Once, there was a snake who had a dream that she would meet her death by being swallowed by a snake just like herself. So she set out to attack and devour all the other snakes in the world, that she might finally be safe enough to sleep again. She roamed far and wide, swallowing all the snakes she could find, and as a result, she grew and grew to an enormous size.
Finally, she grew so large that as she slithered through the forest, she came across the end of her own tail and did not recognize it. Believing her tail to be a rival, she lunged forward and tried to swallow it.
And so it was that the snake made her dream come true.
***
As a transgender woman who, in over thirty years of life, has held perspectives ranging from supreme apathy to mild contempt for organized sports, I find myself deeply resentful that every trans media and cultural worker in the world is being forced to pay attention to the racist, transphobic moral panic currently unfolding at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
This is a racist, transphobic moral panic that, I might add, involves no actual transgender women or transfeminine people, but has been instigated by the absolute, wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth fear and hatred of us that is currently being used to fuel a loathsome culture war around gender identity and trans rights that ultimately benefits no one except the handful of canny politicians and business people who are expertly mining the controversy for public attention.
To briefly summarize: The so-called “gender critical” movement, spearheaded by such prominent cultural figures as Harry Potter author JK Rowling, is currently losing its mind over two competitors in the Paris Olympics’ women’s boxing competition: Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan and Imane Khalif of Algeria, whom some have deemed “biological men” due to a mishmash of hazy rumors about testosterone levels and chromosomes, as well as flat-out misogynist interpretations of the two athletes’ physical appearances (in a word, some people on the internet think that they look too “manly” to be women).
“What will it take to end this insanity? A female boxer left with life-altering injuries? A female boxer killed?” Rowling tweeted. She also commented on a photograph of Khalif following her victory over Italian boxer Angela Carini (who forfeited the match in tears), writing, “The smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.”
Thousands of Twitter/X users responded in support of Rowling’s sentiments, which were echoed by many other prominent members of the so-called “gender critical” community, including other writers, political figures, and celebrities. Even a brief review of the online discourse unveils a seething current of anti-transgender sentiment towards Lin and Khalif, with many commenters apparently under the mistaken impression that the two athletes are transgender women – despite the fact that both were apparently assigned female at birth, raised as girls, and have never identified as anything else.
Much of the opinion writing around this incident has focused with breathless fascination on various narrative details of Lin and Khalif’s lives and sporting careers, including the fact that both have apparently been tested for – well, something about hormonal and/or chromosomal atypicalities, no one seems to know for sure what tests or what results exactly – but I will not. I will not, because it is demeaning and dehumanizing to two women who only wanted to compete in a sport they have trained in their whole lives, and who deserve basic dignity, privacy, and integrity of personhood.
I will also not examine in detail the various types of bigotry that are boiling to the surface, because other commenters can and already have done so in good detail: Suffice it to say that this affair is disrespectful and hateful towards intersex people (individuals who present with a wide range of developmental variations that make their bodies difficult to classify within the male/female binary) because it casts them as outsiders who do not deserve recognition or full participation in society. It is transphobic for similar reasons, and because of the way this incident is being used to stoke already-surging hatred towards transgender people, particularly trans women. And it is racist because it follows a disturbing historic trend of labelling racialized women’s bodies – especially within sport – as insufficiently feminine to count as female.
What I do want to comment on in this piece, however, is how this made-up boxing scandal illustrates an essential aspect of the way that bigotry and moral panic function: Namely, that they always turn back on the populations they claim to protect. Movements that hysterically set themselves against so-called “dangerous” populations (such as transgender women, gay people, Black and Brown communities, migrants, homeless people, the list goes on) in the name of protecting society never actually do so. Far more frequently, they create even more danger, surveillance, repression, and violence than there was in the first place.
The gender critical movement claims to protect women and girls, in sport and in the world, by restricting trans rights – and, judging by the current Olympic controversy, the rights of certain intersex people, or even people not known but suspected to be intersex or trans. Yet the cultural attitudes and policy demands expressed by this movement will not do any such thing – but rather the opposite.
***
Bigotry is perhaps most simply defined as attitudes that are driven primarily by fear of the Other: The sense that there are monstrous people, “Others,” lurking in the proverbial forest of shared society who must be rooted out, contained, driven away, or killed to protect oneself. Though bigotry is often portrayed as an individual trait, I find that it is best understood as a cultural phenomenon, as the expression of deeply wounded forces embedded in the collective unconscious – forces that, in response to particularly pressured moments in history, tend to explode in the form of moral panics.
As writers such as Roger Lancaster, Juith Levine, and Erica Meiners observe, moral panics – and particularly sexualized moral panics, as the anti-trans sentiment tends to be – are inherently politically regressive. They result in widespread public demands for the suspension of not only progressive values such as tolerance, patience, and curiosity about those different from oneself, but also for the suspension of actual human rights such as privacy, free expression, bodily integrity, and participation in the public sphere in the name of protecting the “normal people” from the “dangerous people.”
Within the state of moral panic, only the “normal people” are perceived to deserve default access to human rights. Of course, rights that are conditional upon perceived normality, or other identity factors, are not really rights at all, but rather privileges. Those who fall outside the charmed category of “normal” may be subjected to tests in order to prove their deservingness (rather like accused witches being inspected for the mark of the Devil), and those who fail may be subjected to discrimination, social exclusion, and in extremes, even culturally sanctioned death.
