Words by Ghassan D.
Artworks by Omar Khlif
This article is a supplement within the “Frenquencies” issue

Mid-July, I found myself in a back-and-forth with an LGB separatist1 and self-proclaimed Trans-Exclusionary Radical “Feminist”2 (TERF), about her trans-exclusionary activism. Throughout our discussion, I insisted that her transphobic attempts to ‘defend (cis)women’ harm her and the other cis-gendered women she claims to defend. I emphasized that despite her dedicated efforts in TERFist activism, she is not excluded nor better off with such gender policing.

The conversation lulls and my points are dismissed as she insists that I’m speaking in hypotheticals, that none of the consequences of gender policing I mention would ever touch the “real world”, and that this discourse in the echo chambers of the internet is forever confined there. For the most part, I was indeed speaking of hypothetical situations.

Early August 2024, however, Algerian pro-boxer Imane Khelif found herself at the heart of a combination of racism, transphobic, and misogynistic attacks. Forty-six seconds into the fight, Khelif’s opponent, Italian boxer Angela Carini forfeited in tears, earning Khelif a victory.3 Khelif’s celebration would not last long, and she would quickly face an online assault, invasive questioning of her sex, and other dehumanising rhetoric,  including accusations that she is a ‘hidden man’, and becomes the target of onslaughts by J.K Rowling, Elon Musk, Georgia Meloni, Donald Trump, and other high-profile figures, whom she is now suing for cyber-bullying.

I resisted the urge to send an “I told you so!” to the trans-exclusionary activist. I was dismissed, being told that transphobia won’t harm cis-women, instead, it’s protecting cis-women, and that my critiques were a hypothetical imagination. Yet, here was a cis-woman who was nonetheless a victim of transphobia. Not only did Khelif’s case show, on a high-profile and mainstream scale, how transphobic gender policing can harm anyone, Trans or not, but it also revealed the racist undertones of TERFism and its Eurocentric conceptualization of sex and gender. My intention throughout this article hence is not to trivialize the attacks Khelif had to face, but to reflect on what had been made tacit in the aftermath.

The Gold Medal vs the Terf Flag : Artwork by Omar Khlif
A judiciary court floating on water between the wisdom of the oceans and the heavens, where an Olympics golden medal representing Khelif is heard against the accusations of the TERF Flag.

Featured image: Imane Khelif vs the Tesla (A smiling winner looks from above at the sight of Imane fighting off a Tesla, a tank look alike, driving through the Land as an invader promoting racist white supremacist ideals.)

Eurocentric Femininity and Women of Color

The contemporary manifestation of transphobia, particularly online, builds off of a Eurocentric idea of femininity and masculinity. White/Western gender ideals are the criteria on which TERFs and transphobes designate who needs to be socially assaulted with transvestigation4 and harassment, and who doesn’t. To them, “real” women are delicate and petite, “real” women cannot possibly be that strong or that tall, “real” women cannot have defined facial bones, and “real” women cannot have a voice like that. Should you fail to perform this Western conception of femininity, you should gladly succumb to villainization and dehumanizing demands for genital inspection and chromosomal/hormonal tests.

In their efforts to “protect” women (and by that, they mean cis-women), they continue to police and bully all women, narrowing the boundaries of “femininity” into a suffocating, near-impossible White ideal. One X user proceeded to spew misogyny and transphobia at Khelif under the guise of defending femininity and womanhood.

Here is a cis-woman being attacked, dehumanized, and attacked as a result of the manic obsession with racist gender policing TERFism encourages and is built on. This is where transphobic gender policing gets us, this is how misogyny and the policing of women gets bolstered.

This racist conceptualization of gender is not restricted to transphobia only but to Western feminism as well. Women of color exist at the periphery of mainstream Western feminism, and the movement hasn’t successfully questioned its idea of femininity beyond the colonial and Eurocentric. In Khelif’s case, put simply by Tharwa Boulifi, “Imane doesn’t have typical, white women features. In the collective feminist psyche, she’s masculine. For racists, she’s too masculine.”5 [emphasis added]. 

