The Olympic Games (of Gender Conservatism)

Why this year's freak-outs seem to come fast and furious -- Part 1

Full disclosure about me: I don’t care all that much about the Olympics, but I am married to someone who watches a ton of them. Every morning the house resounds with shouting about some swimming event, or gymnastics, or tennis, or track and field. Other full disclosure about me: for professional reasons (hey, did you know I have a book coming out?) I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter/X, and exloring, let’s say, the more reactionary corners of Twitter/X. Although I suppose the seedier corners are now just Twitter’s C-suite. What’s really quite striking is the drumbeat of mini-panics emanating from people watching, or barely watching or grifting off clips from the Paris Olympics. And it’s likewise striking that they’re almost all about gender. In general, I think people are either using the Olympics to radicalize others, or the reactions are an indicator on how radicalized many who would claim normalcy for themselves really are already.

In my forthcoming book I argue that one of the defining features of the Far Right in the present moment — especially those who refuse to understand themselves as Far Right, and insist they are totally bog standard liberals or conservatives or some other secret and totally unplacable thing (read: reactionaries) — is that they insist on traditions and institutions the hollowing-out of which they otherwise gleefully participate in. Harvard has gone down the toilet and no one should go there anymore! But also we need to protect excellence at our nation’s premier institution of higher learning! The US government is just a bunch of crooks, and the constitution is more of a suggestion! But also how dare you not respect the power of both once a right winger comes draped in them! The modern Olympic Games are obviously a pretty recent tradition, but it is one that average people experience as a tradition — they remember where previous contests were held, they look forward to the next one, they may get a little invested in who gets to host. Which makes them a really easy stand-in for tradition as such, of the kind that supposedly we have “now” abandoned — at least according to various weird trad accounts on Twitter/X that Elon Musk seems to have really absorbed. You know the type: two pictures juxtaposed, one old one modern, then some kind of facile comparison (men in the 1860s/men in the 2020s), scoring points off of some minority or other, and then a line like “let that sink in”. Musk absolutely loves that shit. And so do the far right accounts that he loves and promotes.

What that kind of discourse does is reify tradition: all tradition is worth keeping, and tradition is exactly what you happen to remember, not the complicated and messy practice as it actually existed back in the day. Take this exchange on Twitter/X, where Musk seems to think that a depiction of a headless Marie Antoinette (!) during the opening ceremony of a modern revival (!) of a pagan ritual (!) was “extremely disrespectful to Christians”. Even the post he’s responding to (“Reject degeneracy”) is pretty interesting: not just because of the Max Nordau-echoes, but also because “degeneracy” is one of those catchall terms of fascist aesthetics. It’s an idea that’s persuasive only to people who don’t consume much art, that art “should” be beautiful and uplifting, and that anything that makes you go “huh” or “ew” or laugh or whatever is somehow a sign of (take your pick) “postmodernism”, “modernism” or “degeneracy” — it’s trad account aesthetics.

So the idea that something is off about the Olympic Games is pretty seductive to that set. But that sense of ready-made nostalgia, which, as Jameson has argued, is one of the hallmarks of postmodern media is clearly dominated this year by questions of gender. It’s a narrative not about decline, in other words, but more specifically about degeration. It has, of course, a particularly strange counterfactual quality in a situation where, by definition, the present keeps outdoing the past: records keep tumbling, incredible careers are extended or capped off. It’s nothing that gets me particularly excited, to be quite honest, but it’s kind of remarkable to kvetch that an event used to be better when by the terms of that very event people keep getting numerically better at it. It’s not vibes over evidence, it’s vibes contra evidence. But that’s where gender becomes salient as a category, the same way “wokeness” does when it comes to universities: if you want to claim a decline, but the institution (at least by its own myopic and limited logic) keeps producing excellence, you have to say that it’s the wrong, or an illegitimate kind of excellence.

