The Paris Olympics have been glorious—among the best in decades. The French have made the games a joy starting with the extraordinary day-long opening ceremonies featuring international gay icons Lady Gaga performing “Mon Truc en Plumes” at the edge of the Seine mid-day to a luminous return of Céline Dion singing Edith Piaf’s classic “L’Hymne A l’Amour” from the Eiffel Tower after dark. Dion’s career has been curtailed by her devastating diagnosis of Stiff Person Syndrome.
The City of Lights has provided a gorgeous backdrop for the Olympics throughout with NBC/Peacock’s coverage ranging from serious sportscasting to fun segments from Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart as well as Colin Jost of “Saturday Night Live.”
The U.S. has dominated the medals race, with swimmer Katie Ledecky, now the most medaled woman in Olympic history, and gymnast Simone Biles flying through the air on vault with a higher score than ever before winning gold for the 10th time. America’s male gymnastics team won gold for the first time in 16 years thanks to Stephen Nedoroscik, the “Pommel Horse Guy,” with his Clark Kent-style take-off-the-glasses-and-save-the-day routine that wowed everyone and became an internet meme.
Many LGBTQ+ Athletes
A record 193 LGBTQ+ athletes competed in the Paris Olympics, with British diver Tom Daley, Canadian soccer player Quinn and Team USA track athletes Sha’Carri Richardson and Nikki Hiltz among this year’s competitors.
Track and field champion Richardson, who has stated she has a girlfriend and identifies as bisexual, won silver in the 100m. And Brittney Griner, multiple Olympic gold winner, spoke with NBC about her long road to Paris after her incarceration in Russia as Team USA poised to win its eighth gold.
But behind that gold and silver Olympic glory was an ugly controversy surrounding Algerian women boxer Imane Khelif, one of whose early competitors, Italy’s Angela Carini, claimed was not female. Carini had stopped the fight the two were in after only 46 seconds, saying her nose, which was not even bleeding, was too injured to continue. Carini then gave a tearful press conference in which she claimed Khelif was not a woman. (Carini has since apologized to Khelif.)
Controversy
In 2024, it takes very little to trans a female athlete. Notably, American track-and-field star Nikki Hiltz was assigned female at birth, but came out as transgender and nonbinary on International Transgender Day of Visibility, March 31, 2021. The 5’4 runner has been competing in the women’s category with no complaints. Hiltz owns the American record in the mile and is thought to be the first openly transgender and nonbinary American track and field Olympian.
While Hiltz is making positive inroads for trans and nonbinary competitors, for lesbian and bisexual women and even women athletes who do not identify as either, it doesn’t take much to trans a female athlete—it’s happened for decades as PGN reported in 2021. The women under attack are nearly always women of color like Khelif who do not conform to white European standards of femininity or even heteronormativity.
When the controversy over Khelif arose, the world’s two most notorious transphobes leaned in: author J.K. Rowling, who has dedicated her prodigious talents and global reach to what she asserts is protecting women from “men” overtaking women’s sports. Elon Musk, whose trans daughter divorced him and who has for years attacked trans people and made transphobic statements and posted hateful memes on social media, also addressed the controversy. And not to be outdone, Donald Trump weighed in, bolstering the GOP’s anti-LGBTQ brand.
Rowling blasted an #IStandwithAngelaCarini hashtag on Twitter/X to her 14.2 million followers, doing her best to destroy the young woman from rural Algeria who was born female, raised female, submitted all the appropriate paperwork to be considered as a female participant in the Olympics and had played fairly as a female for years.
Round One, Won
Rowling, Musk and their cohort won the internet, but lost the fight. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) stood firmly behind Khelif who has since won several more fights. Khelif won her semifinal match against Janjaem Suwannapheng of Thailand on Tuesday—a competitor who looks far more masculine-presenting than she–and will now move on to fight for a gold medal in her weight’s division at the Paris Games on Aug. 2.
On Aug. 6, Khelif declared through an interpreter, “I am very happy.”
With the red, green and white Algerian flag draped on her shoulders, Khelif said, “I’ve worked eight years for these Olympics and I’m very proud of this moment.”
The Algerian president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, congratulated Khelif on social media.
Transing Lesbian Athletes
The transing of lesbian athletes has been going on forever. Some sports—basketball, soccer, volleyball, golf and tennis—are known for their preponderance of lesbian athletes. Brittney Griner is going through being called trans yet again at the Paris games. She’s a lesbian, not trans, not intersex and yet she’s being attacked brutally on social media as she performs in Paris as a man in a woman’s sport taking a space for women.
Also being attacked is Ledecky, who is LGBTQ and is just apparently too good an athlete to be considered female. The comments about her online asserted that she is not really female.
Women athletes have different bodies from other women. This is a fact. It doesn’t change their biology. And the rules for actual trans and nonbinary athletes, of whom there are, as Hiltz can attest, quite few, are rigid and demanding. Khelif passed all of them.
At the height of the controversy, Khelif was sobbing in the arms of her coach, crying to her father, who was forced to present his daughter’s birth certificate and passport to international media.
Standards of Femininity
The brutal irony is that Algeria is notoriously anti-LGBTQ, which meant all the internet commentary could have put Khelif’s life at risk.
Standards of female beauty and femininity are different in different cultures and in different races and ethnicities. Some female athletes meet general standards of beauty like Richardson and the women’s gymnastics team, all of whom are classically pretty and petite. No one suggests these women gymnasts aren’t truly female despite their near-superhuman abilities. Yet perhaps no female body is more altered by their sports training than those gymnasts, beginning at a very young age.
But other taller, less feminine-presenting women athletes—the best in their respective sports—become “suspect” under the guise of keeping competition fair for those assigned female at birth, something no trans athlete is trying to change. Thus women athletes like Khelif, Ledecky and Griner, who excel and are often the best in their sport, yet do not meet those same standards of femininity, are tainted by this manufactured controversy.This is a slippery slope for women athletes and it is disappointing to see political liberals like Martina Navratilova who have themselves been targeted on the wrong side of this battle. The more women’s bodies and achievements are questioned, the more unobjective “testing” and commentary and flat out bigotry will adhere and expand and redefine sports. The IOC won this round, but the online war continues and there may be no single worse threat over women’s sports today than the power of rumor to wreak havoc on our best performers. As Khelif said in an interview, “I send a message to all the people of the world to uphold the Olympic principles and the Olympic charter, to refrain from bullying all athletes, because this has effects, massive effects,” Khelif said in Arabic. “It can destroy people, it can kill people’s thoughts, spirit and mind. It can divide people. And because of that, I ask them to refrain from bullying.”
