MADISON, Wis.- After Italian Angela Carini quit her Olympic boxing match against Algerian Imane Khelif on August 1, discourse has sparked surrounding gender and sports that LGBTQ+ advocates in Madison say harms all athletes.
Carini walked away from her Algerian opponent 46 seconds into the match, because the punches were too painful.
She said she wasn’t making a political statement and was not refusing to fight Khelif, and that she is not qualified to decide whether Khelif should be allowed to compete.
The Russian-dominated International Boxing Association, claimed Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan failed their organization’s eligibility tests and disqualified the two from the 2023 World Championships.
Khelif, 25, was born a cis gender woman and identifies as such.
But across social media, authors like J.K. Rowling to politicians have made unsubstantiated claims calling Khelif transgender, or biologically a man.
“I will keep men out of women’s sports,” Former President Donald Trump said at a campaign rally in Georgia Saturday. “This young girl from Italy, a very, a champion boxer. She got hit so hard. She didn’t know what the hell hit her. It is a person that transitioned. He was a good, he was a good male boxer.”
While many claim to have these views in support of female athletes, “any of those really strict ideas that we have about gendered behavior harms everyone,” AJ Hardie said.
Hardie is the Program Director for Outreach LGBTQ+ Community Center Madison.
“You see a lot of people jumping to the defense of female athletes and saying this person’s not even trans,” Hardie said. “But really the question shouldn’t be whether or not they’re trans, it should be: ‘why are we reinforcing and imposing these really strict ideas about gender on people in the first place?'”
The International Olympic Committee has called the IBA testing “flawed”, and banned the organization in 2019 after years of concerns about its leadership, integrity, and financial transparency.
“We’ve seen multiple states introduce legislation trying to prohibit trans athletes from participating. And here in Wisconsin, this, you know, happened, except our governor vetoed the bill,” Hardie said. “And what we’re seeing is an outgrowth of that transphobia and the harm that transphobia has on people beyond the trans community.”
The discourse has now branched into questioning the womanhood and attacking the body types of American stars Katie Ledecky and Rugby player Ilona Maher — comments about her broad shoulders and other parts of her body she’s been vocal about on social media.
“It’s really harmful, Hardie said. “It’s really you know, we’re seeing a lot of really strict and rigid ideas about what people’s body should look like, and you’re talking about athletes that have spent their entire lives training and are at the top of their game.”
Hardie said this rhetoric is not new for women of color, as Olympic runners like South Africa’s Caster Semanya have been experiencing this year.
“The extra scrutiny that we’re seeing in the way that a brown woman…is being treated in comparison to white female boxers as well,” Hardie said, “you know, we’re seeing this masculinization, this questioning of her womanhood in a way that we don’t see with any of her competitors.”
“All of our modern ideas about gender really come from white supremacy as well, in the sense that when we think about what are the sort of, quote unquote feminine values, a lot of those are things that are ascribed to white women instead of women of color,” Hardie said. “And a lot of that, you know, comes from historical and cultural things that were present in Europe hundreds of years ago.”
Hardie says in this time it’s important we support young athletes to pursue the sports and activities they enjoy.
“One of the most positive things that we can encourage young athletes to do is to pursue the sports and engage with them in whatever way feels best for them and to do the sports that they love,” Hardie said.
“The message that this sends to people of any gender, whether they’re transgender or not, is that, you know, if you deviate from what people think is normal, you’re not going to be accepted in sports,” he said.
The IOC said if boxing doesn’t find a new governing body by 2025 besides the IBA, they will not include boxing in the 2028 Games.
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