As seen during the 2024 Olympics with Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, female athletes of color face disproportionate scrutiny on sex testing.
Overcome with emotion, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif left the ring in tears after a resounding victory this weekend. Khelif has faced days of hateful comments and false accusations about her gender following her first fight against an Italian opponent who quit seconds into their bout.
“Sport is very Eurocentric — the approach is not necessarily global,” Mitra said. “We need to accept women in all their diversity. And we are not seeing that at this point.”Mitra and other advocates and anthropologists note that international sporting federations don’t tend to promote an understanding of diversity in sex and gender identity and that gender tests have often targeted female athletes of color who don’t conform to typically Western, white ideals of femininity.
“Nobody was disqualifying Michael Phelps for having particular biological features that allowed him to excel in swimming," said medical anthropologist Danyal Kade Doyle Griffiths, an adjunct professor with the City University of New York. Regardless of differences in sex or hormones, women of color — and Black women in particular — have often been subjected to stereotypes that portray them as more masculine. Dehumanization and objectification stretches back to chattel slavery, when enslaved Black women were valued for auction based on their physical appearances and skills that were seen as more masculine or more feminine.
The definition of womanhood “is often reliant upon Westernized notions of white femininity or standards of white beauty," said Cheryl Cooky, professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Purdue University. If a female athlete doesn't fit into those white, Westernized standards,"they’re subject to these questions and these accusations.”
“The whole process is flawed,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Sunday. “From the conception of the test, to how the test was shared with us, to how the tests have become public, is so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with it.”
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