And though I dearly wish that last phrase was just a rhetorical flourish, I cannot help but recall how the murder of transgender women such as Gwen Araujo was for decades defended (and in some jurisdictions still is) using a legally precedented defence known as the “trans panic defence,” in which it was claimed that the shock of discovering that one’s prospective sexual partner is transgender is reasonable grounds for deadly violence.
In the case of the culture war over gender identity and trans rights, the phenomenon of designating a certain population as abnormal, dangerous, and in need of surveillance and restriction can be seen in the increasing demand for trans people (and particularly transgender women) to be marked as trans in legal identification and barred from access to public spaces, social services, health care, and public housing allocated to women, which I care about deeply. Then there is also, of course, a demand to bar transgender women and girls from competitive women’s sports.
I will admit, I honestly don’t care about transgender participation in institutionalized sports. If I was somehow given the choice to magically trade trans women’s participation in competitive sports for our guaranteed permanent access to all other the other social rights that we either do not have or are in danger of losing, I’d do so in a heartbeat, because the naked truth is that I think those rights (such as the right to access housing and healthcare and education and legal support unimpeded by transphobia) are more important. Sorry to all my athlete tgirlies out there, that’s just how I see it.
Yet I do believe there is something very disturbing and necessary to observe in the way that the so-called gender critical movement has made its attacks on trans participation in sport, because these attacks have implications that are much further-reaching than any given competition itself. In essence, the gender critical approach to sports, if successful, will erode privacy and bodily autonomy in the public sphere not only for trans and intersex people, but for all people – and as usual, it will be the most vulnerable members of society, including children, who are the most impacted.
Consider that a common gender critical demand is that athletes be physically inspected and screened before competition in order to detect trans and intersex individuals, with the goal of either forcing them to compete in whatever category outside authorities deem appropriate, or of forcing them out entirely. Consider also that this demand is applied not only to adult competition, but to competitive sports – and in some cases even gym classes – in primary and secondary education.
If applied widely, the overall result of such measures would be a society in which children and adolescents are routinely subjected to invasive physical inspections by adults outside the family, and in which such invasions are normalized. This future would also be one in which adults outside the family are entitled to demand physical inspections of other people’s children if they suspected they were competing in the “wrong” category. Frankly, it is difficult to understand how such a future could be considered beneficial to children’s safety, from either a progressive or conservative perspective.
That future is, in some ways, already starting to take form: In June 2023 in the Canadian city of Kelowna, an adult man allegedly harassed a 9-year-old girl and her parents at a children’s sporting event because of (in his own words) a “gut feeling” that the child was transgender (she is not) and therefore should not be competing. The man also allegedly demanded to see a copy of the child’s birth certificate.
The above-noted incident, alongside the current Olympic boxing controversy and similar situations, illustrate some particularly disturbing dynamics of the moral panic over gender: First, even though trans people (and especially trans women) occupy the role of the stigmatized Other in this collective psychodrama, the bigotry and violence has begun to spread to affect people who do not and have never identified as trans. Second, in the frenzied pursuit of safety from an imaginary threat, the proponents of the moral panic are making everyone, including themselves, less safe.
***
The furor over women’s boxing in Paris is deeply dehumanizing – not only to Lin and Khalif, or to trans and intersex people, but also to all women (whether transgender or not) because it pushes us deeper into a world of policy and legislation mandate that women and girls’ bodies are policed and surveilled, supposedly in the name of their own good.
The curse of bigotry and moral panic is that it is a paranoid hunger for safety, purity and control that can never be satisfied: It grows and grows until it turns on itself, like a snake eating its own tail. Trans women, intersex women, racialized women – the logic of bigotry says that anyone can be treated as suspect and forced out of the circle of personhood.
Who’s next?
For a longer, in-depth exploration of moral panics and further reading list, click here to read my free eBook, The Village and the Woods: https://ariseembodiment.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/THE-VILLAGE-AND-THE-WOODS-ebook-2.pdf
For more on sexualized social and moral panics, I recommend these books:
Lancaster, Roger N. Sex panic and the punitive state. Univ of California Press, 2011.
Judith Levine & Erica Meiners – Feminism and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence
Your snake metaphor is so spot-on for describing how fear-based bigotry actually creates that which it is afraid of. Thank you for your beautiful writing!
Thank you for this. The transphobic panic around these two women is nothing short of disgusting. The IOC abandoned chromosome testing of female athletes decades ago because the results showed that gender is not binary, it is a spectrum. If the entire population was subjected to the full range of testing women athletes are, we’d find a lot of these bigots surprised and horrified to find they aren’t as “purely” the gender they thought they were. These women aren’t all powerful. They have lost matches to other female athletes who aren’t under such ridiculous claims.
JK Rowling lost all my respect years ago And I regret all the royalties she made off my purchase of the books and movies, and Trump never had it. Ditto for Elon Musk. Perhaps if any of these transphobes used their funds to help people other than other wealthy people or to try to buy elections, they could redeem themselves.
I fear for these women, especially the boxer from Algeria, given the laws and culture in her country. Their Olympic committee already knows she’s female, but this may stir up hate and danger from the general public for her when she returns home. Danger promoted by Musk, Rowling and Trump. I suggest each of them have their hormone levels tested immediately and publicized. Their moral indicators are already all too apparent.