It’s no coincidence that Imane Khelif is from decolonized Algeria. The current state of the global gender hegemony is a direct result of colonial gender enforcement.

Bourgeois gender ideology rose to prominence during their early consolidation of power through the transatlantic slave trade and the colonization of the new world. Womanhood as a class category was built in direct opposition to the existence of racialized women: from its inception, bourgeois “womanhood” specifically excluded women of colour.

The bourgeois gender roles didn’t hold for slaves: Black women were expected to toil in “masculinized” field labour alongside the men, and Black men were also used for domestic, “feminized” labour. Womanhood–and manhood, to a lesser extent–was specifically a condition of white European femininity, which needed to protected from the perceived evils of miscegenation. Slaves were dehumanized, literally objectified, and thus ineligible for gendering.

With the abolition of formal chattel slavery, fears of miscegenation became rampant in bourgeois society, and so the status of “womanhood” as a state of white fragility that required protection from the Black Other was cemented. At the same time, feminized labour was still being done by former slaves and now racialized immigrants, mostly men as women were largely excluded from many wage labour activities, which kept the lines between “manhood” and “womanhood” blurry (as perceived by the bourgeois ideology).

The racialized Other was simultaneously feminized, never able to truly attain the dominant position of “man,” which was a bourgeois (and thus white) class position, and dehumanized, projected to be a dangerous object of violence, an “animal.” Racialized women, who due to immiseration and systemic denial of opportunities, continued to labour in ways unfit for (white, bourgeois) “womanhood,” were not granted entry into the role of “woman.” While white womanhood was a position of fragility, a potential victim of the perceived dangers of miscegenation, racialized women were excluded from womanhood (and, through objectification, humanity) itself, the overwhelming victims of gender-based and sexual violence, which became a tool leveraged by white men to control, dominate, and punish those who strayed from their perceived “place.”

The one-two punch of white (woman) fragility, and white (man) domination, are essential kernels of bourgeois/colonial gender ideology, and are methods still in use to enforce colonial/imperial roles on the world at large.