In recent pop culture and social media discourses surrounding racism, ‘white woman tears’ has become a catch-all phrase for how white women — including feminists — manufacture distress and collude with patriarchal white men to harm people of colour (POC), particularly Black communities.
The maelstrom of misogynistic, anti-trans, and racist hate triggered by Italian boxer Angela Carini crying on camera, joined in by white feminists like JK Rowling, was a reminder of how only the distress of femininity that is packaged within the narrow racialised concepts of ‘womanhood’ is given empathy. And this is about race, make no mistake. Imane Khelif’s body, skin colour, and facial structure fall outside the traditional white concept of a woman.
Carini’s crying on camera appeared timed to coincide with the derecognised and controversial International Boxing Association (IBA)’s press statement the following day that cast further aspersions on Imane’s gender. The IBA’s gender test that ‘failed’ Khelif has no legal standing. Meanwhile, the organisation remains mired in corruption charges amongst others.
All of this colluded to spark the hate campaign against Khelif as a “man” who punched a white woman “too hard” (in an Olympics boxing ring where punching is an essential requirement, we could add).
The descent to transphobia — the misgendering of a cis woman as a trans woman, or many times even a ‘man posing as a woman’ — by people who refuse to acknowledge trans and non-binary people’s identities, turned out to be an easy leap from there. The fact that Khelif is suing Rowling and Elon Musk for cyberbullying has been a welcome development.
Is it unfeminist to use the term ‘white women tears’?
‘White women tears’, in anti-racism vocabulary, contains everything from the lynchings of Black men over false allegations of rape by white women in segregated Jim Crowe America (1800s to 1960s), to the 2020 New York Central Park incident when a white woman called the police crying and lied that a Black man — a well-known bird watcher — was “threatening” her. All he had done was ask her to leash her dog in an eco-sensitive spot for birds. The woman was proven to have fabricated the ‘attack’ and was fired from her job.
The Central Park incident could easily have gone another way, if the woman’s false allegations and manufactured distress on a call to the police, had been responded to differently. For context, the incident occurred on the very day – May 25 – George Floyd was murdered by police in Minnesota. Black and other people of colour are vulnerable — trapped between racism, the exclusive protections offered to white women, and police brutality.
In her article ‘About the Weary Weaponising of White Women Tears’, author Luvvie Ajayi writes, “White women tears are especially potent and extra salty because they are attached to the symbol of femininity. These tears are pouring out from the eyes of the one chosen to be the prototype of womanhood; the woman who has been painted as helpless against the whims of the world. The one who gets the most protection in a world that does a shitty job overall of cherishing women.” This neatly summarises what happened between Khelif and Carini.
Ruby Hamad in her book White Tears/Brown Scars recalls the personal cost of a column she wrote for the Guardian Australia in 2018. The piece was titled How white women use strategic tears to silence women of colour. Hamad says in her book that she was “vilified, but not only by local feminists,” whom she earlier in the book describes as mostly white, but that “it seemed everyone — from overt white supremacists to ‘classical liberals’ to progressives — had something to say about the article, and I was accused of everything from ‘bullying an entire race of women’ to setting back the cause of feminism to being responsible for the election of Donald Trump.” What she did not predict, she writes, was that the backlash would be global and would even rouse the ire of prominent conservatives.
The racist Instagram posts by Hungarian boxer Anna Luca Hamori who lost later to Khelif in the quarterfinals is an example of what both authors observe. Rallying around Carini, like many other white women athletes, Hamori shared a vile AI-generated poster on her Instagram story, ahead of her quarterfinal match. The poster depicted a hulking minotaur (half human, half bull)-like character, against whom a slim-waisted, delicate-looking, white woman with blonde hair was about to box. The bestialising of POCs, especially from Black, Indigenous or Muslim communities, has been a common historic trope. The post signals, with little room for doubt, what Ajayi describes as the “prototype of womanhood”: a white, thin, preferably blonde figure.
