Battle of the Sexes for Olympia - Sports and gender: Which body should it be?
If there is a human body that attracts Olympic medals like the moon attracts tides, it looks like this: 193 centimeters tall, arm span over two meters, hands like shovels, feet like flippers, an overly long torso, remarkably short legs - voila: Michael Phelps. With 28 medals, 23 of them gold, he is the most successful Olympian of all time and a prime example of genetic advantages. A swimming robot construction office couldn't have designed a better design. And everyone thinks that's great. Because Phelps' undeniable advantages over the competition are not linked to his (presumably two) sex-determining chromosomes. One suspects the secret formula for his eternal victory in the other 44 genetic molecules of his body cells. So no one gets upset. Everyone celebrates Phelps.
It looks very different when it comes to the usual boundaries of gender. The number of self-proclaimed hobby geneticists has long been unmanageable: demagogues have discovered the topic for themselves. Perhaps because it is no longer really effective today, despite all the desire for provocative hate, to openly propagate sports racism, even right-wing agitators have now discovered their burning concern for athletic fairness - and thus found an alternative field to indulge their obsessions. They claim to want to defend the supposedly only correct order of gender relations on the track and football field, in the swimming pool and in the ring.
In January 2021, when Donald Trump was barely recovering from his election defeat, he devoted literally half of his speech time to his first major appearance before his supporters to the topic of "Transgender in Sports". The moral panic about men deliberately transforming into women to then climb onto the podium in women's competitions had spread so much in the USA that angry fathers at girls' soccer games were seriously demanding gender inspections.
Net-Enraged in Gender-Trouble
Meanwhile, the outrage industry complex has grown enormously according to Trump's recipe. Especially on the net, of course. It's no longer necessary for someone to have physically transitioned to the other gender to get into full swing. The insidious vilification of the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was based almost solely on hearsay about allegedly high testosterone levels in a competition of the boxing association IBA, which is under the control of Putin's confidant Umar Kremlev. This association has a certain interest in revenge on the IOC, as it has already been excluded from Olympia, including the 2028 Games. Nevertheless, speculation about Khelif ran wild, and the participants seemed indifferent to whether they classified Khelif in their stereotype collection under "transsexual", "intersexual", or "formerly a man or always a woman, but with enormous testosterone levels". They were equally indifferent to whether they invented entire chromosome sets, speculated about the dating of birth certificates, or redefined a specific womb protector for women as a testicle protector.
Transsexuality – also an identity disposition that deviates from the physical sex – and intersex, where physical characteristics cannot be clearly classified as either male or female, are fundamentally different phenomena. A physical sex that deviates from the most common physical expression of the chromosomal sex is again to be differentiated. Labels change, but one thing has remained constant for 150 years: The scientific and medical elite in Western societies have been granted a dominant interpretation of these phenomena. Especially during the great epoch of the scientific worldview, they created a practical range of allegedly "natural" truths – racial science, the "naturalness" of the struggle of all against all in the market economy, or the predetermined path of society towards communism, and of course the allegedly evolutionarily strictly regulated gender relationships that must be protected at all costs. We find it difficult to shake off this legacy of false certainties. What was once "god-given" for conservatives is now "obviously" and "by nature" so. But that's old wine in new bottles.
As early as 1843, a doctor was consulted in America to decide whether everything was in order. It was an election year, at least in the state of Connecticut, and in the small town of Salisbury, Levi Suydam's vote could decide the election. The losing party declared Suydam a woman. Women, it was considered a natural law, could not vote. The doctor called in found a penis. The vote was counted. Then witnesses reported that Suydam menstruated. The doctor changed his opinion. And now, as reported by the New York researcher Elizabeth Reis, it was said: "Suydam's earlier efforts to appear male could be interpreted as a deception, leading to the worst kind of election fraud. Such deceptions to be discovered and exposed was exactly what the doctors intended with their science." Completely unquestioned – that was the spirit of the time – remained the crucial question of why it seemed "completely natural" that women, and therefore all those whom society declared as such, should not have the right to vote.
Sexism and racism: How researchers fanned the flames
The arrogance of telling others who and what they are and should be, celebrated itself unrestrainedly in the last few days on the net: Hundreds of comments about how one can clearly see with one's own eyes that Khelif "is a man". This is also a skill that scientific opinion leaders have attributed to themselves, especially since the 19th century – and today apparently anyone who can hold a smartphone. The US researcher Joseph LeConte declared at the time: "The trend of evolution is to make men more masculine and women more feminine." The German sex researcher Richard Krafft-Ebing, in line with the increasing racial madness, argued: "The higher the anthropological development of an ethnic group, the stronger the contrasts between the secondary sexual characteristics of men and women." Sexism and racism intertwined and became a basic ingredient of nationalist and reactionary ideologies and their strict assignment of identities, roles, duties, and privileges to different groups. The latter, of course, always to themselves.
At the European Championship, AfD agitators Maximilian Krah and Björn Höcke failed to stir up sentiment against the German football national team, whose diversity they found enraging. Society did not take the bait, and the alleged scandal-color jersey became a bestseller. Immunity to the gender uproar surrounding the Olympics would also be advisable now.
For if those now getting upset were genuinely concerned with an utopian ideal of complete equality of opportunity in sports, they would have to demand separate competition classes for Phelps, for North African long-distance runners, or for 6'7" basketball champions. But that's not what they're after. Just as it's never about anything but Trump with Trump. For the sports world will ultimately be capable of setting and enforcing rules for the participation of non-binary athletes in competitions - it has been doing so since 2015 and adjusting them as needed. In reality, it's all about exploiting the reach of the Paris Games to gain maximum attention, at the expense of Imane Khelif. There's nothing constructive about it, it's just about pushing a backward social agenda from the Kaiser's era.
In the discourse surrounding gender and sports, some individuals utilize controversial claims about an athlete's biological sex as a means to undermine their success, as shown by the outcry over Algerian boxer Imane Khelif's alleged testosterone levels. Despite lacking concrete evidence, such individuals categorize individuals like Khelif under various stereotypes, such as 'transsexual' or 'formerly a man', demonstrating a lack of understanding and acceptance towards gender identities that deviate from traditional definitions.
Historically, the medical and scientific elite have played a significant role in shaping societal perceptions of gender and sexuality, creating a false sense of certainty and justifying patriarchal views, such as the belief that only men should have the right to vote. This established narrative, often based on flawed or outdated scientific theories, has had a lasting impact on societal attitudes towards gender and sex.
