Imane Khelif Isn't Trans—But So What If She Was?

The hatred towards her isn't wrong because she's a cis woman. It's wrong because transphobia is always wrong.

Sina Schuldt/picture alliance via Getty Images

Last week marked the first full week of the 2024 Olympics, which is apparently the same amount of time it takes for anti-trans bigots to watch a game or two, notice that women are playing sports, and get really gross and dehumanizing about it.

Online, two female Olympic athletes are under transphobic scrutiny, not for being trans, but for deigning to exist as female athletes in a public arena. Among them were American swimmer Katie Ledecky and Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, both cis women whose recent international performances have confused and bamboozled the worm-rotted brains of international transphobes.

Trolls and earnest users alike shared posts speculating on Ledecky’s gender identity, insinuating or arguing that she’s a trans woman. Ledecky has won nine Olympic gold medals, including two she won this past week. (A video of American rugby bronze medalist Ilona Maher responding to people online calling her a man also recently went viral, though she originally posted that video in 2022.)

So says the community note, “Oftentimes, X users will frame posts as questions in order to avoid a community note.”

Screenshots via ESPN/Instagram and X/cowlonfullc

Yet, online comments about Ledecky seemed to pale in comparison to the backlash that boxer Khelif received after her competitor, Italian boxer Angela Carini, forfeited their match, saying that she couldn’t take Khelif’s punches.

Washed-up transphobes including J.K. Rowling and IRL Disgusting Bothers Logan and Jake Paul (if you need to look them up, don’t bother!!) helped stir up a barrage of online hate against Khelif, claiming that she’s a man who beat up Carini (who walked away with a bruised ego, at most). They also used Khelif’s dubious disqualification from the world championships last year to claim that she’s trans and therefore “not a woman.”

The hateful backlash to Khelif’s win triggered a days-long story that Khelif, her family, and the International Olympic Committee have been forced to address. All this of this because Carini tapped out — not after some big merciless, bloody beating, but after only 46 seconds. Regardless of the actual events of the fight or of Carini’s intentions, her tears of embarrassment broadcasted worldwide have made Khelif out to be the villain, and her the victim.

Khelif has responded with strength, calling for the end of bullying athletes, and saying the conjecture over her gender has “hurt human dignity.” Beyond that, I have no critique on how anyone in her position would handle right-wing-fueled hatred and conjecture about their physical appearance and gender identity, particularly because being gay is criminalized in Algeria.

But the mealymouthed attempts to correct transphobes have felt disappointing. So much of the response to this poisonous discourse seems more concerned with cis women being labeled as trans, and not at all concerned with pushing back against the dehumanizing, unfounded concepts that fuel these right-wing arguments in the first place — the idea that trans women “are men,” and that they should thus be excluded from women’s sports. Whether intentionally or not, it sends the message that these athletes’s gender identities shouldn’t be scrutinized and debased not because doing so is flat-out wrong, but because they’re simply not trans, and therefore these beliefs don’t concern them.

That’s not to say the cis identities of these women don’t matter — they do. But they matter for a deeper reason than a simple fact check could provide. In their scrutiny of these cis athletes, transphobes have made explicit their scrambled-eggs-for-brains rationale behind every claim they’ve ever made on protecting womanhood.

These people do not care about preserving the “dignity” of women’s sports, let alone about protecting women. In latching onto women who are at the top of their athletic performances, decrying their strength and appearances as inherently masculine (particularly toxic when you add in the racialized dynamic between Carini and Khelif), they have exposed the ethos of their obsession: a starkly narrow definition of womanhood in which women cannot be big, or strong, or competitive, that is rooted in white supremacy and praises hyperfemininity, and makes a target of anyone who exists outside of these parameters.

Furthermore, their fascination over a cis woman’s gender identity admits that this anti-trans panic that regularly kills trans children and murders trans adults is all in the name of preserving a rigid, conservative image of femininity, molded by white patriarchy and preserved by women like Rowling who think they’ll save themselves by aligning with its power. And of course, this is something that trans activists and trans journalists have long sounded the alarm on.

That’s all to say, I do understand the inclination to find whatever silver lining of joy in laughing at anti-trans crusaders who are so hypnotized by their prejudice that they’re thiiiiiis close to admitting that cis women and trans women are far more similar than they’ve wanted to believe. And more seriously, I cannot ignore the importance of squashing this specific speculation about Khelif, considering Algeria’s criminalization of queer people and the consequences that this right-wing misinformation campaign could wrought.

But beyond making a fool of transphobes, it would be a waste to not meet this moment for what it is — an opportunity to fully, unapologetically shout down the hatred and rhetoric and respond to “accusations” of athletes being trans with, “OK, cool! That’s fine! So what if they are!” Not because the athletes they’re crying about aren’t trans. And not because there aren’t any trans athletes (and just a couple of nonbinary athletes) competing in this year’s Olympics, as if that somehow neutralizes the conjecture itself. But because it is fine to be trans and to be a trans women in women’s sports.

Because when we meet anti-trans talking points with a deflection of, “Well, actually!” we’re still letting the fire burn. Because if trans women were competing in the Olympics, in any sport, their inclusion would be fair and good, point blank.