‘But she’s not even trans!’: A rhetorical analysis of ‘liberal feminist’ defences of Imane Khelif amid Olympic transvestigations

In the explosion of discourse across the political spectrum amidst Imane Khelif’s Paris Olympics performance, little academic attention has been paid to the subtle anti-trans and anti-Arab rhetoric posed by supporters of Khelif in defence of her success. In essence, this article adopts the case study of the discursive landscape surrounding Khelif’s Paris Olympics win to demonstrate the theoretical and liberatory limits of exclusionary, so-called ‘liberal’ feminism. As anti-trans sentiments, violence, and legislation are steadily rising across North America, most blatantly within the US, there is an imperative to not only address the overt right-wing transphobia responsible for these attacks, but also the normalization of anti-trans rhetoric among the left. Under the guise of a feminist orientation, these ‘liberal feminists’ defend Khelif’s eligibility to compete by touting her cisgender womanhood – silently reinforcing the notion that transgender and intersex athletes are deserving of that violence and exclusion. These arguments also suggest the impossibility of an LGBTQ + identity for Algerian-born Khelif, given her ‘homophobic’ and ‘transphobic’ society: a common Orientalist trope assigned to Arab and Muslim countries to justify Western imperialism. Finally, we analyse the failure of these arguments to address systemic forms of gender-based violence in sport, including sex testing, which disproportionately affects racialized women athletes from the Global South.