This racist White standard of gender is adopted by TERFs and transphobes, but we should not be surprised that it’s taking place at the Olympics either, particularly considering the symbolic and disciplinary power the Olympics hold. Such an event, which revolves around the performance of the human body, lends itself to the policing of said body. Who the Olympics police gender for, and how, ripple out as institutional and disciplinary frameworks to police bodies. The Eurocentric colonial norms of gender and sex make themselves immediately apparent in whose gender and sex are speculated. There is a striking pattern of female athletes of color being put under this scrutiny, Imane Khelif, Annet Negasa, Santhi Soundarajan, Margaret Wambui, Francine Niyonsaba, Lin Yu Ting, Dutee Chand, Hitomi Kinue, Caster Semenya, the list goes on.

Dual Panics, Dual Exclusions

Khelif was pushed into the intersection of racist transphobia and misogyny, in the crossfires between two moral panics6 dominating Western ideological extremism and the right wing, an internal and external ‘culture war’. Internally for the West —  and projected online through cultural hegemony — there exists a “gender panic” surrounding gender identities and biological determinism, with Trans and gender non-conforming people set as the target. Second, is an ‘intercultural’ panic, the Hungtintonian7 clash-of-civilization discourse and paranoia over the supposed incompatibility and moral/existential threat the Arab-Islamic world represents to the West. 

Khelif became the victim of a racialized transphobic misogyny, paralleling historical colonial panics over those same two issues. I believe a large reason for the high-profile and mainstream nature of this discourse surrounding Khelif was simply because she had represented a seemingly perfect angle for the Western panics. Khelif represents the ‘evil’ camps that the Western right wing is fighting in its two ‘culture wars’, gender non-conforming and Arab. In their eyes, the boxing ring had turned into the battleground for the war to defend gendered and civilizational morality, and the perverse and uncivilized had executed a victory against the fragile White woman. 

Western civilizational and moral panic over conceptualizations of sex, gender, and sexualities they deem non-normative, and hence uncivilized, is a reaction oft repeated in history, and continues to this day, whether through homonationalist imperialism or these gendered civilizational panics. These panics were humorously summed up by one X (formerly Twitter) user, writing “the duality of ‘arabs are throwing gays off roofs in gaza’ to ‘arabs are sending trans women to beat up real women in the olympics’” [sic].

One Instagram post which reeks most of a colonial, racist, and misogynistic stench was made by Anna Luca Hamori, the Hungarian boxer who was set to fight against Imane following Imane’s victory against Angela Carini.8 Hamori reposted a fan-made illustration, depicting a dainty European-looking boxer facing a burly devilish beast in the boxing ring.

Split down the middle, the photo reflects how the dual moral panics divide the world into camps, and how they perceive themselves and others. They are graceful, they are human(e), and their vulnerability is acknowledged under the threats of the immoral, brutal, unnatural and inhuman(e) “woke” mobs and Muslim monsters of the world. This imperial trope of animalization being used as transphobic misogyny raises the most glaring red flags on the historical parallels and intersection between the gendered civilizational moral panic of the colonial and contemporary eras. If the racist backdrop to the attacks on Khelif was not explicit before, I hope it is now.

Another X user, in response to a racist and sexist remark made against Anna Luca Hamori, emphasized their focus on protecting ‘women’. “Don’t be racist, this isn’t about race. It’s about WOMEN!” [sic], they wrote, completely unaware of the painful irony of their words. In their attempted defense of anti-racism and protecting women, they continue to attack a cis-gendered woman due to their racist perception of true femininity.

It’s precisely these contradictions in their activism and panics, the selective ignoring of realities and stakes behind their activism, that weigh the heaviest. We’ve witnessed first-hand now, on a world stage, how transphobia, racism, and misogyny bolster each other and harm even those who assume they are untouchable by these forces. TERFs, branching off of White feminism, ultimately believe the patriarchal oppression, cis-women’s oppression, is the most fundamental of social prejudices, and so assume male privilege, a privilege they project upon Trans women (having been assigned male at birth), is the most dangerous of all privileges and prejudices, focusing solely on that and exempting themselves of confronting their racism, classism, and homophobia.9 Such arrogance over the intersections of these systems of oppression, and the assumption that the misogyny they face is not linked to any other form of oppression, allows them to blindly continue in their transphobic ‘activism’, that is, until their own transphobic gender-policing boomerangs back onto them. 

