Little can be gleaned about who the runner Pratima Gaonkar was or might have become from the profile maintained on her by World Athletics, the international governing body for track and field. There are just two races listed for Gaonkar: a 400-meter dash from a July 2001 meet in Bengaluru, during which she clocked a personal best of 54.39 seconds, followed in September by a 400 in Lucknow, where she ran a 55.94 — slightly slower than her July showing but still fast enough, were she a high school student in the United States today, to get her recruited by a competitive collegiate track program.
Gaonkar was around 19 when she raced the 400 in 2001, but we wouldn’t know this from her World Athletics profile, which does not list her date of birth — or her date of death. Less than a month after the race in Lucknow, Gaonkar was found dead in a well in her home state of Goa, her body weighed down by bags of rocks tied to her ankles. According to local reporting, Gaonkar’s death — ruled a suicide — happened amid swirling questions within the sports community about her natal sex. Where some saw a classic triumph-of-the-underdog narrative in Gaonkar’s ascendancy, others had their doubts — not just about whether a girl from a poor family could race so well but whether she was even a girl at all.
Prior to her death, Gaonkar was allegedly asked to undergo sex verification at India’s National Institute of Sports to identify any “masculine” traits that would have given her a putative athletic advantage over other women. Gaonkar reportedly “failed” the evaluation, which could have resulted in her suspension from competition. According to her mother, Gaonkar’s coach was attempting to use the results as blackmail, threatening to out Gaonkar if she didn’t pay him 50,000 rupees.
In a coda to a story already rife with injustice, details from Gaonkar’s autopsy were leaked to the public, including descriptions of her sexual anatomy; per one journalist, “It was the police who virtually ‘raped’ her [Gaonkar’s] identity after her death.”
Others doubted not just whether a girl from a poor family could race so well but whether she was even a girl at all.
But Pratima Gaonkar isn’t the first woman to have suffered in the name of maintaining an even playing field for women. Nor is she the last.
Readers may remember the furor over Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s defeat of Italy’s Angela Carini at the Olympics last summer. After Khelif’s stunning victory, Carini burst into tears and lost no time embarking on a right-wing media tour accusing Khelif of being a “biological male.” Khelif’s next opponent, the Hungarian Luca Hámori, took to Instagram to post a seemingly AI-generated image depicting a frail, girlish figure in boxing gloves facing down a huge, monstrous, bull-like creature, complete with horns, in the ring. The analogy is obvious: Khelif is the bull, and Hámori is the plucky waif who has no choice but to enter the ring against stacked odds. The irony becomes palpable when all three women are pictured and there is no significant difference in their physiques — after all, they do compete in the same weight class.
Leading anti-trans figures like billionaire author J. K. Rowling and U.S. president Donald Trump were quick to rally their acolytes against Khelif, and the internet lit up like a wildfire with speculations about her body and motives for competing. The vitriol didn’t abate even when Khelif’s childhood photos and passport were dredged up, which disproved claims that she is transgender — the looming specter of terror for the right. On Ovarit, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) website populated almost entirely by heterosexual white Western women, commentators surmised that since Khelif grew up selling scrap metal to support her family, she was obviously raised as a boy because no girl would ever be enlisted to do that work in a conservative Islamic society — betraying a comical level of ignorance about the backbreaking labor that poor women and girls are forced to do the world over, Islamic or not. Some claimed that she was part of an Algerian plot to smuggle in “males” to cheat or that she enjoys “beating women.” (For that matter, do Carini and Hámori — or female fighters in general — not enjoy “beating women”? Or is the drive to excel at violent combat sports reserved for men only?) The racist subtext cannot be ignored either, especially as anti-immigrant riots ripped through Britain that same summer; Khelif, representing a formerly colonized North African country, must be part of a plot to destabilize Western nations and befoul white women.
In October, a document was leaked suggesting that Khelif, who was assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, has a 5-alpha reductase deficiency, classified as a Difference of Sexual Development (DSD) — a constellation of conditions, sometimes lumped under the term “intersex,” that affect the development of the reproductive system and secondary sex characteristics. Individuals with 5-alpha reductase deficiency have XY chromosomes but are often born with ambiguous genitalia.
