OII Europe strongly condemns the hate speech against two athletes competing in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris

Hateful attacks against athletes Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting fueled by sports federations’ sex testing practices.

“Every person has the right to practise sport without discrimination”

International Olympic Committee

OII Europe strongly condemns the hate speech against two athletes competing in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. The hateful rhetoric centres around speculations about their sex characteristics and the mischaracterization of these athletes not ‘being woman enough’ to compete in the category of their registered female sex.

As recent reports show^{[1] [2]}, hate speech and other kinds of hate motivated violence on the grounds of alleged or actual variations of sex characteristics have significantly increased in day-to-day life in Europe and across the globe.

However, in the case of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting the hate speech is clearly incited and fueled by a highly discriminatory and violent practice in competitive sports: the invasive and harmful practice of “sex testing”, an examination of genitalia, chromosomes, and hormone levels of women and girl athletes to try to “prove” or “verify” their sex. Sex testing is mandated by sports federations on any female athlete who does not neatly fit a narrow definition of how a woman has to look like. The practice of sex testing disproportionately targets women of colour from the global south. It is a practice which men are not subjected to.

Regulations from sports federations in the female category excluding athletes above a certain testosterone level force female athletes with a variation of sex characteristics to lower their hormone levels in order to compete. These regulations have prevented and are preventing athletes such as Caster Semenya to exercise their profession after having dedicated their lives to excelling in sport. They have also coerced female athletes with  variations of sex characteristics into having medically unnecessary and non-consensual interventions, including non-vital surgeries modifying their innate sex characteristics, in order to be allowed to continue their chosen profession as athletes^[3].

Already in 2016 the Women Sports Foundation stated that women with variations of sex characteristics have “the same rights to participation in athletics as all women”, while being particularly “vulnerable to exclusion from women’s sports, as well as ridicule and invasion of privacy”.

The foundation, whose mission is to fund “girl and women athletes to play, compete and lead without barriers, including at the highest level of sport”, firmly stated that “eligibility standards for women’s sports that require an athlete to demonstrate particular hormone levels promote the policing of gender by medical means [and] is discriminatory.” Furthermore it also “sends the harmful message that female athletes are uniquely vulnerable and in need of special protection from the normal, natural variation in size, skill, and athletic ability that exists among members of either sex.”

The policing of women’s bodies and dismissal of women deemed too masculine under the guise of fairness has a chilling effect on all women’s participation in sports, including but certainly not limited to women with variations of sex characteristics.

Sex-testing regulations also target and restrict intersex girls’ right to access sports and to choose a career in sports on an equal footing with everyone else. In addition, while coercing adult female athletes into having intersex genital mutilation (IGM)^[4] performed on them, those regulations have also led to intersex genital mutilation performed on intersex adolescents, who were tested when taking the next step towards becoming a professional athlete and, in the course of being tested, got a diagnosis that resulted in these non-consensual harmful interventions being carried out on them.

OII Europe condemns the hateful attacks against Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting. OII Europe also condemns the harmful practice of sex testing and strongly calls on governments and international human rights bodies to finally hold sports federations responsible for the breaches of human rights of athletes that those sports federations conduct on a regular basis.

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^[1] See the latest data from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights revealing alarmingly increasing levels of violence against intersex persons, and OII Europe’s statement.
Available at: https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2024/lgbtiq-crossroads-progress-and-challenges
Available at: https://www.oiieurope.org/fra-2023-eu-lgbtiq-survey-iii-shows-increase-of-violence/

^[2] See also the 2023 report from Intersex Greece on hate speech against intersex persons in Greece.
Available at: https://intersexgreece.org.gr/en/hate-speech-against-intersex-people-in-greece/

^[3] See “They’re Chasing Us Away from Sport: Human Rights Violations in Sex Testing of Elite Women Athletes”, a report from Human Rights Watch on the practice of sex testing compiling stories of athletes who have been coerced into interventions in order to compete.
Available at: https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/12/04/theyre-chasing-us-away-sport/human-rights-violations-sex-testing-elite-women

^[4] IGM encompasses non-vital surgical, hormonal and other medical interventions and practices that aim at altering a person’s sex characteristics without their personal, prior, free and fully informed consent. Other harmful practices against intersex people include, among others, vaginal dilation, bodily exposure to other professionals and students, medical photography, performed without the person’s fully informed consent, as well as violent/degrading examinations, secrecy, coercion and sexual assault/harassment in medical settings.
See OII Europe’s publication #MyIntersexStory featuring personal accounts by intersex people living in Europe: https://www.oiieurope.org/myintersexstory-page/