The unfolding barrage of racist and misogynist abuse directed at Imane Khelif, an Algerian boxer and a woman of color at the ongoing Paris Olympics 2024, is abhorrent, but not new. Black and other female athletes of color including Caster Semenya, Dutee Chand, Annet Negesa, and Santhi Soundarajan, have been derided for their differences, often characterized as hyperandrogenism with serious professional and personal consequences. Some Twitter/X users are right to point out that all of them have one thing in common— they are racialized women.
Much has been written about the misogynist discrimination of racialized women in international sports under the guise of fairness and Black feminists have long been arguing how Black women in particular are systematically denied womanhood. There is also a rich body of trans/feminist scholarship that exposes the brazen transphobia and wounded attachments of cis-women to a fixed and deeply reductive understanding of gender.
Instead of rehearsing these points, I want to offer an analysis of the racist and misogynist politics of binary genderism, its anxieties, and rootedness in the colonial bourgeoise notions of sexual dimorphism, as seen in the abuse directed towards Khelif. This perspective, drawing on María Lugones’ meditations on gender, insists on how the conception of gender in binary, fixed, dimorphic terms – and the ensuing violence inflicted on the bodies that do not or refuse to conform – is a doing of coloniality and one that is sustained by liberal and civilizational ‘feminisms’ in the West and many non-Western contexts too.
Colonial fictions
‘Race is no more mythical and fictional than gender, both powerful fictions’
Maria Lugones
The Argentine feminist and philosopher María Lugones’ definitive 2008 essay ‘The Coloniality of Gender’ argues that the gender binary – men and women, men vs women – is a construct of European colonialism. Fashioning gender in binary, hierarchical, and oppositional terms, often by violently rupturing other forms of social organization, as colonialism does, was essential to advancing racial capitalist domination. By narrowing the terrain of gender to a binary, the colonial-capital system enabled heterosexist control over labor, subjectivity, authority, and sex, which characterizes the coloniality of power.
While Lugones offers several examples of Indigenous societies where the binary gender and its narrow characteristics (women in need of protection, women as procreators, women as submissive and fragile) did not organize social formations, this does not mean that gender did not exist at all before European colonization. One need not look far away: In the Indian subcontinent, the practice of caste endogamy illustrates how heterosexist control over women’s sexuality was essential to sustaining caste hierarchies and caste-based social order prior to European colonization.
But what European colonization did was sediment gender in binary, oppositional, and graded terms, and govern gender and sexuality through laws and knowledge systems to determine who fell within and outside of a respectable, moral, and ‘civilized’ society. In the colonial world order, hierarchical notions of gender and race (which are always already enmeshed) were essential to both ideologically justifying Europe’s evolutionary superiority as the bringer of civilization, and materially amassing global-racial-colonial capital by rendering colonized peoples and lands as sub-human, flesh, things for profit.
Some colonized and racialized peoples, especially Black people, were thingified and dehumanized to the extent of being violently expelled from the realm of humanity. Reducing gender to heterosexist control made the colonized subjects, lifeworlds, land, and ecologies available for capture, extraction, control, and often decimation.
The gender binary, then, is constituted through contradictions— while racialized people ought to be brought into its realm for the colonial-capital to regulate labor and being, they can never fully enter the stage of bourgeois white fe/maleness. Their inclusion is always contingent, always on a tightrope, and set up for failure. The body, and the very ascription of gender in how others assign gender to racialized people, becomes a moment of violence— of ungendering, misgendering, or regendering the person as less-than-human, alien, strange, not-up-to-the-mark. Similar descriptions such as ‘smirk of a male’, ‘broad shoulders’, and ‘looks like a man’ have been used to discredit Khelif and her victory.
The gender binary is constitutive of colonial violence, and we are witnessing its cunning play out in international politics. It has been over 300 days of Israeli genocidal violence on the Palestinian people in Gaza, but the liberal white bourgeois ‘feminist’ outrage remains violently selective, rendering itself complicit in Israeli colonization of Palestine, and the Western imperialism that supports it. Self-proclaimed saviors of women, who go on and on about ‘women’s hurt and fragility’, are tactically silent on the Zionist weaponization of gender and sexuality that enforces colonial domination over Palestine.
Once again, who enters the stage of colonial gendering and who is deemed worthy of solidarity is contingent on whether they are willing to partake in and sustain the colonial-capital world order. Any analysis of the binary gender without pointing to its racialized and colonial underpinnings risks reducing gender to the ‘stuff of identity politics’, rather than grappling with gender as a structural relation that upholds the imperial global order with pernicious material consequences.
Woundedness, the trope of ‘biological woman’ and underlying transphobia
‘The assignations reveal that what is understood to be biological sex, is socially constructed. During the late nineteenth century until WWI, reproductive function was considered a woman’s essential characteristic…But there are a large number of factors that can enter in “establishing someone’s ‘official’ sex”: chromosomes, gonads, external morphology, internal morphology, hormonal patterns, phenotype, assigned sex, self-identified sex. At present, chromosomes and genitalia enter into the assignment, but in a manner that reveals biology is thoroughly interpreted and itself surgically constructed.’
Lugones, drawing on Julie Greenberg
‘She is a cheat!’
‘It’s the end of women’s sport!’
‘XY chromosome’
‘This is abuse’
These are some of the comments made by elite white and brown women regarding Khelif. Engulfed in whiteness, many of them, including some journalists, are sharing misleading content that Khelif is not a ‘biological woman.’ Social media is filled with teary-eyed videos of the white Italian athlete Angela Carini, who lost to Khelif in a women’s 66-kilogram boxing match on 1 August 2024 at the Paris Olympics. The circulation of Carini’s white tears, her shattered dreams, her fragility, and her soft femininity contrasts sharply with the dehumanization of Khelif as ‘beastly’.
