Olympics 2024: Misogyny in sports hasn’t gone, it’s just changed shape

For the first time in history, the Olympic Games is gender-balanced. Paris 2024’s competitors are 50 per cent women, up from 48 per cent in Tokyo, and more than 50 per cent of events are now open to women. It’s been a gruelling, century-long road to get here, and a road often actively obstructed by the International Olympic Committee. As Michael Waters writes in The Other Olympians, it took trailblazing organiser Alice Milliat, founder of the Women’s World Games (1921-1934), to make the IOC grudgingly include more women’s athletics events in the 30s, while IOC members like Karl Ritter von Halt were proclaiming that “Men were born to compete; competition is alien to a woman’s nature […] let us do away with women’s athletics championships.” Women’s participation in the Olympics didn’t even break 25 per cent until 1988. 

But now, Paris’s ‘GOAT’ is Simone Biles, a 4’8” woman with 11 Olympic medals, while Katie Ledecky has become the most decorated currently-competing Olympian. So many gorgeous stories have arisen in Paris’s women’s competition: Hongchan Quan’s perfect splashless dive, Kristen Faulkner’s shock gold in the road race, Rebeca Andrade finally edging out Biles in a dazzling floor final. Women’s sports are gaining ground in wider culture, and more people in the UK watched a women’s sports event in 2023 than ever before. Is the grip of misogyny on sport finally being somewhat broken? Or has it just changed shape?

World Athletics itself admits that their ban is not based on evidence, but a lack of evidence: because “there are currently no transgender athletes competing internationally in athletics,” there is no evidence about “the impact these athletes would have on the fairness of female competition”. Despite obvious evidence that trans women are not dominating women’s athletics, mass fear that trans women might carry an entirely unevidenced advantage is considered more important than their right to compete. Paranoia about the category of ‘woman’ in sport outlives any attempt to soothe it: even with extreme strictures and a full-on ban in place, a woman of colour has been harangued because she competes in a full-contact sport and one of her white opponents cried. Unsurprisingly, these witch hunts for ‘wrong’ women are most likely to seize upon Black women, other women of colour, women from non-Western countries, masculine and butch women, and women with naturally higher testosterone. So much for an international gathering to celebrate human diversity; women who slip the narrow bounds of femininity must be punished.

Many of us want to celebrate the nonbinary and trans athletes who did make it to Paris, who have traversed both the typical immense difficulty of elite sport and the extra impediments of homophobia and transphobia. Sportspeople are some of our most iconic cultural symbols and role models. But the binary structure of elite sport, of ‘men’ and ‘women’ and the careful enforcement of what those words mean, heavily restricts how active nonbinary and trans athletes can live and how they are spoken about. Two openly nonbinary athletes, the US’s Nikki Hiltz (a runner) and Canada’s Quinn (a footballer), are competing in women’s categories in Paris. Nonbinary athletes are routinely misgendered in Olympics coverage, and Hiltz has spoken about how World Athletics rules have made their Olympic dreams incompatible with their dreams “to take testosterone or grow facial hair or have top surgery”: “sometimes I can really resent this sport”. Meanwhile, the first openly trans man at the Olympics, Filipino boxer Hergie Bacyadan, has referred to himself as ‘biologically a woman’ and ‘female’, and has been widely referenced in media coverage as a ‘female’ who ‘identifies as a man’. In his own rhetoric, his coaches’, and in reporting, his ‘femaleness’ is foregrounded to neutralise any feelings of confusion or threat his manhood might cause. As a trans man, I find this profoundly depressing.

