American rugby sensation Ilona Maher, was an inspired choice to be Sports Illustrated Swimsuit’s digital cover star. Maher’s cover, which debuted last month, featured her standing almost defiantly on a dock on Fire Island Beach in Bellport, New York, with blue water and green-yellow marshland behind her. She is wearing a brown bikini that shows off the majority of her thick, muscular frame. Her personal tagline, “Beast. Beauty. Brains,” runs along the top.
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The SI Swimsuit issue cover is a cultural phenomenon, credited with launching the careers of models like Chrissy Teigen and Brooklyn Decker. For a long time, it was the magazine’s top-selling issue each year. However, faced with a changing landscape for both print media and feminism, SI Swimsuit underwent a transformation in recent years — beginning in 2021, they began touting greater diversity among their models, which included putting a trans woman, model Leyna Bloom, on its cover, and featuring WNBA players in a photo spread. SI Swimsuit’s first digital cover debuted as part of its newfound independence from Sports Illustrated. The choice to feature Maher capitalizes on her post-Paris Olympics fame — as well as the increased profile that muscular women like Maher have occupied in mainstream culture recently.
Many people have celebrated Maher’s cover, but it also has a fair share of haters. Maher has made national headlines for her hilarious TikTok content responding to people who body-shamed her. “I get comments being called a man and being called masculine and asking if I'm on steroids,” Maher says in a viral TikTok video. “There will always be negative people out there. And they put women in a box. And they think women should be fragile and petite and quiet and meek. But that’s not the case.”
Maher was not the only Olympian who faced criticism for not conforming to traditional models of femininity. After Algerian boxer Imane Khelif won her gold at the 2024 games, a smear campaign launched against her falsely claiming she was a “man,” resulting in intense public harassment. Khelif, who is a cisgender woman, has since named Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and billionaire Elon Musk among others in a lawsuit for their part to play in what Khelif alleges is a coordinated cyberbullying campaign about her gender. Both during and following the Games, there has been an uptick in “transvestigations” like the one to which Khelif was subjected.
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Parallel to all of this, there’s seemingly been an influx of social sentiment, posts, and memes that glorify and celebrate beefy women, priming the culture at large to find platforms for another kind of beauty. Maher is currently having success on Dancing With the Stars, performing routines that play up both her strength and her womanhood with songs like Shania Twain’s “Man, I Feel Like A Woman” and choreography that features her lifting her male partner. Khelif was recently spotted sitting in the front row at Bottega Veneta during Milan Fashion Week and being featured in Vogue Arabia.
But it is within trans and queer circles that the full embrace of the muscular woman can really be seen. Following the success of Love Lies Bleeding, Katy O’Brien has become a lesbian heartthrob, with mainstream outlets like GQ and independent newsletters like She’s A Beast all posting articles that focus on O’Brien’s workout regimen for the film. Chappell Roan also recently recruited a slew of women bodybuilders pumping iron behind her during her Lollapalooza set.
Seemingly every Olympic cycle we are reminded that athletic bodies come in all shapes and sizes, only to suffer cultural amnesia and forget four years later. Olympians in women’s sports are subjected to brutal sex testing and excluded from the highest level of sport for not conforming to Western ideals of femininity. In more recent years, new policies explicitly ban trans women from competing at all. These policies can be traced back to Nazi Germany, according to the research of Michael Waters, the author of The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports. “The justification then, as it is now, was about ‘protecting’ women’s sports,” Waters tells Them. “Athletes who were overly masculine or who didn't fit a standard definition of femininity were seen as being a threat to women's sports.”
Even in the attempts to celebrate someone like Maher, whose thick musculature deviates from the kinds of thin, fragile, and delicate beauty ideals imposed on women, people are still incredibly weird about her and women’s bodies in general. The cover story that ran alongside Maher’s SI Swimsuit cover, penned by feminist writer Liz Plank, harps on Maher’s body. “Throughout our time together, I actually have to stop myself from staring at her,” Plank writes. “Whether it’s her piercing green eyes or her olive skin, it’s giving sentient caramel. With a jawline and cheekbones that seem like they could cut through steel, she gives a Roman statue a run for her money.”