Khelif’s detractors exulted in their supposed vindication, seemingly forgetting their former assertion that Khelif is actually a trans woman — that is, a woman who is assigned male at birth — or their insistence on enshrining birth certificates as permanent gender markers. Indeed, TERF lingo uses “Observed Sex at Birth” instead of using the more commonly known “Assigned Sex At Birth” claiming that sex, as an essential, obvious, and immutable characteristic, cannot be externally “assigned” based on an ultimately subjective evaluation — it can only be observed and dutifully notated by a doctor. Ironically, the terms AFAB and AMAB were developed in the first place by intersex people, who are harmed by the practice of forcing the entire population into one of two neat, color-coded boxes at birth, no matter how their bodies or minds might go on to develop. If sex can only be “observed” at birth by a doctor — not assigned — and what that doctor writes on your birth certificate is forever what you are, then Khelif is a woman — an Adult Human Female, in TERF parlance — even by these transphobic standards. Khelif is filing suit against the French paper that leaked the document, as well as against J. K. Rowling for inciting hatred against her.
Policies designed to maintain “women” as a protected category in sports often endanger those women most in need of social protection. Yet if we were to listen to the voices in the Global North leading the charge to “save” women’s sports, it is exactly these most vulnerable women — overwhelmingly poor, racialized, gender non-conforming, and queer — against whom sports must be defended. It is often women from the Global South who draw the ire of internet transvestigators. To quote writer Ayesha Siddiqi: “Every border implies the violence of its maintenance” — a statement no less true of the sex binary than the nation-state.
Sports Unmake Women
A new book by journalist Michael Waters, titled The Other Olympians, details the history of sex surveillance in elite sports. Waters notes that women’s participation in sports was discouraged as far back as 1888, in large part because of fears that athleticism would damage their fertility. Doctors claimed that declining birth rates were due to women’s participation in sports and that women ought to therefore “abandon cycling to the stronger sex.”
Alice Milliat was an early advocate of women’s sports and founded Fédération des sociétés féminines sportives de France in 1917. She also helped organize the Women’s World Games from 1921 to 1934 — ultimately lobbying for the inclusion of more women’s games in the Olympics. She was determined to prove that women could participate in sports without damaging their femininity or fertility. “They play fast, but not vigorous,” she claimed in response to reporters who questioned whether it was moral or “unwomanly” to operate a women’s soccer team. She enlisted doctors to examine her athletes to verify that their reproductive systems were unharmed by their exertions.
Nevertheless, anxieties about women’s sports only grew in fervor. Waters cites a 1922 article in the Daily Herald that fretted that if women participated in “masculine” sports like soccer or track and field, “a new type of human being, neither male nor female, is likely to develop.” A British newsreel depicting women high jumpers at the Women’s World Games was captioned “The new theory that ‘sport may kill sex’ does not worry them!”
The International Olympic Committee (IOC), displeased with competition from Milliat’s Women’s World Games, eventually agreed to allow women to participate in additional sporting events. But track-and-field athletes Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston complicated the issue of sex and sports further. Both Koubek and Weston were assigned female at birth; though they both felt somewhat alienated from womanhood and femininity and were often criticized for their “masculine” appearance, they were raised as women. Both won medals in the Women’s World Games — Koubek in running and Weston in shot putting and javelin throw. Eventually, Koubek and Weston decided to transition and live their lives as men, changing their names to the masculine versions, and discovering through consultations with doctors that they were born with DSDs.
Some commentators, particularly in America, were empathetic. Dr. Morris Fishbein, the long-serving editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, wrote a nationally syndicated op-ed about Koubek and Weston, stating, “Cases like this are repeated again and again in the pages of medical publications…No doubt in various places in the United States today there are little girls growing up who will eventually turn out to be predominantly male and who will need the type of diagnosis and surgery that has been mentioned…what they need most at this time is proper understanding by their parents, by their doctors and by the community in general.” But for the most part, the discovery of Koubek’s DSD resulted in an outcry about “hermaphrodites” and “abnormals” competing in women’s sports, as well as fears that competition in sports would encourage women to “change their sex.”
The American Olympic Committee member Avery Brundage, who was always highly suspicious of women’s sports, believing them to harbor secret men, fought the United States’ boycott of the 1936 Olympics, to be held in Germany. Brundage, an admirer of the Nazis’ model of racial hygiene, found an ally in Nazi sports doctor Wilhelm Knoll. Knoll insisted that female athletes would need to be medically sex-tested before each competition and that “abnormals” should be barred from competition, lest Germany be accused of cheating. Knoll didn’t have any clear guidelines on what constituted an “abnormal” or “hermaphroditic” woman. As Waters writes, “A woman who didn’t meet his standards of femininity, whatever those standards were, represented a challenge to the eugenic state. The Nazis associated masculine women with sterility and lesbianism; they were seen as unable to reproduce and, therefore, should be swept to the margins of society.”
