Why Can’t We Have A Nuanced Conversation About Sex And Sports?

Much of the world, it seems, is up in arms about Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif and her participation in women’s boxing after her first round opponent, Italy’s Angela Carini, dropped out after 46 seconds.

While Khelif has always identified as female, testing by the International Boxing Association, which is not recognized by the International Olympic Committee, suggested Khelif may have XY chromosomes.

After Khelif delivered a well-placed blow to Carini’s face, the Italian boxer stopped the match because of pain in her nose. She later explained she was not making a political statement.

That didn’t seem to matter to social media. In this moment of heightened transphobia and cultural divisivenss, many people rushed to assert that Kehlif is a man and/or transgender.

Others have tried to explain biological differences, and many have noted that Khelif’s conservative culture does not accept transgender people and certainly would not issue a trans woman a passport that lists her as female or send a transgender person as an Olympic athlete.

In the midst of another dust up in the culture wars, I find myself thinking about what it must feel like for Khelif to have the world discussing her genitals and chromosomes. She’s been boxing since she was a child and has lost to a lot of women through the years, including in the Tokyo Olympics where she made it to the quarterfinals but was eliminated by Ireland’s Kellie Harrington.

I can’t even imagine what that must have felt like to her to have understood herself as female her entire life, only to have a chromosome test suggest something different.

Khelif’s experience, like Caster Semenya’s before her, suggests that instead of attacking individual athletes, we need to have a reasoned, nuanced discussion about sex, gender, and sports to make informed decisions about participation. Targeting and humiliating individual athletes don’t achieve anything substantial except harming them and people like them.

So why is it so hard for us, especially in the US, to have such an important and needed conversation? I can think of a few reasons.

Many of us are scientifically illiterate.

Only 28% of Americans can be classified as scientifically literate, while 70% cannot understand the science section of the New York Times. That means the majority of Americans don’t understand what science is and how science works and don’t know basic scientific facts. For example, a quarter of Americans don’t understand that the earth revolves around the sun.

Most Americans are ill-equipped to grapple with the scientific literature on sex and gender. On social media they’ll toss out terms like chromosomes and hormones, but they’re don’t really know what these things are or how they actually work.

That makes having a conversation about diverse bodies really difficult. Yet, given sport’s construction around bodies, it’s an essential conversation. Sports are built on assumptions of two kinds of bodies—male and female. Yet the science for many bodies is not that simple. We can’t even begin to talk about what to do with those bodies in sports until we begin to understand what those differences mean.

The so-called culture wars color our perspectives long before we examine any evidence.

Many posters have called Khelif “transgender,” although she absolutely is not. This moment in the culture wars that has moved transgender people to the forefront shapes how some people see the boxer regardless of the facts about her. In fact, anti-trans activists like J.K. Rowling even went so far as to call Khelif a “male.” While social media influencer Logan Paul has acknowledge his role in spreading misinformation about Khelif, Rowling has not taken back her post.

The divisiveness of the culture wars means that people quickly take up sides depending on which side is “woke” or “anti-woke,” often without a lot of thought or investigation into the facts.

We can’t have nuanced conversations if we simply line up on “our” side, especially with issues that may have more than two sides to them. We also can’t have conversations if we aren’t willing to acknowledge that we might just be wrong.

Nuanced conversations about sex and gender threaten the gender order of society.

Our society is built on gender binary and hierarchy. Rather than focusing on our common humanity, we focus on our differences and define one another by those. Then we use those differences to justify hierarchies, like men over women, white people over People of Color, and so on. To question the fixed nature of sex/gender would disrupt the foundations of gender hierarchy and male dominance.

We may not often think about these issues in these terms because they are so deeply ingrained as to be invisible, assumed to be natural and inevitable. So, for example, many people have long argued that women’s gender makes them more emotional than men, in fact, too emotional to be something important like President of the United States (We’ll soon see about that). If we start to question the fixed nature of sex/gender, then we may find ourselves having to change the way society itself is structured to keep men in power.

Sports culture, which is rooted in and maintains our assumptions about sex and gender, is sacred.

In the US, sports culture is absolutely sacred, especially men’s sports culture. Sports becomes one of those places where we reassure ourselves about the fixed nature of sex/gender and maintain our justification for male dominance. Seldom do we reflect on the ways sports were created for typical male bodies to highlight typical male strengths. So while in many instances we recognize that most women could not compete with most men, particularly at elite levels, in sports like football or sprinting, we purposefully still segregate women and men athletes in sports where women could legitimately compete and win against men. Bowling is a good example.

I was watching men’s floor exercise in the Olympics the other day and wondered why floor exercise is gender-segregated. Most of the differences between the two sports are artificial—the women use music and get an artistry score, while the men are expected to demonstrate strength more. Could not men use music and artistry? Surely Simone Biles puts to rest the notion that women can’t do tumbling passes that require incredible strength.

I think at the core of much gender-segregated sport is that fear with which boys are often taunted—“You lost to a girl!” The idea of men losing to women in athletic competition goes completely against the grain of sports culture, and so we make sure that won’t happen by preventing women and men from competing, even in sports in which typical male bodies don’t confer a lot of advantage.

We do not value nor practice empathy, active listening, openness, and compassion when we are frightened, confused, or threatened.

For many people the very ideas of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex are new, and new things often confuse or frighten us, especially if they might upset the ways we’ve always understood and acted in the world.

There are important conversation we need to have about diverse bodies and participation in sports. Asking the question about whether or not a body that has been through male puberty might have unfair advantage in some sports, despite use of female hormones, is a needed part of these conversations.

Most of the time, however, it seems we forget that there are real human beings behind those conversations, not just abstract notions about bodies, gender, and sports. Imane Khelif has feelings, fear, aspirations, just like all the rest of us. Many folks on social media seem to have forgotten that or else don’t care as they’ve depersonalized, dehumanized, and demeaned her.

We can also listen to the pain of Angela Carini and empathize with her too. We can do both/and. We don’t have to choose whose pain we care about. We can and should care that anyone is in pain.

We’d do much to advance conversations about sex/gender in sports if we’d try listening with compassion and openness before we leap to judgment. Athletes aren’t simply fodder for our viewing pleasure and social media commentary.

What to do about diverse bodies in sports is a complicated question. I doubt there will be an answer that will make everybody happy, but posting on social media out of our ignorance, bias, and disregard certainly isn’t the way forward.