This elevation of Maher, and to some extent, Khelif, to the status of “body positivity” icon is missing important context: both these women are cis, and their celebration, as well as their controversy, are intrinsically, and also explicitly, linked to trans women. (And as an aside, I personally believe that almost all elite athletes are trans-coded to a degree because what’s more trans than shaping your body to be and do exactly what you want it to? But I digress). And not only are cis women being embraced for certain trans expressions of beauty, but they are being lauded for features that historically get trans women killed.
“Getting too close to trans femininity, despite its obvious allure, reminds people of their fundamental social interdependence with trans women and trans-feminized people, who have been consigned near to the bottom of most social hierarchies,” Jules Gil-Peterson writes in A Short History of Trans Misogyny. It should be obvious that the uproar against someone like Maher ultimately threads back to a kind of transmisogyny. The online attacks of transvestigators predominantly affects cis women, with a particular focus on athletic women who don’t fit into white, Western ideals of femininity.
“This is what is most threatening to our culture about the ‘monstrous’ female bodybuilder or weightlifter’s body,” Stef Rubino writes at Autostraddle. “She challenges the stark contrast between what people believe is masculine and feminine and collapses the construction of masculinity and femininity into nothingness.”
Nevertheless, trans women are creating their own models of femininity. A recent photoshoot helmed by Willie Norris, the new trans CCO of TomboyX, features Marley Gotterer, a trans comedian whose online moniker is “the strongest woman in the world.”
“[My persona is] greater than life,” Gotterer tells Them. “Like, holding a mirror to American sports culture and flipping it on its head.” She agrees that there is a countercultural moment, particularly one in which men are de-centered and where women are coming to understand that they can be strong without a man.
“But at the same time, it's hard because I don't see trans representation,” Gotterer says of the muscular femme bodies in the mainstream. “We can be ungendering these gold medalist Olympians or these big pop stars and yet, at the end of the day, who gets the brunt of that hate is trans women.” Trans women, who are largely denied access to the sporting spaces occupied by the cis women, may receive a similar celebration and problematization for their musculature, but they have not been offered anywhere near the same platforms, access, resources, or protection.
Gotterer’s persona is fun and irreverent, but underneath it is a real, existential grievance. “Why do people only want to see me compete if I am performing as a lubed up ‘tranny faggot clown?’ Why does it have to be wrestling in beans, why can’t it just be playing mixed doubles?” Trans women who do try to make it by playing to the mainstream are shut out, too. Powerlifter Jaycee Cooper has been embroiled in a discrimination lawsuit against USA Powerlifting in the state of Minnesota after they denied her entry into women’s competitions in 2018, as well as her petition to allow her medication spironolactone, which is taken as a part of gender affirming care. For a sport that supposedly “doesn’t care what your body looks like,” as one headline put it, that’s a freedom that seems only to apply to cis women even though both cis and trans communities suffer the same kinds of misogynist body-policing sentiment.
“Praising the world’s most elite athletes for having bodies that are both genetically blessed and custom-designed for their sport but just happen to not always be super skinny does not make it easier for the rest of us to have non-normative bodies,” Virginia Sole-Smith writes at her newsletter, Burnt Toast. “And it would be okay if it just didn’t do… that. But what celebrating Olympian body diversity also does is reinforce the idea that your body doesn’t have to be thin but only if it’s really, really good at something else.”
Body policing comes down harshest on Black and brown women, whether they are cis, intersex, or trans, like South African runner Caster Semenya, Namibian track and field athletes Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi, Venus and Serena Williams and, of course, Khelif. Author C. Riley Snorton refers to this particular strand of racism as the “ungendering” of Black women in the book Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Snorton also cites the phenomenon he calls “thingification”— the removal of personhood and “societal assignment of fleshiness” that disproportionately impacts people with Black as well as trans bodies.
The truth is that queer and trans people have always broken gender norms, and have often been punished for doing so. In this budding trend toward a new, different kind of femme role model, there is a clear disconnect in the cultural conversation between the cis women lauded for it now and the trans women, particularly Black trans women, who did it first. Though fashion and culture spaces have always broken out trends invented by trans and gender nonconforming people without giving credit where credit is due, what might it look like to uplift trans bodies in a bigger way as a reclamation of the monstrosity that is placed on trans people for living in their bodies?
“What if trans feminism meant saying yes to being too much,” Peterson asks, “because a safer world is one in which there is nothing wrong with being extra?”
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