On August 9, Imane Khelif became the first Algerian woman to bring home a gold medal in a boxing event during the 2024 Paris Olympics. But just days before her victory, the athlete’s identity became the subject of intense public scrutiny from notable TERFs, right-wing pundits, and anti-trans politicians alike, who falsely accused the cisgender boxer of being transgender and “male.” Whether knowingly or not, these attacks from the likes of J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk regurgitated talking points from a group of anti-trans conspiracy theorists colloquially known online as “transvestigators.”
In order to understand this bizarre and violently transphobic phenomenon, we’ve answered some of your burning questions about transvestigation and the anti-trans extremists who participate in it: What does it mean to transvestigate? Where did the theory come from? Why is the right using it as a political tool?
Who are transvestigators, and what does it mean to transvestigate?
Transvestigators — lurking in comment sections, Facebook groups, and other dark corners of the internet — make factually baseless conclusions to “uncover” celebrities and public figures they believe are secretly trans, a.k.a. a “transvestigation.” Transvestigators often utilize racist, anti-semitic, and white standards of beauty to out “inverts,” or the celebrities they falsely believe are trans.
These rumors have targeted many, including Michelle Obama, Taylor Swift, and Daniel Radcliffe’s girlfriend, actress Erin Darke. While transvestigators are a fringe group of conspiracy theorists, similar to Pizzagate and QAnon, their talking points are not. What makes transvestigations dangerous is how they bleed into mainstream right wing politics and broader anti-trans sentiment. Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance even spouted off accusations on X that Khelif is “a grown man pummeling a woman” and that Vice President Kamala Harris was responsible. (How? We do not know.) The 2024 Summer Olympics were also rife with transvestigator ideology, as multiple cis athletes were accused of secretly being “men,” from American rugby player Ilona Maher to Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting.
Victims of transvestigation are typically scrutinized for having features that transvestigators deem outside the bounds of a person’s biological sex, like “broad shoulders” and “large noses" on women. Men are similarly analyzed for “delicate features.” Their pseudoscientific tactics hinge on a transphobic or misogynist belief that if a successful person has even a shred of gender nonconformity, they must have gained that success through false pretenses or nefarious means.
These ideas are out of step with basic scientific understandings of sex. As culture progresses, researchers are finding more and more that sex is a binary social construct that does not match the complex reality of our bodies. The Endocrine Society — the largest and oldest medical organization dedicated to researching hormones — determined that phrases like “biological sex,” “biological male,” and “biological female” are “imprecise and should be avoided.” The standards transvestigators use to “prove” someone is trans are simply wrong.
Where did transvestigation come from?
According to GLAAD, transvestigation emerged as a “hate-driven conspiracy theory” in 2017 after the rise of legislative anti-trans sentiment. The broader ideology behind transvestigation is called “Elite Gender Inversion,” the idea that many, if not most, famous people are secretly trans and part of a cultish cabal attempting to control the world. These ideas percolate on niche message boards or subReddits like r/egi and rarely garner large followings. However, the broader reasons transvestigators exist can be linked to the larger anti-trans political environment created by the U.S. conservative Right.
As a 2024 analysis by Media Matters For America noted, “these false accusations come amid a broader ‘trans panic’ encouraged by right-wing media and politicians.”
Why is the Right using transvestigation as a political tool?
Though right-wing politicians and pundits don’t generally believe that a horde of trans celebrities are secretly controlling the world, that doesn’t stop them from perpetuating transvestigator ideology. Notorious far-right podcaster Alex Jones accused Michelle Obama of being trans in 2017. Donald Trump used the controversy surrounding Khelif during a campaign stop to remind people of his anti-trans stances, saying “keep men out of women’s sports.” Rowling called Khelif “a male who’s [sic] knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head.” Transphobes even went after trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, falsely claiming she is actually a trans man who detransitioned after being forcibly “transitioned” as a child.
Transvestigation wields political power by falsely implying that being trans is inherently negative and that trans people are trying to “trick” cis people in plain sight. But transvestigators, and those who exploit their conspiracies for their own political ends, fail to realize that they themselves aren’t protected by their anti-trans political strategy, as the primary victims of transvestigations are cisgender people. (There is a widely circulated belief, for example, that Melania Trump is trans.) What these accusations all have in common is that they attempt to dehumanize and discredit those accused, to no real end.
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