Transphobia in Sports is a Legacy of Eugenics

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Few understand that the history of gender scrutiny is rooted in eugenics and, more specifically, in the idea of sexual dimorphism, which was popularized by European eugenicists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to argue for the supremacy of the white race and to advance imperialism.

Their claim was that European civilization demonstrated the starkest contrast between the "two genders," wherein European men were the most masculine on Earth and European women the most feminine.

This ridiculous claim was then used to argue that other races were thus inferior as they had not "advanced enough" to reach the desired state of gender contrast "achieved" by Europeans. This idea also strengthened the work of European Christian missionaries in Native American schools and other similar efforts, which contributed to the erasure of dozens of genders across the world.

Sexual dimorphism is partly where we get the idea that Black women are not real women (and not desirable) because they are "too masculine" and similar to Black men and where we get the idea that Asian men are not real men because they are (from the vantage point of eugenics) "too feminine" like Asian women.

All other peoples, including Oceanic, Indigenous, and West Asians, were similarly cast as not gendered correctly from this Eurocentric perspective.

Fast forward to today, and we have yet to reckon with these harmful and false frameworks and understandings of gender. The transphobic panic can be understood as a contemporary symptom of a much longer discourse and trafficking of gender essentialism that has gone underground but unchallenged.

To achieve a world where what happened to Ms. Khelif is no longer thinkable, we have to uproot our internalization of this warped understanding of gender.

Defending Ms. Khelif's gender, while understandable, does nothing to transform our unspoken expectations that gender, bodies, and external expressions must fit within a restrictive physical and social gender binary. Reach out to learn how to create gender-affirming organizations and policies.