And that’s where categories of degeneracy and sickness come in. From the 24-hour news cycle about the supposed parody of The Last Supper during the opening ceremony, which gave occasion to a veritable flood of homophobic bile, to the freak-outs over women boxers that didn’t seem to the internet’s sleuths to be feminine enough, gender has become a way of attacking an institution while simultaneously claim you are just looking to honor it. It’s a standard of anti-”wokeness” discourse to freak out at imagined outrages (and be they only because you didn’t pay attention in art history class), while conversely hymning as boldness, courage and heterodoxy the most bog-standard gestures and decisions. They had to imagine an attacked and besmirched Christianity in order to shit out tweets like this:

Which brings us to the other big gender-related freak-out of this year’s Olympics-coverage, the one that is still ongoing, namely the fracas about the Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu Ting and Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. This one has had a lot more staying power than Last Supper-Gate, and (even though the creator of the Opening Ceremonies has been getting death threats), it is arguably far more frightening. Nevertheless, I think it’s worth thinking of these as coming from the same shop. Because they did: promoted by Far Right account, they then made the jump (often in the “people are saying” mold) to more respectable outlets, eventually the “people are saying” went away and … well, and that’s when the two diverged. Because with the Last Supper, a bunch of right-leaning papers and writers went “oh, wait a minute, this is bullshit”. With Khelif, that didn’t end up happening and we now have allegedly left-leaning papers joining in the fray.

So what happened? Very short version (for the long version, go to the always brilliant Parker Molloy over at The Present Age) On August 1, Khelif was scheduled to fight Italian boxer Angela Carini, who withdrew after on 46 seconds. Carini exclaimed “It’s not fair!”, refused the customary handshake after the bout, and overall left the impression (though she later sought to dispel that impression) that she objected to the match on grounds of gender.

A massive freakout ensued. A freakout that managed to be… well, sexist, homophobic and transphobic all at once (with hints of racism, just to complete the sundae of pure shit). First was the suggestion that Khelif was “really” a man, where the exact nature of that “really” was left ambiguous. JK Rowling could argue that this was a trans woman sneaking her way into the competition (Khelif is cisgender). The skull-measurers over at Quilette could suggest that probably Khelif had DSD (differential sexual development) that gave her an unfair advantage. And the truly enlightened among the just-asking-questions brigade surmised that Khelif was — again, “probably” — intersex. All of this, by the way, based on one test allegedly done by the disqualified boxing federation that seems to have been trying to fix some matches by disqualifying athletes after they won in 2023. The IBA, by the way, has refused to say what they even measured to determine that Khelif and Lin Yu Ting are supposedly men. But the real point is: there are different versions of this story and the questions it supposedly raises, depending on a writer’s comfort with a dial called “transphobia”. You can do whatever the account EndWokeness (likely neo-Nazi Jack Prosobiec) is doing here…

… or you can go for more genteel versions. The article below claims that both boxers were harmed by putting them in the media spotlight, and decries the transphobic hatred that Khelif faced. But it also pointedly avoids calling her a woman. And goes on and on about the “questions” allegedly raised by this fight, even though — again — the evidence for those questions existing at all is exceedingly meager.

It also, as my podcast co-host Moira Donegan pointed out, got pretty homophobic pretty quickly. Like: there are plenty of women who look like this, and saying that they don’t count … has a bit of an aftertaste.

And of course, the discourse ended up being all about “woman” as a category of protection. Not just as a category that requires policing and protecting, but also about women as constituted as a group by their need for protection. Not only was Khelif called a man, she was called a man “who enjoys hitting women”. Her next opponent, a Hungarian boxer, posted this meme to her Instagram account — Khelif as the Beast, and herself as Belle. The protection of threatened white women against brutes from overseas: there’s a reason this kind of transphobic imaginary seems to get activated persistently around non-European athletes. There is, as Zine Magubane notes, a colonial logic to it — as there is to TERFism’s policing of womanhood, a kind of imperial femaleness.

A first thing that I think is worth noting: it’s not exactly surprising that sporting events are about gender. Some might argue that’s most of what they’re about. We celebrate excellence that is itself gendered, but by the same token we perform anxiety about excellence that seems to violate gender norms (jokes about “mannish” female athletes, categories of “softness” and “aggression” in judged sports, jokes about sports that aren’t “real” sports, etc.). And of course we group athletes according to gendered principles — not just whether they are male or female, but a whole raft of other categories that taken together likely produce what then constitutes the binary of competition: women’s vs. men’s. Think about the politics of doping (or of alleging doping when someone does well), and how it interacts with our tricky relationship to hormones. Think about the way Chinese gymnasts are routinely implied to be way younger than they are — this isn’t about whether they’re men or women, it’s about the correct way to be a woman.

