feminine ideal

I am no longer on Twitter/X very much, but I know that a certain author who wrote a generation-defining fantasy series, and now devotes much of her time and energy to giving out about trans people, posted multiple times criticising Khelif and repeatedly referring to her using male pronouns. One such post has 449,000 likes at the time of writing. 

Misinformation spreads fast, and the Boston Globe published the headline ‘Transgender boxer advances’ on August 2, later retracting its mistake. To quell the controversy, an IOC spokesperson had to come out and assert that Khelif "was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport". I can’t speak for trans or intersex people, but I do know that it’s terrible to be made to feel that you don’t belong in a sporting environment because of the way you were born – even if it’s just being a girl on the hurling field in the 1990s, your ponytail conspicuously poking out the back of your helmet, an opposition selector (a grown man!) telling you that you’re taking a boy’s place.

I’m guilty of sometimes using emotional language myself, but it has been jarring to see so many commentators confidently assert that anyone who thought Khelif was eligible to compete was bonkers. She is now an Olympic gold medallist, but it’s not as if she’s some kind of unstoppable machine: she has lost several fights in her career, including to our own Kellie Harrington in the quarter-finals of the Tokyo Olympics.

I’m not usually a cynic, but it’s hard not to notice that the outcry over women such as Khelif tends to only arrive when they begin to win. Notable, too, is the fact that most of the women who have been accused of being too masculine and making the competition unfair are women of colour: Imane Khelif, Caster Semenya, Brittney Griner, Serena Williams.

I’m not a historian, but I know that excluding minoritised groups from sport has never ended well or been judged to have been on the right side of history. It didn’t work when black athletes were excluded, with professional sports in the US segregated for the first half of the 20th century. It didn’t work when disabled athletes were excluded, with the Paralympics only having its first Games as recently as 1960. And it didn’t work when female athletes were excluded.

I consider myself a feminist, but I’m nothing next to Alice Milliat, a young French sportswoman, who was angered by the fact that at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, women were only eligible to compete in archery, swimming and diving. In response, Milliat decided to stage her own event: the Women’s Olympics. The first Games were held in Monaco in March 1921, with 100 participants from countries throughout Europe taking part in a full spectrum of track and field events. 

Walter George, a then-famous British middle-distance runner, remarked: "Whilst I consider the athletic tests, in a mild form, might be beneficial to young womanhood, I fear the carrying of physical and nervous strain to excess. We have to keep in mind the motherhood of the future, and, as a nation, to make up our minds as to whether this forcing process in women's sport, which is associated with a new mentality, is beneficial or detrimental." 

The Women’s Olympics continued until 1934; after World War II, female athletes were more or less integrated into the mainstream Olympic Games, although the proportion of female competitors didn’t rise above 15% until the 1970s.

I’m not a biologist, but I’ve been on dozens of teams made up of women and girls, and I can say – as can anyone who has been around female teams – that there is huge variation in the body type of an athletic woman. A woman who may not fit society’s stereotypical image of ‘athletic-looking’ can nonetheless be extremely fit, quick and strong. Unfortunately, the end goal of this sort of policing seems to be the imposition of a sort of rigid femininity, whereby any woman who doesn’t fit the feminine ideal will be looked on with suspicion. This includes, but is not limited to: women who are tall; women who are muscular; women with strong jawlines (guilty); women with deep voices (guilty arís!). This sort of commentary hurts us all.

I am retired from playing now, but one of the things I loved about being a sportsperson was how it allowed all of us – both men and women – to escape the constraints of the gender boxes we’d been placed in since birth. As a woman, I was allowed to try to be unapologetically aggressive, powerful and strong, parts of myself I was not encouraged to express anywhere else. Likewise, I saw how the arena of sport provided men a space to express emotion, cry, and hug each other, without fear of censure.

I’m not an optimist by nature, but I hope the Khelif kerfuffle is just a sideshow on the road to a more inclusive sporting society. It’s unfortunate for her that she was in the eye of the storm on this occasion: how remarkable that she held her nerve and claimed gold.