From the beginning of her tennis career in the mid-1990s, Serena Williams’s body was a battlefield. After turning pro at 14, she battled her way through 23 Grand Slams, faced down a slew of injuries, and later, in her 30s, survived a birth experience that nearly killed her. Her body went through a lot—and it was as often a focus of praise and awe as ludicrous, petty criticism. “People would say I was born a guy, all because of my arms or because I’m strong,” Williams told Harper’s Bazaar in 2018. “I was different to Venus: She was thin and tall and beautiful, and I am strong and muscular—and beautiful, but, you know, it was just totally different.”
Williams is far from the only cisgender Black female athlete to contend with such cruelty; basketball player Brittney Griner and runner Caster Semenya have dealt with similar remarks. All three women were on my mind last week after 25-year-old Algerian boxer Imane Khelif defeated Angela Carini of Italy in under a minute at the 2024 Paris Olympics, promptly starting a firestorm. Carini refused to shake Khalif’s hand after the fight (she has since apologized) and called the win “not fair”—which some understood as a reference to the fact that in 2023 the International Boxing Association determined that Khalif and another cis woman boxer, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, had “competitive advantages over other female competitors” and disqualified them from the world championships. But gender-critical celebrity opportunists, including J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk, had already descended to question Khelif’s womanhood and mire her hard-won success in the muck of racist and transphobic rhetoric.
The pain of this kind of accusation is multifaceted, particularly when it’s leveled against women of color. Not only does it further demonize and demean actual trans girls and women (far too many of whom are still denied the opportunity to compete at the highest athletic levels or even simply play sports in school), but it also deliberately otherizes cis women of color, punishing them for excelling and telling them—and the millions of young women looking up to them—that their very selfhood is negotiable.
One thing that isn’t remotely questionable in all of this, however, is Khelif’s talent. After besting Carini last Thursday, Khelif went on to defeat Luca Anna Hamori of Hungary over the weekend—shortly after Hamori reportedly shared an Instagram meme that many interpreted to be an attack on Khelif—and then Janjaem Suwannapheng of Thailand in the women’s welterweight semifinal this afternoon.
But the point of the smear campaign marshaled by Rowling and her ilk has nothing whatsoever to do with Khelif’s ability: Its point is distraction. As Toni Morrison once put it, “[Racism] keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” While it’s commendable that Khelif has turned this ugly moment into an opportunity to speak out against bullying, it’s also painful to imagine what she—or Williams or Semenya or any other woman of color accused of being too much of one thing or not enough of another the moment she soars past society’s expectations—could be doing with all the mental and emotional energy she’s been forced to expend on bad-faith critics.
Despite the progress exemplified by Vice President Kamala Harris and other highly visible women of color rising through the ranks of global politics, it’s hard not to see the controversy surrounding Khelif’s wins as evidence of a harsh and unyielding glass ceiling—one that restricts the potential of anyone who dares to excel while diverging from cis heteropatriarchal notions of what a woman (and, in particular, a woman of color) should look like. The impact that Khelif is surely already having on a generation of girls is not to be overlooked, but we’ll know we’ve really grown as a society when she, or someone like her, can be the best without having her achievements overshadowed by blatant racism and misogyny.