In an article for Al Jazeera, Hamad herself wrote on the controversy and Hamori’s racist post. “This is Orientalism writ large,” she says in the piece, “recalling centuries of representations of the ‘East’, in which non-white women have been variously depicted as either wretched, submissive victims desperately in need of saving by white men, or as masculine, animalistic creatures unworthy of protection, to contrast with the superior European women.”
So then, as feminists, we must contend with the problem of white women tears and how it causes harm to the global majority. Because when 25-year-old Imane Khelif walked away in glory with her gold medal, defeating world champion Yang Liu, it was feminists who should have stood in the sidelines, staunchly celebrating her. Across the prohibitive lines of gender, class, and race, this young Algerian Muslim woman made history. Instead, an online witch hunt was set in motion by Carini’s tearful interview after her 46-second match with Khelif.
Let’s also not forget that a significant section of the hateful posts against Khelif came from Indian accounts too. This is reflective of how in the global north, the privileged-caste south Asian diaspora continues to benefit from the civil rights struggles of Black leaders, while simultaneously playing the so-called ‘model minority’, thrown together with entrenched caste supremacy and anti-Black racism.
Back home, Brahmanical notions of womanliness align with Eurocentric ideals. Our film industries are a breathing monument to these ideals that also bestialise lowered-caste, dark-skinned women.
In a country now dominated by anti-Muslim hate, it’s of little surprise that many Indian netizens jumped at the chance to join the hate campaign against Khelif.
Common ground: Transphobia, patriarchy, race, and white feminism
Accusations regarding testosterone levels in women athletes –predominately POC–and ‘sex tests’ aren’t new to sports. The humiliations faced by India’s Dutee Chand and Santhi Soundarajan and South Africa’s Caster Semenya link directly to the narrow, Eurocentric, binary ideas of male and female. This has repeatedly hurt cis women of colour in sports, while simultaneously attempting to invalidate the identities of trans people. Previously, TNM in the article ‘Transphobia and testosterone regulations in sports are hurting all women athletes’ pointed out the science behind these binaries, and how such ill-informed understanding of sex and gender are ruining careers.
In 2006, Santhi Soundarajan, a middle-distance runner from Tamil Nadu and a Dalit woman, was subjected to humiliating tests and public bigotry, all on the basis of rumours that still reportedly have not been traced back to their source. By 2010, after ‘failing’ the gender tests, the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) informed Santhi that she had been barred forever from competing.
Speaking to TNM, Santhi says, “It ruined my life and I am still running from it. These rules are a violation of human rights. I can relate to the international humiliation faced by Imane. This is racism. And why is it that men are never put through gender tests?”
In all of the other women athletes’ cases, the sporting establishment itself turned on them. For Khelif, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) dismissed the allegations in a press conference, highlighting that she had been born female, assigned female at birth, and was raised a girl. But Carini’s tears on camera, and the fact that her physique fits the idea of ‘femininity’ more than that of a brown-skinned Muslim Algerian woman boxer, was enough to trigger international speculation about Khelif’s gender.
Simply at the bidding of a few powerful white celebrities including women on social media, a hate campaign began, which resulted in Khelif’s childhood photos (invasion of privacy) being circulated online while her father faced down reporters with her birth certificate.
It’s not to be forgotten that the IBA got involved in the issue by offering Carini 50,000 USD as compensation. The organisation stands derecognised since 2023 on the basis of failing to meet the IOC’s standards in terms of integrity and financial governance and displaying “a culture” of showing “no real willingness to fundamentally change”, among other charges. It was the 2023 IBA gender test that ‘failed’ Khelif — a test that the IOC has described as “flawed and illegitimate”. So far, the IBA has kept most details of the test results and methodologies used confidential.
Then there’s the issue of multiple corruption and match-fixing charges against the IBA. Not to mention that the organisation’s president Umar Kremlev, whose close association with Russian President Vladmir Putin has worried many, is accused of scrapping internal elections to retain his post. Yet the IBA’s test was brandished by Khelif’s bullies as ‘proof’ that she wasn’t really a woman.