Similarly, LGB separatists perceive themselves to be fighting a separate battle than genderqueer people are, arrogantly ignoring the misogynistic and gendered roots of homophobia and how homophobia exists precisely due to how homosexuality is seen to violate gendered norms. TERFs and LGB advocates hoist up transphobic discourses in their politics, assuming this won’t come back to bite them. Both ignore the impact of their transphobia on their politics, and both share a complete disregard for the role Trans and gender non-conforming people and activists play in helping de-fang the gendered norms that prop up homophobia and misogyny. At the heart of this struggle are Trans people, facing movements advocating for their double exclusion from feminist and queer movements, a cherry on top of the racist and classist prejudices which shape and are often exacerbated by their gender non-conformity. 

Conclusions

We have seen the consequences of the double exclusion, and perhaps many might only care once this appears to affect them, and not the Trans and/or racialized other. Transphobia pushes us towards a world in which everyone’s gender expression is based on racist and misogynistic limits of what a “man” and “woman” are, how they should exist, and how they should perform. This notion is at the base of misogyny and homophobia, and while these ‘activists’ continue to attack Trans women right now in defence of cis-womanhood, the future they work toward will have them in Imane’s shoes, humiliated and attacked for the slightest divergence from the window of acceptability they have set up for “women” and “men”. Assuming exemption from these forces and unattainable ideals is at best naive, and at worst, destructive.

About Omar Khlif‘s artworks for this piece: Mixing photography and collage and drawing from the symbolism of flags, objects and built architecture, the ‘Case’ of Imane Khelif is imagined here in an absurd surreal world. Notably, the violence of a disturbing situation contrasts with the stillness of the natural setting where it happens.

  1. A separatist movement aiming to separate the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual movement and people from Trans and Genderqueer movements and people. As self-defined by LGB Alliance, a major LGB separatist group in the UK, LGB separatists are “asserting the right of lesbians, bisexuals and gay men to define themselves as same-sex attracted”, which they believe is threatened by “attempts to introduce confusion between biological sex and the notion of gender”.
    Greg Hurst “Transgender dispute splits Stonewall”, The Times, October 24th 2019.
  2. A movement of radical feminism, sometimes referred to as gender-critical feminism, which does not recognize Trans women and employs transphobia as part of their fight against patriarchy, framing gender fluidity as a threat to cis women.
  3. Karolos Grohmann and Aadi Nair, “Italy’s Carini abandons fight against Khelif, fuelling gender debate”, Reuters, August 3, 2024.
  4. Lexi Webster (2024) defines transvestigation as “users referring – erroneously – to apparent physiological cues of one’s assigned sex at birth, which motivate their interpretation of one’s transgender status, particularly among those who do not identify as transgender and focus primarily on cisgender celebrities. It is difficult to know whether these behaviors and interactions are symptomatic of an authentic ‘gender critical’ ideology or inauthentic practices that only fan the flames of antagonism in an ongoing social struggle.”
    Lexi Webster, “‘We Are Detective’: Transvestigations, conspiracy and inauthenticity in ‘gender critical’ social media discourses”, ELAD-SILDA, May 22, 2024.
  5. Tharwa Boulifi, “Cry more, Karen. Imane Khelif’s Olympic medal salutes Arab women”, The New Arab, August 5th, 2024,
  6. Coined by Stanley Cohen, the term ‘moral panic’ references the sociological phenomenon wherein “A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; and socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions.” Moral panics are largely irrational and widespread fears, often fueled by the media, identifying a group or behavior as an existential threat to the moral fabric of a society.
    Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, London: MacGibbon and Kee, Routledge, 1972.
  7. Samuel P. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis argues that future conflicts will primarily be driven by cultural and religious differences rather than ideological or economic factors, positing that the world’s major civilizations—defined by shared history, language, culture, and religion—will clash in the post-Cold War era.
  8. Greg Evans, “Imane Khelif’s next opponent shares ‘hateful’ images comparing boxer to a monster”, indy100, August 3rd, 2024.
  9. Emi Koyama, “Whose Feminism is it Anyway? The Unspoken Racism of the Trans-Inclusion Debate” in The Transgender Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 2006.