Baranyai: No place for bullying in search for excellence

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As a woman, I have celebrated the Paris Games’ commitment to gender parity with both pride and unease.

It’s gratifying to see female athletes equally represented in the Games. Even better is how the schedule alternated women’s and men’s events, rather than consigning the majority of female competition to the morning hours. Women are prime-time athletes, and not just in beach volleyball.

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Yet, if the witch hunt in boxing made one thing clear, it’s that the quest for equality still has some distance to go.

A lot has been said, much of it ill-informed, about the controversy that descended on Algerian welterweight Imane Khelif, after she won her first Olympic match in 46 seconds. That’s about how long anti-trans activists waited to baselessly call her a man.

Khelif is not trans. That didn’t stop Elon Musk from taking a shot, amplifying a post from swimmer and right-wing podcaster Riley Gaines, who tweeted: “Men don’t belong in women’s sports.” Gaines went on to audition her grievances on Fox News, where a stream of talking heads, untethered from fact-checking, have continued the attack. J.K. Rowling – a fiction writer with a keen imagination – characterized Khelif as a smirking male, “enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head.”

This character assassination is entirely unsubstantiated. No credible evidence has been offered to support any of these claims. The sole source of the allegations is the thoroughly discredited International Boxing Association (IBA), an institution so manifestly corrupt, it has been permanently banned from the Olympics.

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Last year, mid-way through the world championships, the IBA alleged Algeria’s Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting failed undisclosed eligibility tests, thereby reversing Khelif’s victory over a Russian competitor. Skepticism about the timing and motive, from an organization with ties to the Kremlin, has been compounded by a total lack of transparency about what kind of testing the IBA conducted.

The IOC has resolutely stood by both competitors’ eligibility, affirming they were born female, travel under female passports, and have competed as women their entire careers. The organization abandoned blanket sex testing in 1999, after a checkered history of invasive and unreliable tests, largely rooted in prejudice that some sports were simply unfeminine. During the years, Olympic athletes have been forced to undergo gynecological exams, stripped before a panel of physicians, and subjected to chromosome testing to prove they were “real” women.

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Today, the IOC relies on the international athletic federations that govern each sport to determine competitors’ eligibility. The result is a patchwork of inclusion that allows Olympic organizers to distance themselves from who gets left behind.

The fact is, Olympic categories of male and female competition adhere to a strict binary that sex and gender simply do not.

Obviously, there are sound reasons to segregate elite male and female competition. Experiencing puberty as a male has a direct impact on muscle mass and aerobic capacity, with advantages in strength, speed and endurance. Without that advantage, in nearly every sport, women don’t stand a chance.

In carving out a fair playing field for cisgender women, however, we often fail to make space for athletes who don’t fit neatly into the binary. Elite competitors with Differences in Sex Development (DSD), such as distance runner Caster Semenya, can have naturally high testosterone levels or XY chromosomes. Trans and non-binary competitors also deserve a place to excel, without being pilloried for their identity.

In a place for athletic excellence, free from prejudice, there’s no place for bullying.

write.robin@baranyai.ca

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