It’s pretty clear how an event like the Olympics is basically a gender pedagogy in two steps: first it distinguishes between supposedly salient and non-salient biological factors (not to blame everyone’s success on hormonal imbalances, but surely that’s gotta be some of it?); and in a second step it moralizes specific features. Not only is it not supposed to be salient that Michael Phelps had double jointed elbows and knees and a hyperextended thorax; it’s not unfair that he did. As Rayvon Fouché has noted, “sport is one locale where cyborg bodies have been not only accepted but also embraced. The rhetoric about freakish bodies producing unnatural performances has been a familiar refrain within commentaries about sport,” which, Fouché notes, sits uncomfortably with its insistence on “nature” and “fairness”.

All of this — and I think that is key — is done as a sort of spectacle. We get to watch these bodies perform gender in close-up and slow motion. Those close-ups and slow-mo shots are obviously mostly offered to allow us to dissect who is better or worse and why. But they also invite an examination of athletes bodies in terms of gender. We are invited to cast a diagnostic gaze on these athletes — and in a bunch of habitual discourses around the Olympic Games (doping, age of athletes, etc.) we are being invited in not as admirers of really cool ways of jumping into the water, but as diagnosticians of other people’s bodies. This is physiognomic TV, in other words, and it habitually produces the kinds of images the creeps of the 1880s, 1920s or (ahem) 1930s relied on to taxonomize “races”, “l'uomo delinquente”, etc. etc.

And of course today’s transvestigators are heirs to the physiognomists and craniometers of yesteryear (which I wrote about here years ago). Their classificatory/diagnostic schema is all about visual control (exactly knowing how to place an individual) as a first step/substitute/ideological substrate for social control. The “deviant” needs to be placed, needs to be given a location, in order to be controlled. And of course the categories the various writers turned to to explain what was wrong with Khelif being where she was, are the results of those efforts at social control. Zine Magubane’s article about Caster Semanya points to the “role of race and nation in determining which bodies are marked as intersex and what is done about those bodies.”

Which I think points to two important takeaways when it comes to Imane Khelif. First: the images of that arrived from the fight and its immediate aftermath (Angela Carini’s tears, Khelif’s reaction to the forfeit), and which immediately stoked an anti-trans panic on social media (and in legacy media) in spite of there being no trans person anywhere in that picture, were not accidental byproducts taken out of context. The gaze the world’s gender detectives cast on these pictures was their context. This sort of policing is what these kinds of images do. And second: it’s important not to credit the idea that people are reacting to gender norms in flux (though gender norms may be indeed be in flux) and freaking out about the erosion of something formerly stable. The freakout, the policing are the point. The kind of bullshit, ad-hoc stabilizing of gender categories transphobes the world over engaged in, is unfortunately exactly in the spirit of the Games — even though the IOC in this particular imbroglio cut a rather positive figure.

The imbroglio also made clear once more that gender is by now the best pipeline from the Far Right fever swamps into more respectable segments of the publishing and media world. Sure, J.K. Rowling’s tweets about “the new men’s rights movement” were deranged, but Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik went absolutely wall to wall covering this “case”. But of course it didn’t stop there. Everyone’s watching the Olympics, everyone wants to write about them — so the Far Right can drive the conversation, so long as they aren’t too obvious about it. They can rely on centrist and even left-leaning publications to launder their bullshit, because they have primed them for that with years of centrist-baiting stories about Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria or changing rooms or, well, the one trans athlete in all of Utah.

But the Olympics are perhaps even more perfect for this pipeline. Because the controversy was attached to these pictures, but because it was attached to them in ambiguous and slippery ways, everyone could arrive at their own version of the “question” regarding the fight. What remained constant was the idea that there was a question to be asked, that something needed to be nailed down here or prevented. That Imane Khelif needed a place to be put in. This is what Judith Butler meant when they said that “sex” — biological, immutable, clearly, at times spectacularly legible — was but “gender” projected back onto our messy, complex, contradictory bodies. But of course no one’s asking Judith Butler. They’re asking Wizard Lady, or Thilo from the sports pages, or Libs of fucking TikTok.