Unsurprisingly, these witch hunts for ‘wrong’ women are most likely to seize upon Black women, other women of colour, women from non-Western countries, masculine and butch women, and women with naturally higher testosterone

When Bacyadan calls himself ‘female’, he is appealing to a common understanding of ‘femaleness’ as natural and contained, and of women’s sports as places where ‘females’ are protected. This is both a fantasy and a lie that obscures how women’s sports create their own meanings of ‘female’, making – and breaking – their ideal women. I have been a fan of women’s gymnastics, one of the most popular and ‘feminine’ sports at the Olympics, since I was a child. Gymnastics is intensely gendered in ways that are obviously artificial: women are literally marked on their ‘grace’ and facial expressions in ways men aren’t. In 2017, the US women’s gymnastics team – dominant at the Olympics since the mid-2000s – was revealed as the site of the biggest sexual abuse scandal in the history of sport.   

Team USA doctor Larry Nassar being outed as a prolific sexual assaulter was horrifying, but it wasn’t surprising. Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, published 22 years before Nassar’s conviction, depicted women’s gymnastics as a scene of utter brutality, where young girls were starved to maintain a pre-pubertal physique, verbally and physically abused, and made to continue training through serious injuries. It produced the perfect environment for Nassar’s abuse to flourish – one that demanded unquestioning obedience, naturalised pain, punished expressions of discomfort, dissent or complaint, and taught young gymnasts to disregard their most basic needs. It built a vision of girlhood that could be exploited.

At its worst, this is what women’s sport is: abusing women into compliance so that they can produce ideal images for the nation-state to advertise itself, images of graceful, smiling, ‘appropriate’ women. French female athletes have been banned from wearing hijab at the Paris Olympics, a stark reflection of the vicious state discrimination that headscarved Muslim women face in France, and a reflection of the problems with the ‘world stage’ of elite sport. We take it as a given that athletes are lucky to ‘represent their country’ at the Olympics, and countries and federations (particularly those with a lot of money) use that unchecked power to discipline and discriminate against athletes. The potential for both racial and sexual harassment in that context is obvious: footballer Jenni Hermoso was forcibly kissed after Spain won the World Cup by the then-head of the Spanish football federation, and multiple high-up male officials stand accused of trying to harass Hermoso into dropping her complaint. 

The Olympics is a place of convenient fictions: that countries are equal, that gender is binary, that meritocracy is real… Gender is such a volatile issue at the Olympics because the Olympics cannot really tolerate anyone asking ‘why’

But the Olympics has rarely been amenable to talking about power. The Olympics is a place of convenient fictions: that countries are equal and neutral, that gender is binary and natural, that meritocracy is real, that anyone can make it if they work hard enough. Gender is such a volatile issue at the Olympics because the Olympics cannot really tolerate anyone asking ‘why’. The whole thing rests on stories, money, power, and conveniently effaced histories. The Other Olympians, for instance, tells the story of the IOC’s support of Hitler’s 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and how the institution of ‘sex testing’ in elite sport directly arose from Nazi lobbyists’ desires to exclude “unsuitable elements” from sport; when we hear ‘gender test’ now, we should think of Nazi Wilhelm Knoll suggesting that all women be gender-checked in the women’s dormitories before competition – via pelvic exam, one presumes – so that ‘superior’ men did not cheat and beat ‘frail women.’ That’s the vision of women’s ‘safety’ that all calls for gender tests are propagating. 

Imane Khelif, Lin Yu-ting, Chelsea Wolfe, Nikki Hiltz, and French hijabi athletes like Sylla Sounkamba have all been caught in webs of history, bigotry, power, and panic that have tried to pass themselves off as the way things are. The ongoing stories of women’s sports at the Olympics, of women of colour in sports, and of trans athletics are intertwined: the choice to battle over ‘femaleness’, and to harass and exclude those who don’t represent it ‘correctly’, is a choice to believe in Knoll’s idea that what women’s sport needs is the removal of “unsuitable elements.” It’s a choice to accelerate the abuse and discipline of sport’s most marginalised athletes. People who are not cisgender men deserve better than the current vision of gendered sport, particularly now there are more of them in sport than ever. They deserve sports that will elevate them, not punish them. In practice, this would probably break sport beyond recognition; but sport, as it exists, needs to be broken.