Social media is increasingly recognized as providing a platform for misogynist, heterosexist, and transphobic harassment. How is the online harassment of athletes with intersex variations used as a mobilization strategy to pressure sports organizations to adopt exclusionary policies? In this presentation, Dr Pape examines the case of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and the online misogyny targeting Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif. Focusing on english-language posts on the platform X during the two weeks of the Games, she analyzes how feminist lobby groups, many of them located in the US and UK, discursively constructed Khelif as fraudulent in her gender identity and a danger to other women. In highlighting the violence in such harassment, and the hatred directed towards Khelif, Dr Pape shows how this period of intensive online mobilization constituted a form of misogyny, in the form of misogynist commentaries and threats to the personal safety of Khelif from a wide range of online actors. She concludes by reflecting on how attacks on women deemed "excludable" from sport contribute to the normalization of misogyny in sport and online spaces more broadly.

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Dr Madeleine Pape (she/her) is a Maître Assistante FNS Ambizione at the University of Lausanne’s Centre for Gender Studies and Institute of Social Sciences. Her research on the politics of womanhood in sport is informed by her experience of competing alongside South African Olympic champion, Caster Semenya, at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin. An expert in the harms of inclusion debates at the national and international level of sport, and standards of evidence in the regulation of eligibility by sports organizations, her work has been published in leading international journals and has received support from the US National Science Foundation, Australian Research Council, Swiss National Science Foundation, and Olympic Studies Centre.