Olympia in gender battle: Which body should it be?

If there is a human body that attracts Olympic medals like the moon attracts the tides, then this is what it looks like: 193 centimeters tall, arm span of more than two meters, hands like shovels, feet like fins, an extremely long torso, astonishingly short legs – voilà: 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 design office couldn’t have come up with a better design. And everyone thinks that’s great. Because Phelps’ undeniable advantages over the competition are not associated with his (presumably two) sex-determining chromosomes. The secret formula for his eternal victory is thought to be in the remaining 44 genetic molecules in his body cells. So nobody gets upset. Everyone celebrates Phelps.

The situation is completely different when it comes to the usual boundaries between the sexes. The number of self-proclaimed amateur geneticists has long been unmanageable: demagogues have discovered the topic for themselves. Perhaps because, despite all the desire for provocative hatred, it is no longer really appropriate to propagate open racism in sports, right-wing agitators have now discovered their burning concern for athletic fairness – and have thus found an alternative field to indulge their obsessions. They now ostensibly want to defend what they believe to be the only correct order of gender relations on the cinder track and football field, in the swimming pool and in the ring.

In January 2021, when Donald Trump had barely recovered from his election defeat, he devoted literally half of his speech to the topic of “transgender in sports” in his first major appearance before his supporters. The moral panic about men deliberately transforming themselves into women in order to climb the podium in women’s competitions had already spread so far in the USA that angry fathers were seriously demanding gender inspections at girls’ soccer games.

Olympics for online outragers in gender trouble

In the meantime, the outrage-industrial complex has grown enormously according to Trump’s recipe. Especially online, of course. In order to get fully worked up, it is no longer necessary for a person to have physically transitioned to the other sex. The insidious denigration of the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was in fact based solely on hearsay about allegedly too high testosterone levels at a competition organized by the IBA boxing association, which is under the control of Putin’s confidant Umar Kremlev. The latter has a certain interest in taking revenge on the IOC, as it has already been excluded from the Olympics, including the 2028 Games.

Nonetheless, speculation about Khelif flourished, and those involved seemed to be indifferent to whether they should classify Khelif in their collection of stereotypes as “transsexual,” “intersexual,” or “formerly a man or always a woman but with enormous testosterone levels.” Nor did they care whether they should invent entire sets of chromosomes, speculate about the dating of birth certificates, or redefine a specific lap protector for women as a testicular protector.

Transsexuality – an identity disposition that differs from physical sex – and intersexuality, where physical characteristics cannot be clearly classified as male or female, are fundamentally different phenomena. A physical sex that differs from the most common physical expression of chromosomal sex must be differentiated from this.

The terms change, but one thing has been true for two centuries: the scientific and medical elite in Western societies have been granted superior authority to interpret. Particularly in the great era of the scientific worldview, they created a practical range of supposedly “natural” truths – racial science, the “naturalness” of the fight of all against all in the market economy or, alternatively, society’s predetermined path to communism and, of course, the supposedly strictly regulated gender relations that must be protected at all costs.

We will find it difficult to shake off this legacy of false certainties. What was once “God-given” to conservatives is now “obvious” and “natural” to them. But this is old wine in new bottles.

As early as 1843, people in America were seeking medical advice to decide whether everything was in order. It was also an election year, at least in the state of Connecticut, and there it was a critical moment, because Levi Suydam’s vote could decide the vote in the small town of Salisbury. The losing party then declared Suydam a woman. Women, it was considered a natural law, were not allowed to vote. The doctor called in to examine the matter found a penis. The vote was valid.

Then witnesses reported that Suydam was menstruating. The doctor changed his opinion. And now, according to New York researcher Elizabeth Reis, “Suydam’s earlier efforts to be masculine could be interpreted as deception, which leads to the worst kind of electoral fraud. Exposing and unmasking such deceptions was exactly what the doctors wanted to do with their science.” Completely unquestioned – such was the spirit of the times – the crucial question remained: why it seemed “perfectly natural” that women, and consequently all those whom society declared to be women, should not have the right to vote.

Sexism and racism: How researchers stirred up trouble

The intrusiveness of explaining to others who and what they are and what they should be has been celebrated uninhibitedly on the Internet in recent days: hundreds of comments saying that one can see with one’s own, superbly gifted eyes that Khelif “is a man”. This is also an ability that scientific opinion leaders have ascribed to themselves, especially since the 19th century – and today, apparently, everyone who can hold a smartphone.

The US researcher Joseph LeConte decreed at the time: “The tendency of evolution is to make men more and more masculine and women more and more feminine.” The German sexologist Richard Krafft-Ebing, in keeping with the growing racial madness, argued: “The greater the anthropological development of the ethnic group, the stronger the contrasts between the secondary sexual characteristics of men and women.”

Sexism and racism became intertwined at that time and became a basic ingredient of ethnic and reactionary ideologies and their strict allocation of identities, roles, duties and privileges to different groups. The latter, of course, always to themselves.

At the European Championships, AfD agitators Maximilian Krah and Björn Höcke failed to stir up hatred against the German national football team, whose diversity infuriated them. Society did not catch on, and the allegedly scandalous-colored jersey became a best-seller. Immunity to the gender fuss surrounding the Olympics would be advisable now too.

If those who are now getting worked up were really concerned with a utopian ideal of complete equality of opportunity in sport, they would have no choice but to demand a separate competition class for Phelps, one for North African long-distance runners or for 2.10-meter-tall basketball champions. But that is not what they are concerned about.

Just as Trump is never concerned with anything other than Trump. In the end, sport will be able to set and enforce rules for the participation of non-binary athletes in competitions – it has had rules since 2015 and is adapting them. In fact, however, as with the over-the-top reaction to an alleged parody of the Last Supper at the Olympic opening ceremony (we explained the misunderstanding here), the only thing that matters at the expense of Imane Khelif is to gain maximum attention by riding the reach of the Paris Games. There is nothing constructive about this; the only thing that is being done is to advance the sport’s own backward sociopolitical agenda from the Kaiser’s time.