Moving the Goalposts
Anxieties about sexual difference have been particularly intense within women’s track and field. In Tested, a 2024 podcast produced by CBC Radio, host Rose Eveleth traces the history of sex verification in women’s elite running, what she describes as a century-long, near-obsessive quest by sports officials for a simple, accurate test to determine who belongs in the women’s division. Birth certificates, it seems, have never been sufficient for this purpose; even an athlete born and raised as a woman might still have some ineffable masculine quality that must be isolated and eliminated to ensure the fairness of women’s competition.
(Male athletes, it should be noted, have never been subjected to coordinated, systematic attempts to verify their natal sex, although they do seem to need protection. Skeet shooting was a mixed sport until a woman, Zhang Shan, won in 1992; for the following competition in 1996, women were barred from competing altogether. This lasted until 2000 when a separate women’s competition was introduced.)
According to Eveleth, universal, on-site sex testing became a routine part of women’s sporting events during the Cold War. In 1967, at a time when athletes from the Eastern Bloc were facing intense scrutiny for doping, the IOC and the International Amateur Athletics Federation, or IAAF — the precursor to World Athletics — began performing on-site physical and gynecological inspections of female athletes. Dubbed the “nude parades,” these examinations only lasted for two years as official policy. “Many athletes from the era have since spoken about how humiliating and terrible they were,” says Eveleth. “Sporting bodies knew that if they insisted on testing everybody to verify their sex, they would have to come up with another way.”
With rapid advancements in the field of genetics, sports officials thought they’d found their silver bullet. Nude parades were soon replaced by a test that screens for an inactive X chromosome, otherwise known as a Barr body, which is most often found in bodies classified as female. Sex chromatin testing, which involved a cheek swab, was certainly less physically invasive than its predecessor. “Based on our reporting,” says Eveleth, “athletes were actually pretty happy to replace nude parades with these cheek swabs. I mean, really anything is better than being taken into a room and having to get naked so someone can check and see if your vulva looks right.”
Yet from the beginning, scientists expressed doubts about the accuracy of the Barr body test, which they claimed unfairly penalized athletes with genetic variations that are not associated with athletic ability. In 1985, Maria José Martínez-Patiño, a former Spanish hurdler, “failed” a Barr body test at the World University Games and was disqualified from competition by the IAAF. Martínez-Patiño was found to have XY chromosomes and androgen insensitivity. She contested the IAAF’s decision on the grounds that any putative athletic advantage conferred by having an XY chromosomal makeup would be negated by her body’s inability to respond to testosterone.
Martínez-Patiño appealed her expulsion for three years before being reinstated by the IAAF.
But her athletic career would never recover. Writing in The Lancet in 2005, Martínez-Patiño recounts how a quick cheek swab upended her entire life: “I was expelled from our athletes’ residence, my sports scholarship was revoked, and my running times were erased from my country’s athletics records. I felt ashamed and embarrassed. I lost friends, my fiancé, hope, and energy.”
After decades of lobbying by athletes like Martínez-Patiño, the medical community, and human rights groups, the IAAF dropped genetic testing in 1988 and ad hoc physical examinations in 1992. The IOC continued to screen athletes at its competitions, replacing the Barr body test with a supposedly more accurate Y-chromosome test, before abandoning sex testing entirely in 1999.
But this was merely an interlude in the practice of sex verification in elite women’s sports. In the late aughts, the emergence of a number of powerhouse middle-distance athletes from the Global South saw the sport’s governing bodies adopt novel methods of testing and surveillance that were rife with old prejudices. Based on contested science and targeting almost exclusively athletes of color, this new regime of sex testing could have come straight from the annals of colonial medicine. Over the next 15 years, a battle ensued between athletes from some of the poorest regions of the world and administrators in the imperial core, who were seemingly hellbent on keeping them out.
At the 2009 African Junior Championships, 18-year-old Caster Semenya crossed the finish line in the 800-meter dash in a blistering 1:56.72 seconds. This wasn’t the fastest time in which a woman had ever run the 800; that distinction was still held by Czech runner Jarmila Kratochvílová, more than 25 years after she’d set it at the 1983 World Championships, running a 1:53.28. But Semenya’s time was very, very fast, and accusations began to fly that she was doping — or worse. Spectators and fellow athletes alike scrutinized her muscular physique and butch gender presentation; surely there was something unnatural about her, detractors said, some masculine excess that needed to be excised and controlled.
In a stunning breach of Semenya’s privacy, IAAF officials revealed that her natal sex had been the subject of an investigation in both her native South Africa and in Berlin, where the 2009 IAAF World Championships were held. It also came out that Semenya had been misled about the tests by Athletics South Africa president Leonard Chuene, who reportedly told her that she was simply undergoing a routine screening for performance-enhancing drugs. Chuene claimed he lied to protect Semenya; he soon resigned.
This new regime of sex testing could have come straight from the annals of colonial medicine.
Pratima Gaonkar’s case prefigured many of the indignities that Semenya and other athletes would suffer as a result of the IAAF’s renewed interest in sex verification. When the IAAF leaked that Semenya was under investigation for potentially having a DSD, her body and life were fair game for public scrutiny. The sports world soon became awash in speculations about Semenya’s anatomy. As the media picked her apart, Semenya was sidelined from competition by the IAAF as she underwent a months-long “investigation” that reportedly included a two-hour gynecological examination. Like Imane Khelif, Semenya was found to have a 5-alpha reductase deficiency.
“The reason we have gender classification is because if you didn’t then no woman would ever win another title or another medal or break another record in our [emphasis added] sport,” said World Athletics (then IAAF) president Sebastian Coe during a 2019 interview with Australia’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. The paternalism is palpable. Coe seemingly rejected that Semenya and other DSD athletes were raised as women, lived their whole lives as women, are women, reinforcing a longstanding racialized gender hierarchy that inscribes white, cisgender women at the top.
IAAF officials allowed Semenya to start racing again in 2010, with the caveat that she keep her testosterone levels below a prescribed threshold. Two decades after abandoning sex verification, the IAAF resurrected the practice again. But unlike previous lab-based screening programs, this new testing regime would be far more targeted; screening wouldn’t be universal but performed at the discretion of IAAF officials, continuing the legacy of the Nazi sympathizer and misogynist Avery Brundage. The potential for abuses of power within this arrangement seems self-evident.
T as Destiny
As Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young observe in their 2019 book Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography, testosterone carries with it an ineffable explanatory power. Conventional wisdom suggests that if men, on average, have higher levels of testosterone than women, and that if men also outperform women in sports on average, then testosterone would be a viable predictor of athletic advantage. But Karkazis and Jordan-Young complicate the seductive simplicity of this logic, surveying vast quantities of research about sex hormones and their effect on the body and human behavior and attending to the social biases often reflected in these studies. While they acknowledge testosterone’s important role in shaping our bodies and lives, the authors caution that focusing on one hormone in isolation can obscure the complex workings of sexual difference and athletic ability. Testosterone alone cannot accurately determine who will be strong or weak, slow or fast, or male or female.
THE SPORTS WORLD SOON BECAME AWASH IN
SPECULATIONS ABOUT SEMENYA’S ANATOMY.
Semenya and other DSD women were given three options: take birth control, get a gonadectomy (read: sterilization), or forfeit competition. The proposal targeting these women of color looks nakedly eugenicist; while white athletes’ femininity must be protected, athletes of color must be sterilized. Any reproductive justice activist would rightly condemn such a proposal, one that places a woman’s reproductive capacity at such odds with her participation in public life. During an episode of Tested, Eveleth reads an excerpt from Semenya’s 2022 memoir detailing her reaction to the IAAF’s proposal: “That is their offer — to cut me open. You can tell them I said to go cut their mothers.”
Meanwhile, other athletes continued to be ensnared by the IAAF’s hormone restrictions. Dutee Chand, a 100-meter sprinter from India, was one of them. Disqualified from international competition due to her hyperandrogenism, Chand was just 19 when, in 2015, she challenged the IAAF at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, Switzerland. The CAS agreed to scrap testosterone regulations entirely, citing a lack of scientific evidence. Both Chand and Semenya went to Rio for the 2016 Summer Olympics, where Semenya took home gold in the 800.
Not everybody was pleased. Poland’s Joanna Jóźwik, who placed fifth in the race, told sports reporters, “I’m glad I’m the first European, the second white.” Sebastian Coe, for his part, was marshaling a counteroffensive. Two years later, the IAAF’s testosterone regulations were reinstated — backed, presumably, by proof deemed sufficient by CAS. This time, though, the threshold was cut by 50 percent; athletes who wanted to compete would need to maintain their testosterone levels below 5nmol/L. The limit was halved again in 2023, to 2.5nmol/L, where it remains today.
Semenya appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that the sex verification policies of the IAAF, which had since become World Athletics, were discriminatory. In 2023, the court ruled in her favor, though it didn’t strike down the regulations. Semenya’s victory, then, was largely symbolic: a tacit confirmation of the hypocrisy at the center of sports officials’ efforts to “protect” athletes from unfairness.
For a century, sports officials have been dogged in their efforts to purge women’s running of supposedly corrupting masculine elements. But as Eveleth notes, this history is often absent from coverage of high-profile testing cases. Eveleth was struck by this elision when researching a Kenyan sprinter, Maximila Imali, who was banned from the 2024 Paris Olympics for having elevated endogenous testosterone: “You would never know that the idea of testing a woman and arguing that her body was too male-like to be allowed to compete as a woman isn’t new. That there is this long history of trying to find and exclude women who have supposedly male traits. The only thing that has changed is what those male traits allegedly are.”
The Problems in Women’s Sports
Female athletes, existing in a high-stakes, multibillion-dollar industry, are consistently placed in an impossible bind. They must be strong, fast, and skilled enough to bring honor, glory, and ticket sales to their school, their state, their league, their nation. They must also be conventionally attractive, slender, and either passably heterosexual or acceptably gay to be palatable to the audiences that pay.
With female athletes competing under such pressures, researchers at Mass General Brigham estimate that anorexia rates may be as high as 42 percent among female athletes in the United States, depending on the sport, level of competition, and the athlete’s age. There’s even a term for the loss of energy, bone strength, and menstrual health that affects female athletes with disordered eating, particularly those in endurance sports: the “Female Triad.”
Countless athletes have attested to the harm caused by pressure from coaches and peers alike to lose weight, which is widely believed to improve strength and speed. In a 2019 op-ed video published in the New York Times titled “I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike,” 23-year-old distance runner Mary Cain offers a harrowing account of the time she spent competing for the über-elite Nike Oregon Project. “When I first arrived,” she begins, “an all-male Nike staff became convinced that in order for me to get better, I had to become thinner, and thinner, and thinner.” Cain says that under intense pressure from coach Alberto Salazar to lose weight, she developed suicidal ideations and began to self-harm, eventually quitting the program altogether.
Sporting organizations don’t formally screen athletes for disordered eating despite its well-documented health risks. Contrast this with the way that “high testosterone” in a woman, or a person perceived to be a woman, is pathologized. Both are linked to infertility, a jeopardization of what many see as the ultimate purpose of the female body: to bear children. But whereas anorexia is a confirmation of womanhood as defined under patriarchy — self-sacrificial, shrinking, silent — an “excess” of androgen signifies a body that is ontologically flawed in its femaleness.
For the most part, women’s sports have been considered a losing investment and are systematically underfunded. In 2019, Oregon women’s basketball player Sedona Prince went viral on TikTok when she posted a video comparing the men’s well-stocked and spacious weight room to the bare and meager weight room provided to women. The NCAA was quick to deflect blame, claiming that the discrepancy was due to “space.” Prince told USA Today, “We already know we’re getting less money, our food’s a little bit worse, our swag bags aren’t as cool. But then we see pictures of the men’s NCAA tournament bubble and they have this state-of-the-art massive weight complex and we have some dumbbells and yoga mats. Really?”
A follow-up in USA Today for the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX points out that colleges and universities in the U.S. spend 71 cents on women’s sports for each dollar they spend on men’s. When football — which women are not permitted to compete in — is added to the equation, schools spend twice as much on men’s athletics as women’s. Schools either declined to comment or tried to justify this discrepancy by claiming women’s sports just aren’t as valuable to the school. “Over the years, football, men’s basketball tend to garner more support. There’s just more donors that want to be associated with those programs,” said Josh Heird, interim athletic director at the University of Louisville.
Yet the financial spoils brought in by football teams aren’t necessarily shared by everyone who creates the successful spectacle. Consider players’ faithful helpmeets: cheerleaders. The 2024 documentary America’s Sweethearts showed the abysmal working conditions of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. NFL cheerleaders generally make the same wage as full-time Chick-fil-A workers; a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader sued the team, claiming she was being paid less than minimum wage — and less than the team’s (male) mascot. In 2016, the Cowboys settled with four cheerleaders after they accused a senior team executive of photographing them in the locker room when they were undressing, even though the organization refused to admit fault.
Although their extraordinary aerial feats can result in severe injuries, cheerleaders are revered not for their athleticism so much as their conventional attractiveness. One commentator on a forum for DC cheerleaders writes:
5’6 to 5’9 is the sweet spot. …They want tight bodies yet as little muscular definition as possible. I was 5’6.5″ and 118 pounds. You are weighed at your audition and you sign a contract that you will remain within 5 pounds of your audition weight. It states that you must ‘look good’ in the uniform and that is up to the discretion of the DCC organization…They will do their best to pad you up or minimize you to get the perfect [bra size] DD.
The policing of cheerleaders’ femininity is characteristic of attitudes toward female athletes in general. In 2007, radio shock jock Don Imus was fired from CBS for his racist and misogynistic comments about the Rutgers’ women’s basketball team: “That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos.…That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some — whew. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know…” Imus’ comments received resounding backlash, but in 2008, he signed a multi-year deal with Fox to simulcast his show, Imus in the Morning. These days, Fox News has rebranded as a crusader for women’s sports, spotlighting figures like Riley Gaines, who hosts a weekly podcast on Fox Nation, Gaines for Girls.
Gaines has emerged as one of the most prominent voices of the anti-trans movement. Unlike the Rutgers players who so horrified Imus, she is a white, blonde woman; slender with the standard Fox News blowout and one of the most decorated swimmers in University of Kentucky history. Yet she isn’t best known for a win but a tie for fifth place. At the 2022 NCAA Women’s Division I Swimming and Diving Championships, Gaines and University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas finished neck-and-neck in the 200 freestyle, but only Thomas, who is transgender, went home with the fifth-place trophy. (One might ask how four presumably cis women defeated a trans woman if trans women are actually “biological males” who have an inherent and outsize advantage in sports.) An official told Gaines that the trophy had gone to Thomas because she’d actually won by a negligible amount; Gaines would receive her award in the mail. But Gaines wasn’t buying it; to her, the incident smacked of woke virtue signaling, the deserving cisgender athlete passed over for a photo op with the trendy newcomer.
Having since retired from swimming, Gaines has turned toward “defending women’s rights to single-sex spaces and equal opportunities” full-time. Last spring, she joined 15 other current and former collegiate athletes in a lawsuit against the NCAA for violating Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that prevents sex discrimination in education. The plaintiffs contend that the NCAA’s policy of inclusion for transgender athletes has
imposed a radical anti-woman agenda on college sports, reinterpreting Title IX to define women as a testosterone level, permitting men to compete on women’s teams, and destroying female safe spaces in women’s locker rooms by authorizing naked men possessing full male genitalia to disrobe in front of non-consenting college women and creating situations in which unwilling female college athletes unwittingly or reluctantly expose their naked or partially clad bodies to males, subjecting women to a loss of their constitutional right to bodily privacy.
The subject of this breathless, prurient accusation is Lia Thomas, as the suit explicitly states. The threat of male sexual violence looms large in the complaint, reinforced by descriptions of the women as “non-consenting,” “unwilling,” and “unwitting.” The plaintiffs who competed with or against Thomas say they felt caught off guard about having to share a locker room with her. Thomas faces no allegations of sexual impropriety; her presence in the women’s locker room alone apparently constituted harm.
Considering the rates of body policing, sexual assault, and harassment endured by teenage girls by their coaches, doctors, and male peers, it would seem the main danger to women’s sports is, as always, capitalism, patriarchy, and cis men. In October 2024, Seattle Public Schools agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a former girls’ basketball prodigy who was systematically groomed and raped by two coaches, one of whom was serving as a volunteer coach after being fired from another school district. The girl’s lawyer pointed out in the statement how the culture of American high school sports engenders this form of abuse. Between April 2024 and the time of this writing in November 2024, at least four other high school coaches (California, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Oregon) have been accused of sexually abusing or grooming their charges. Many of these are repeat offenders.
Fair Play
For conservatives, TERFs, and other reactionaries, gender-diverse people represent an existential threat to the body politic, an unacceptable blurring of the schematics that make a world orderly, productive, and safe. For a century, female athletes have been subjected to successive regimes of sex verification, each new test promising to be more accurate than the last while causing immense harm to the women they ensnare. Cisgender women haven’t been spared, and the regime of biological surveillance in sports that dissects women’s feminine qualifications is a menace to all competitors. Seen in this light, gender self-identification in sports is the only solution that serves us.
That idea isn’t as new as it sounds. The practice of self-identification — when an athlete participates in the sporting division that best aligns with their gender identity — is longstanding. People we would now consider “transgender” or “intersex” (or who transphobes would label “biological males”) have always competed in women’s sports. There is no evidence that cis girls and women are being sidelined in competition by their trans and gender-nonconforming peers.
Riley Gaines and other purported defenders of women’s sports profit off the resentment and anger of cisgender athletes who perceive transgender inclusion as yet another concession they’re being asked to make before receiving their due. Scarcity and competition are ideal breeding grounds for intolerance, and Gaines has an incentive to keep the illusion of a zero-sum competition between cis and trans athletes in motion.
SCARCITY AND COMPETITION ARE IDEAL BREEDING GROUNDS FOR INTOLERANCE.
It is the professionalization of sports — a vicious, winner-takes-all game where lofty concepts of honor, sportsmanship, patriotism, discipline, and grit are the set dressing for a ruthless capitalist enterprise — that disadvantages women. The predicament over trans kids in high school sports should make us wonder why such battle royales are expected of our children so that they can have a future — in some cases, so they can lift their families out of poverty. When women are commodities, their bodies become subject to rigorous surveillance and punishment; to the impossible expectation that they perform but also look acceptably womanly; that they dominate the (often racialized) Other but still remain deferential, profitable, and sexually available to the patriarchy. A starting point to rectify this would be decoupling sports from an exploitative profit matrix that imposes life-changing stakes on who wins an eleventh-grade swim meet.
In recent years (and especially in the post-Dobbs era), gender policing in sports is increasingly bound up with issues that affect the vast majority of women, notably abortion. Two-pronged legislative attacks have emerged with alarming frequency, the issues fused under the guise of “women’s protection.” This past November, Proposition 1, which ends discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, and gender identity and cements access to reproductive health care, was on the ballot in New York. In an anonymous op-ed in the New York Post, a writer who identifies herself as a high school tennis player claimed that passing the measure “would mean the end of girls’ sports,” continuing, “[It] would also let males intrude on female-only spaces…This is terrifying, and it should terrify the parents of every girl in New York state.”
A throwaway line about abortion offers a clue about the larger political project in which this entreaty to “save girls’ sports” is embedded. “Supporters say Prop 1, which they call the ‘Equal Rights Amendment,’ keeps abortions legal — but New York already has some of the strongest abortion laws in the country,” the op-ed reads before pivoting back to sports. As the anti-abortion movement has demonstrated with its cynical appropriation of “pro-woman” language — compulsory gestation and childbirth are, in fact, highly detrimental to the safety and dignity of people who can become pregnant — “protection” is, more often than not, a right-wing dog whistle.
Ken Paxton, Texas attorney general, is spearheading lawfare efforts against providers of both gender-affirming care and abortion, seeking to overturn both HIPAA protections and New York’s shield laws protecting abortion providers. We have written for this magazine previously about how anti-trans, anti-contraception, and anti-abortion feminists view all of these interventions as a technocratic plot to erase sex difference in order to maximize the body’s profitability — a sort of anti-capitalism of the far right. The “great replacement theory” popular on the right positions feminism, abortion, and LGBTQ rights as existential attacks on the West. Their solution? Build the walls: Keep immigrants out, queers in the closet, babies in the womb, and women in the home.
As we prepared to go to press, Donald Trump became president for the second time. One of his first acts in office was to pass an anti-trans executive order, “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.” It states that “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” The bill sets up a legal framework for defining personhood from conception at the federal level, paving the way for a federal abortion ban. And it does so on the way to institutionalizing violence against transgender people by, for example, forcing transgender women into men’s prisons.
The current moral panic about sex difference in sports is intimately tied to reproductive rights, queer liberation, and ultimately, the role of women in public life. Attacks on gender-diverse athletes will result in the increasingly violent and punitive surveillance of all women. In the end, it didn’t matter what Pratima Gaonkar’s tests suggested — she was destroyed by shame, and other female athletes were put on notice. This is not an unintended outcome. This was always the point.
Emily Janakiram is a writer and a member of NYC for Abortion Rights. Megan Lessard is a member of NYC for Abortion Rights and a former collegiate distance runner.
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