A Moral Panic at the Olympic Games

Of course, we couldn’t just sit back and enjoy the Olympic Games without a moral panic.

I don’t like sports very much, but I am always fascinated to watch the Olympic Games. I like to watch swimming matches, because I love to swim but I’m not good at it; it’s bizarre and fascinating to watch my favorite form of  gentle relaxation sped up and turned into a contest. I like to watch the running matches, because I can barely run at all and it’s mesmerizing to watch people who can run expertly; and cycling matches, because I can’t even stay upright on a bicycle, but these people can shoot forward like a rocket on a bicycle. I love gymnastics because I’ve always wished I could fly and gymnasts come close. I love archery because I always wanted to be a Tolkien elf. The Olympics are delightful.

I like admiring the diverse bodies of the different Olympian athletes: how the bikers and high jumpers are rail-thin, but the swimmers have impossibly thick strong shoulders. Some of the gymnasts are able to do what they do by being tiny, and some do it by being balls of muscle. The weight lifters are portly because the extra fat protects their guts. Every body is different so it can do its special task. I like thinking about how God made the body to do so many different things, and how different people specialize in different amazing talents because of their unique God-given bodies. Differences are wonderful.

But of course, we can’t just admire how people’s bodies work differently, because some people have to look for controversy and danger wherever they go. This year, the moral panic was that there were transgender women secretly competing in women’s sports. And a huge number of people started picking at the appearance of the female athlete’s bodies to find the trans person. `There was a rumor circulating on social media that the record-setting swimmer, Katie Ledecky, was actually a trans woman because she’s so strong. There was another about a female rugby player. And then the ire circulated against two female boxers, particularly a boxer from Algeria named Imane Khelif.

Khelif was falsely accused of being a transgender woman, and the accusation quickly went viral.

This happened after she beat an Italian boxer in only 46 seconds. It’s bizarre to me that the Olympics are all about who’s best at a sport, yet being too good at a sport in the Olympics can make you the victim of an internet smear campaign if you’re a woman– and it surely helps the rumor get started if you’re a woman of color who bested a white European woman as well.  Next thing you knew, people decided that this poor woman was trans, or even a man in disguise trying to trick the International Olympic Committee out of a medal. She was called trans in some newspapers, right in the headline. J. K. Rowling shared the falsehood to her millions of social media followers. The odious J. D. Vance tweeted about it, and former president Trump even ranted about it at a speech in Georgia. And it wasn’t true.

It’s a fact that Khelif is not trans, nor is she a man. She was born female, assigned female at birth, and has always identified as a woman. There are photos of her as a little girl, looking like a girl. It’s not even legal to be a transgender person in her country. She was accepted into the competition for a women’s sport by the International Olympics Committee, who is pretty strident about this sort of thing and definitely double checked. But she and one other female Olympic boxer were disqualified from competing in the International Boxing Association last year, for allegedly having a Y chromosome, despite being in many boxing matches before and after that disqualification and not displaying a marked advantage– they lost to other women many times.

It’s important to remember that, though most women have two X chromosomes and most men have an X and a Y,  XY women do exist.  They are born with labia and vaginas. They look and sound like women. If you met one on the street you wouldn’t question whether they were women. They might go all the way to the typical age for puberty without realizing they’re not typical females, and some might go their whole lives. Sometimes they can even get pregnant, if they have a donor egg, depending on whether they have a uterus (some don’t). If given hormone therapy, and if they have a uterus, they will menstruate. They don’t turn into men if they’re not given hormone therapy; they just don’t experience puberty and might have bone density issues. Often they have undeveloped ovaries, and sometimes they have undeveloped testes where you’d expect to find ovaries, and sometimes they have gonads which are a mixture of both kinds of tissue. They are, technically, intersex persons, but if you believe there can only ever be two genders you can’t really be justified in calling them men. They are not transgender or secretly men trying to trick you. They’re a very rare kind of woman, that’s all.

Also, it’s not clear to me that being intersex would automatically give a woman an unfair advantage in sports in the first place.  I’m not a doctor, so don’t take my word for it. But from what I’ve read, it seems that there’s not much evidence that it makes a difference.

I keep seeing people who are not doctors claiming that merely having elevated androgens will make a woman more like a man and therefore necessarily better at sports, but that doesn’t make any sense. I am a woman with poly-cystic ovary syndrome: I have a very common endocrine disorder that causes  elevated androgens in XX people. The elevated androgens don’t make people with PCOS muscular and good at sports. The main symptoms caused by having too many androgens in a female body are gaining a lot of fat around your middle even if you eat maintenance calories, as well as diabetes, fatigue, infertility and painful cysts. That doesn’t make you good at sports. Endocrinology and genetics are extremely complicated sciences and you can’t just make pronouncements like that. Testosterone isn’t Sports Juice, it’s just a hormone.

It’s also important to remember that the only evidence there is that Khelif has XY chromosomes, is the unverified word of the IBA.

One, Russian, member of the IBA made that remark about her chromosomes, to a Russian newspaper, only after Khelif defeated a Russian boxer in a match. That’s it. The IOC says the evidence for this seems to have been “cobbled together” and doesn’t agree with the IBA. They have suspended the IBA entirely for corruption.  That’s the whole basis for the vicious rumors and hysteria: one disappointed Russian from a discredited organization, who didn’t provide evidence for his claims. Because of this, an extremely talented and hardworking female athlete is being smeared all over the world. And the IBA’s recent press conference defending the decision was as ridiculous as a Monty Python sketch. They’ve openly contradicted themselves and they can’t be trusted. There isn’t any reliable evidence that Khelif is intersex at all.

And this is why the moral panic against transgender people is dangerous for everybody.

First and foremost, of course, it’s dangerous because it hurts transgender people. Our transgender siblings in Christ aren’t dangerous and we shouldn’t fear them. But in addition, the moral panic hurts all women, queer or not. If you’re constantly vigilant to find the secret dangerous trans woman conspiring to win a sporting match and hurt someone, all kinds of women get dragged into the mess. If you’re preoccupied with finding out the secret imposter, all women are under scrutiny and we’re all hurt. Women who have short hair or a prominent jaw or a who are a little too tall, are all subject to abuse for not being “real women.” Women who get thick and muscular instead of very skinny when they work out get sucked into the abuse. Women who are a bit too good at a sport get attacked, even though this is a sporting match so we’re supposed to root for the one who’s the best. A woman of color who hits an Italian woman too hard, even though this is boxing and you’re supposed to hit hard, can become the victim of an internet smear campaign. And that’s wrong. It hurts everybody.

Everyone, queer or not, and especially all women, are safer when we don’t get carried away.

The Olympics should be about enjoying sports and admiring talented people. That’s much more fun anyway.

I wish Imane Khelif congratulations on her victories so far, and good luck in the matches to come.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.