Gender “Controversy” Around The 2024 Olympics Make It Clear How Much People Still Fear Powerful Women

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In this op-ed, Features Director Brittney McNamara looks at how we hurt all women when we question the strength of female athletes at the 2024 Olympics.

When Italian boxer Angela Carini dropped out of her match at the 2024 Olympics against Algeria's Imane Khelif, transphobes were quick to claim Carini was forced to quit because Khelif is transgender (she is not), which they say would give Khelif an unfair advantage (research has shown it would not). Earlier, in a tearful TikTok, rugby star and bronze medalist Ilona Maher addressed comments calling her a man, or saying she's masculine because she has broad shoulders and muscles.

Attacking strong women is certainly nothing new, particularly for athletes and Olympians. Former Olympian Aly Raisman and current gold medalist Simone Biles have both spoken about being bullied for their muscular arms; Serena Williams has long faced conspiracy theories that she was born a man, simply because of her muscular build and dominance in sport; Olympic runner Caster Semenya faced intense scrutiny about her gender, even getting a court order to take testosterone-suppressing drugs to lower her natural levels of testosterone to continue competing; and while Semenya has been punished because her hormone levels were too high, swimmer Lia Thomas, a trans woman, was barred from the Olympics, despite adhering to NCAA hormone requirements.

Khelif is the latest woman to draw such scrutiny after her match with Carini because, according to the Associated Press, Khelif couldn't compete in the 2023 world championship because she failed an unspecified gender test. That has prompted many to claim she is secretly transgender (again, she is not), even though she is from Algeria, where it is illegal to transition. (Some have pointed out that calling Khelif trans could even put her in danger given her country's laws.)

The people most vocal in attacking female athletes for their prowess and strength claim to be policing fairness in sports, engaging in what they seem to think is a noble act to make sure that women still have a chance to reach the highest echelons of their sports. Let's put aside the screaming cognitive dissonance of saying that you're protecting women's ability to play sports while scrutinizing athletes like Semenya and Khelif — both women — and sometimes preventing them from achieving the very thing you say you want to defend. What these critics are really doing is deciding who gets to be a woman, basing that decision on the proximity to frailness and smallness, traits that have long been assigned to womanhood to suppress our power and ability to succeed.

Women participating in sports has always sparked criticism. Though they have, of course, always engaged in sports in some capacity, an article in The Sport Journal notes that, in the 1800s and early 1900s, it was commonly believed that women shouldn't exert themselves, particularly during menstruation. This, according to the National Women's History Museum, was because of the belief that physical exertion could be a threat to elite white women's fertility. When women did play sports, they typically engaged in activities like tennis and horseback riding, which required elaborate outfits to emphasize their femininity. In other words, participating in sports has historically been viewed as men's territory.

While women started increasingly participating in sports as the 1900s progressed (A League of Their Own, anyone?), it continued to carry stigma as many had their appearance and demeanor critiqued, and faced policing around how they should look. Things began to change in 1972, when Title IX cemented women's place in sports, but as is clear from the questioning today's female athletes face, the stigma associated with women in sports has only faded so much — which is particularly true for Black athletes, who also face racist stereotypes around what it means to be feminine.

It was in the 1940s when, NBC News reports, sports officials started conducting random sex testing on female athletes whose gender seemed “suspicious.” Between the 1960s and 1990s, sports governing bodies like the International Olympic Committee started doing chromosomal testing on female athletes, a practice that started amid Cold War-era fears that Eastern European countries were secretly sending male athletes to international competitions to compete against women. While that practice was eventually banned, NBC News reports that sporting authorities still maintain the ability “to test female athletes suspected of having physical advantages,” eventually settling on testosterone levels as a determinant of eligibility in women's sports.

Men aren't subjected to these kinds of tests; in fact, they're expected to succeed at sports and in other physical pursuits. It's this sexism that's so ingrained in our society that is driving such intense scrutiny of female athlete's performance and appearance. When women perform at an elite level, they're often seen as masculine because of the long-held belief that men are physically dominant, while women are weaker, meeker, and all around less able.

We see some notable exceptions to this rule: while Simone Biles says she faced bullying when she was younger because of her muscles, she's now regarded as one of the best athletes in the world, and certainly the best gymnast. She and the entire U.S. women's gymnastics team are widely celebrated, and one of the biggest Olympic draws. But, gymnastics is a sport that, for women, values grace. It requires incredible strength, but the best gymnasts make their skills look easy, flying through the air to land neatly and gracefully, with a flourish of the hands. It's a sport that many have historically considered feminine.

Of course, it's no longer the 1800s. This year is the first the there are an equal number of men and women competing in the Olympics, and a recent Gallup poll found that prospective viewers were just as excited for women's events as they were for men's. The sharp increase in interest in women's basketball in the past year has been widely lauded, and women's sports, in general, seem to be earning more respect. All of this is long overdue progress.

But, transgender women — who, let's make no mistake, are simply women — are still widely banned from competing in certain arenas, and when any woman gets a little too good for comfort, people quickly jump to questioning her gender, and whether it's fair for her to compete against her less-skilled opponents. It doesn't help any woman to perpetuate the idea that she should be weaker than she is, smaller than she is, or in any way lesser than she is just to fit an outdated and sexist view of what a woman is. And, it's certainly not a feminist argument to claim that women just couldn't be that good at sports. It's time we stop judging women based on their proximity to weakness and redefine femininity based on the power that all women know we possess.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue