Translating the Discourse: Republicans and Women's Sports

If you enter the phrase "protect women" on just about any search engine right now, you'll stumble face first into a fog of bigotry.  That's because in very literal ways, conservative politicians conjure the figure of a White woman in danger to demonize groups of people they don't like.  And sadly, it works. White Americans get a little triggered, and that makes us a little more receptive to those politicians' regressive agendas.

Benevolent sexism

Although we could look to the past to see how this pattern has played out historically, we shouldn't assume this is a rusty, dusty old phenomenon languishing in the barn out back.  It's happening now. In a 2023 article called "Protecting Our (White) Daughters: U.S. Immigration and Benevolent Sexism," Rachel Smilan-Goldstein  observes that "conservative U.S. politicians" interested in promoting what she describes as "restrictive immigration policies" have "advanced a narrative that Latino immigrants commit violent crimes against White women. This framing of immigrant threat builds on a long history of similar anti-Black discourse and activates racialized ideas about protecting femininity."  

Specifically, Smilan-Goldstein argues that White Americans respond to this narrative with "benevolent sexism," which "invokes warm, protective feelings toward women who embody traditional feminine virtues of morality, purity, and chastity."  To be very clear, this virtuous, chaste woman is and must be White; in Smilan-Goldstein's experiments, "a Latina or Black woman victim of immigrant crime does not activate benevolent sexism among White Americans of any party affiliation." 

The names we know

As a catchphrase for anti-trans organizers, "protect women" seems like a similar appeal to benevolent sexism.  After South African runner Castor Semenya won a 2009 race - finishing in "less time than it takes . . . to microwave a Hot Pocket," as one writer put it - the sixth-place runner from Italy, Elisa Cusma, said, "These kind of people should not run with us . . . . For me, she’s not a woman. She’s a man.”

As it happens, Castor Semenya was not then and is not now a man; however, her body produced higher levels of testosterone than a typical woman.  She was thereafter classified as "a non-woman" (!) and barred from competing unless she agreed to lower her testosterone with medication or surgery.

As many others have noted, testosterone levels are not capped in male athletes.  According to Jaime Schulz, "In fact, male athletes with low testosterone can apply for a 'Therapeutic Use Exemption'" in order to take exogenous testosterone without breaking the rules.  Meanwhile, elevated endogenous or "natural" testosterone levels have been used to disqualify Francine Niyonsaba, Margaret Wambui, Christine Mboma, Dutee Chand, and Beatrice Masilingi,and more. It probably won't shock you to learn that none of these women are White. 

I have no idea how many White woman have been excluded, by the way - and as Rachel Maddow would say, neither do you.  Schultz writes:

The results of the tests are supposed to be confidential, so we don’t know exactly how many women have been drummed out of sport as a result. Researchers estimate that between 1972 and 1990, sex-testing procedures disqualified approximately one in 504 elite athletes. An untold number of women competing at the lower levels of sport met a similar fate, or else abandoned competition altogether based on fears that they might not meet the standards for femaleness.

The point, in any case, is not simply that a Black or brown athlete might win any given race; it's that a Black or brown athlete might beat a White woman who worked really, really, really hard. And then the White woman might feel sad about losing. And might appear sad to onlookers. And so it is that White Americans get wrapped up in benevolent sexism and start carrying on about the need to protect women - but only the proper kind of women: The white kind, the chaste kind, the kind that's definitely pure.

Trans women

The differences between trans women, on the one hand, and cis women with elevated testosterone, on the other, seem all but irrelevant to the discourse.  People who purport to care vey much about whether someone was born with a vagina do not in fact care at all if someone was born with a vagina, as demonstrated in the summer of 2024 when cisgender boxer Imane Khalif did what boxers do and popped her opponent in the nose.  (But oh, the crying. That poor girl. Protect women.)

The claims about what trans athletes are doing to cis athletes by competing with them are pretty astounding.  Did you know trans women are "severely undermining women's rights"?  Here I thought rights involved things like having bodily autonomy, in which case, it's far more accurate to say that trans women are having their rights undermined, aggressively and unconstitutionally, all over the country.  Trans women are also being actively demonized and dehumanized on the news, in ads, and in state legislatures, but there is a shocking silence from the public around the unfairness of those efforts.

And that's because of women's sports.

That's because conservatives got tired of being told that trans folks weren't hurting anyone, including and especially in public bathrooms.  They got tired of losing in court, including the Supreme Court. So they decided to use the same tactic they have deployed against CRT (protect White children!) and immigration (protect White women!). Conservatives have produced "victims" of trans-inclusive policies.

Cisgender swimmer Riley Gaines, 

who tied with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas

for fifth place in 2022.

The idea here is to make you angry, at best, or at worst, confused. Men are stronger, faster, and better at sports. Everyone knows that.  It's not fair for women to work hard when it's inevitable they will lose.

Except, as you might notice from the words in italics above, Lia Thomas (a woman) and Riley Gaines (a woman) were both defeated by the same four cisgender swimmers (also women). Loss is not inevitable, even though in the broadest sense, it is. There is no athlete anywhere in the world who has never lost. Athletes are not and cannot be paired up with competitors who are physiologically and psychologically identical, and who therefore have no advantages.  Sports are inherently pretty unfair.  

Again, as Schultz writes:

Researchers associate physical performance with over 200 different genetic variations. More than 20 of those variants relate to elite athleticism. These performance-enhancing polymorphisms – PEPs – can affect height, blood flow, metabolic efficiency, muscle mass, muscle fibers, bone structure, pain threshold, fatigue resistance, power, speed, endurance, susceptibility to injury, psychological aptitude, and respiratory and cardiac functions, to name just a few.  We don’t disqualify athletes with these types of predispositions.

To get worked up about testosterone and not fatigue resistance or psychological aptitude or muscle fibers is ideological. It's benevolent sexism, which politicians are deliberately activating to piss (White) people off and get them to support regressive policies.  

Why so mad?

The gender binary that underpins our White supremacist patriarchy cannot work if women won't play their role - their weakness to a man's strength, their softness to his roughness, their inferiority to his superiority. Trans women problematize that binary in ways Republicans clearly do not want to be tolerated. By anyone.

As Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, "They say someone is a criminal, and they dare you to defend the rights of criminals. They say someone is a deviant, and they dare you to defend the rights of deviants."

See these tactics for what they are. Protect the rights of women. All of us.