A Hungarian athlete Luca Anna Hamori posted a graphic on her Instagram page, depicting a petite, straight-sized woman facing a beast in a boxing ring! How often have we seen this? How imperial its underpinnings! It is worth noting, as an aside, whose fragility is recognized and whose vulnerability is ignored. Which women are never seen as fragile, and who are framed as cunning cheat. What binds these reactions is also an attachment to woundedness: a sense that something ‘rightfully’ theirs, something they felt entitled to, is being unfairly taken away. White women’s wounds, tears, rage, and victimhood serve to legitimize the racist and misogynist violence directed at the racialized Other like Khelif.
Caste and class elite brown women too are vehemently reiterating the alleged damage to women’s sports and offering insular analyses of the Indian state’s third gender recognition as the solution to all problems in gender-based sports and a way to protect ‘real, biological’ women. Some are promoting Hindutva agendas, asserting that their religion is more open, inclusive, and liberated than the West as it recognizes trans people as a third gender.
This is notwithstanding that both the state and the upper-caste, class-elite Indian women – many of whom claim to represent Indian feminism – have contributed to anti-feminist and anti-gender violence by resorting to biological essentialisms, caste-class supremacy, Islamophobia, fascist politics, and transphobia. The transphobia is evident here: women are a fixed category, determined by their ‘natural and biological’ anatomy, perceived as universally alike across times, spaces, and contexts, and in sisterhood because of their softness, susceptibility to violence, and thus, their universal vulnerability. If one deviates from the norm, they are ejected from the category of ‘woman’, often by the self-appointed caste-class elites who dole out report cards of true womanhood.
The inevitable corollary is that transness is framed as a pathology, danger, an encroachment upon and erasure of ‘true’ womanhood. Among the cis elite, ‘biological’ is considered immutable (with any gender self-identification dismissed as woke fluff), and sex is viewed as binary, unchanging, and a site that will make women equal, of true liberal politics. But what gets lost is the historical materialization of sex/gender in binary terms and sex has always already been gendered in the service of the colonial-capital order. Or how colonialism and coloniality sustain themselves by categorizing people and making them knowable and legible only in certain terms while repudiating many others.
As such, Lugones and other Black, Indigenous, and Third World feminists – for example, Oyèrónke Oyewùmí’s work and subsequent African feminist thinking show how in Yorùbá culture, gender wasn’t conceived in hierarchical terms or the central axis of social organization or the presence of trans people (hijras and khwaja siras) in South Asian Islamicate courts – argue that historicizing the gender binary shows how dominant frames of knowledge, of truth, of naturalness are constructed in the service of power.
Yet, the critiques raking up ‘biological womanhood’ – for instance, ‘Khelif is a biological woman. We must protect her like our daughters’, ‘she was born a biological woman’ or ‘it’s worse because she is an actual biological woman’ – must be cautious not to reproduce biological essentialism and transphobia. The trope of ‘biological woman’ suggests that somehow everyone identified in this category must possess the same hormonal and physical profiles, but this does not reflect women’s lived experiences, especially those with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), and endometriosis among other conditions.
Further, by insisting that certain athletes are acceptable only if they are biologically women — meaning born with specific anatomies and assignations that are legible as per deeply limited parameters — such critiques effectively throw trans people under the bus. They advance a liberal politics of inclusion that upholds hegemonic femininities and a reductive notion of womanhood structured solely around fixed notions of gender.
To paraphrase and translate Indian sprinter Dutee Chand who challenged the hyperandrogenism policy at the Court of Arbitration for Sport and has been vocal in her support for trans athletes— if athletes like us from poor, developing nations can compete against those from the US and the UK without any reservations, why are questions about bodies, height, and hormone levels only ever directed at some women? This constitutes a form of violence!
Freeing feminisms from fragility
For Lugones, the emergence of feminism in the West failed to fully address how class, gender, race, and heterosexuality make and reinforce each other. Bourgeois white colonial femininity largely ignored how race and gender are mutually constitutive. As a result, gender became evacuated of its mutual constituents – class, race, and colonial structures of power – while dominant feminist politics became singularly focused on gender equality through rights-based empowerment and seat-at-the-table representation.
While such approaches can sometimes be strategic, they often remain reformist in nature. In non-Western contexts like India, upper-caste and elite women too have been preoccupied with their inclusion and capital accumulation without confronting the structures of caste supremacy and settler colonial violence that they remain complicit in. The liberal demands are often formulaic across these contexts: representation in politics, inclusion in militaries, state, and international institutions, breaking the glass ceiling, leaning in, girl boss, girl power, go-getter.
Feminisms that seek liberation for all must move beyond notions of woundedness and fragility. For such fragility, seclusion to the private, coyness, and able-bodied respectability attached to traditional femininity are classed attributions ascribed only to certain women. Moving beyond woundedness and fragility does not mean that we ignore the rampant violence that marks the lives of so many of us. But it does compel us to ask whether we can ever grapple with gendered violence without considering the underlying structures of coloniality, racism, casteism, and capitalism that fertilize the ground for such violence.
We must continue historicizing the emergence of the gender binary and develop a robust critique of, and coalitions against, bourgeois white colonial feminisms that are so rabidly racist, misogynist, transphobic, and imperial. We must refuse and reject their ascriptions and attachments to the fixed gender binary as harmful fiction.
