The Politics of Sex and Sport

Imane Khelif’s case reflects a broader historical pattern of empire projecting its unresolved anxieties about gender and sexuality onto “misfit” bodies and contexts.

Donald Trump’s final advertisement during his 2024 presidential election campaign appealed to perseverance, patriotism, and the revival of core American values. The one-minute ad features American cityscapes and Americans of diverse racial backgrounds and occupations, including military figures, construction workers, and police. The ad opens on a somber note, stating that four years prior, America had lost its purpose. It ends with footage of Trump’s survival of his assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, and highlights an emphatic slogan: “We fight.”

Every featured individual in the ad appears to be American, with one peculiar exception: the Algerian professional boxer and 2024 Olympics gold medalist, Imane Khelif. Footage of Khelif appears after the soot-covered faces of construction workers, with a narration reading: “Our patriotism was called toxic. Men could beat up women and win medals, but there was no prize for the guy who got up every day to do his job.” It reflects one of Trump’s core campaign promises to “keep men out of women’s sports,” and builds on a precedent of attacking gender and sexual minorities in the United States. But why, of all people, did the Trump campaign elect to feature Khelif, a non-American who did not even compete against an American during her welterweight boxing event at the 2024 Olympics? And how did Khelif, a boxer who has identified as female her entire life, become embroiled in a controversy over her gender identity during the Summer 2024 Olympic Games?

Trump’s “We Fight” ad deliberately strips Khelif of her agency in order to insist on the image and message of a stable, idealized, national-masculine identity. Khelif, as a presumed “man,” destabilizes and threatens gender categories through her “invasion” of women’s sports and “beating up” of women. What Trump’s ad suggests is that, rather than a regular boxing competition between two females, the Olympics somehow unfairly pitted a vulnerable female against an advantaged and aggressive male. What happened between Khelif and her opponent then ceased to be a match (which inevitably involves hard punching) and was transformed into a racialized event in which an aggressive brown man mercilessly harmed an unassuming white woman. By not performing a certain expectation of femininity, Khelif’s body was made into an illegitimate actor violating a woman-only space.

Testing Sex