In 2022, the Right's favorite "gotcha" question to liberals was "What is a Woman?" Sen. Marsha Blackburn famously asked then Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson to define the word, and conservative political commentator Matt Walsh turned the question into a feature length film released by The Daily Wire. The power behind the strategy was less a debate over any particular criteria for womanhood and more the assertion that if the answer is anything other than simple and obvious, the respondent is dangerously out-of-touch, or part of the woke ideological agenda. The political potency of the attack relied on the assumption that "What is a woman?" is an "incredibly simple question," as Piers Morgan put it.
That simplicity is being tested in real time following last week's Olympic women's boxing match in Paris, where Italy's Angela Carini tearfully forfeited her match against Algeria's Imane Khelif after just 46 seconds of competition, citing severe pain from Khelif's opening punches. Khelif has failed gender eligibility tests in the past.
Within a day, the clip went viral and stirred fierce online anger from conservative politicians, pundits and anti-trans advocates around the world. Both former President Trump and his vice presidential nominee JD Vance weighed in, using the moment to attack Democrats and Kamala Harris. The controversy was then accelerated when Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, who has also failed gender eligibility tests in the past, beat Uzbekistan's Sitora Turdibekova 5-0.
The outrage was based on the insistence that the fights were unfair because Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are actually men, not women. Yet contrary to the complaints of the commentariat, neither is transgender. There are currently no transgender athletes at the Paris Olympics competing outside the sex they were assigned at birth, and it happens to be illegal in Algeria to transition. We know that Khelif was assigned female at birth, was raised as a girl, and has always lived her life as a woman. She has a vagin*, breast tissue, and no penis or external testicl*s, and is most certainly not a trans woman. Yet many conservative critics still consider Khelif to be a man because of her disqualification from a 2023 International Boxing Association (IBA) event, where the president of that organization suggested that Khelif had XY chromosomes, a genetic pairing most associated with biological males.
How interesting! It turns out, the question of what is a woman is not so clear cut.
Do conservative politicians and anti-trans activists who accuse Khelif of being a man playing in women's sports believe that all people born with female presenting bodies who have XY chromosomes are really men? Do they actually think that the 10,000 XY babies born every year, whose external bodies look indistinguishable from their XX counterparts, assigned female by their doctors, must be raised as men?
Perhaps this is the extreme consequence of conservatives insisting that "What is a woman" is a simple question with a simple answer. Matt Walsh ends up defining a woman as an adult human female. He claims that nobody can transcend the binary arrangement, that everyone is either male or female, and thus, man or woman. When you reject any notion that gender could be different from biological sex, you must conclude that a person who is different from a biological female must be a man. Consequently, the only argument they can come up with to exclude people like Imane Khelif from partaking in women's sports is to claim that she is actually a man.
Read more
- Who is Lin Yu-ting? Olympic boxer who failed gender eligibility test
- Trump slams Kamala Harris amid Olympic boxing gender eligibility test anger
- Olympic boxer who failed gender eligibility test wins after Khelif furor
Not only is this point of view devoid of common sense, reality testing, and medical precedent, but it actually prevents the better argument for consistent criteria when it comes to fairness in women's sports. The debate should be about unfair advantage, not who is a woman.
One shouldn't have to take the position that Khelif is a man to be concerned about a potential unfair advantage of having a Y chromosome. Given that the presence of a Y chromosome may allow for post pubescent development of masculine secondary sex characteristics like increased muscle mass, upper body strength, and higher levels of testosterone, one would be hard pressed to argue this would not give anyone an advantage when it comes to boxing or other physical sports.
The strongest argument to protect women's sports has always been the suggestion of agreed upon, objective, and consistent criteria. The conservative definition of womanhood distracts us from working on clear limiting factors that we can use to ensure fair play. The rules should be more like those differentiating between middle and heavyweight contests, and less about nostalgia for when girls were girls and men were men. After all, don't facts not care about our feelings?
Mordechai Levovitz is the founder of JQY (Jewish Queer Youth), an organization that supports and empowers LGBTQ+ youth and teens from Orthodox, Hasidic and Sephardi-Mizrachi homes. If you need support, visit the JQY website or call/text the JQY warmline at (551) JQY-HOPE (551) 579-4673.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