Now here’s a quick history lesson: gender testing in sports was introduced during the 1940 Olympics by a registered Nazi party member who was also a member of the IOC. It was this man, Karl Ritter von Halt, who said “ladies taking part in the Games 1940 shall produce doctors’ certificates stating that they are women.” That is, gender-testing in sports directly goes back to one of the most horrific white supremacist movements in Europe’s past.
By 1948, these ‘tests’ included women athletes being forced to parade naked while their ‘femininity’ was confirmed or rejected by male doctors. It would take until 1999 for compulsory sex tests to be withdrawn by the IOC.
While gender testing procedures have technologically advanced, the notions of femininity that drive them remain outdated and tied to Euro-centric ideals that continue to mould white feminism, transphobia, and 21st century patriarchy.
Caster Semenya is still fighting for her right to compete, even though she won her discrimination case at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Caster is up against the World Athletics (WA), an international governing body, and its regulations concerning people with differences in sex development (DSD).
In their amicus brief to the ECHR on behalf of Caster, the Human Rights Watch scathingly said, “The Interveners submit that sex testing regulations are at their root a form of judgement and questioning of women’s sex, in which everyone is invited to scrutinise a woman athlete’s body according to dominant – and ultimately arbitrary – gender norms.”
They also highlighted another danger: “The regulations allows anyone considered a ‘reliable source’ to raise doubts about a woman athlete to the World Athletics medical manager through observation based on subjective and discriminatory assumptions and harmful gender stereotypes. Once doubts are raised, the processes involved in examining a woman athlete’s sex characteristics, and assessing her degree of ‘virilisation’, are inherently subjective and degrading.”
From Hogwarts to witch hunts
A central figure in the Imane Khelif debacle was JK Rowling. Once upon a time, she would have required no introduction as the author of the globally popular Harry Potter series and its spin-offs. Now, Rowling needs little introduction for her part in spreading transphobia and misinformation. Since 2018, the author has prolifically made anti-trans statements that, with her 14.2 million followers on X, have repeatedly caused online hate campaigns against trans persons.
When she inserted herself into the discourse surrounding Khelif, Rowling inadvertently only demonstrated the fallacy of the exclusionary definition of ‘womanhood’ perpetuated by her and other anti-trans feminists. She persisted in misgendering Khelif, even when it was made clear that the boxer was not a trans person. The obvious irony, however, did not stop the virulent social media hounding of Khelif as a “man who punched a woman.”
Rowling’s descent from feminist icon to well-established transphobe all began back in 2018, as many will recall, when she was exposed for liking a transphobic tweet that she was immediately called out for. At the time, she had claimed it was an “accident.” But soon the Harry Potter author became an openly anti-trans voice, with many branding her a ‘TERF’ (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) — an internet slang for feminists who don’t consider trans women to be women.
The term can now potentially get your post blocked as ‘hate speech’ on X after the take-over by Elon Musk. The X CEO, also known for his transphobic (among other regressive) views, joined in the social media witch hunt of Khelif. Musk quoted a post by an X handle named Riley Gaines who alongside a photo of Carini had said, “Men don’t belong in women’s sports. #IStandWithAngelaCarini.” To this, Musk weighed in with: “absolutely”, triggering another wave of hate against Khelif by his followers.
His involvement in this controversy came after a recent and very public spat on Threads with his trans daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson, whom he had deadnamed in an interview. He also claimed in the interview that he had “lost his son to the woke mind virus.” Vivian slammed him saying, “Going out of your way to misgender me … is both completely transparent and honestly just sad.”
His second online endorsement of hate against Khelif was unsurprisingly regarding a news post about former US President Donald Trump, whom Musk is financially backing with 45 million USD a month for the upcoming US elections.
Trump, BRICS News posted on August 1, had said that he would “ban biological males from competing in women’s sports.” Reposting this too, Musk said ‘good’.
It is disheartening as much as it is incongruous to witness how just two words posted by a white billionaire – whose family is accused of profiting from colonialism and South Africa’s apartheid – could destroy the career of an African boxer who sold scrap metal to fund her sporting dreams.