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On Aug. 1, a second round welterweight women’s boxing match at the Paris Olympics between Italy and Algeria sparked a controversy over gender eligibility and led to a profusion of misinformation about the winning boxer, Algerian Imane Khelif. Contrary to the claims of many, including former President Donald Trump, Khelif is a woman and is not transgender.
Much of the speculation about Khelif’s gender stems from a disqualification at the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships by the International Boxing Association for an unspecified gender eligibility test. The IBA, which has ties to the Kremlin and does not oversee boxing at the Olympics, has suggested that Khelif and another boxer, Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, have XY chromosomes and/or have elevated testosterone levels.
It is unclear how legitimate these claims are. The IBA has released few details of the testing, and the International Olympic Committee, which no longer recognizes the organization as the global federation for boxing, has condemned the IBA’s testing process, calling it “arbitrary” and “flawed.” Even if the IBA’s claims are true, however, it’s incorrect to call Khelif and Lin men or transgender women.
“The Algerian boxer was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport. This is not a transgender case,” IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said in an Aug. 2 press conference.
The Carini-Khelif Bout
The bout that initiated the controversy lasted just 46 seconds. In it, the two boxers fought for about 40 seconds before Italian Angela Carini went to her corner to have her head guard tightened. Khelif then landed one strong punch to Carini’s face, and Carini walked over to her ropes to abandon the match. Visibly upset while still in the ring, Carini can be heard saying, “it’s not fair” in Italian. She did not shake hands with Khelif.
After the fight, Carini told reporters that she had “never felt a punch like this” and that she quit because “one punch hurt too much.” She also told the BBC in a post-bout interview that she “felt a strong pain to my nose” and “had to preserve my life.”
Later, speaking to an Italian newspaper, Carini apologized to Khelif for not shaking her hand. “All this controversy certainly made me sad, and I also felt sorry for my opponent, she had nothing to do with it and like me was only here to fight,” Carini said. “I was angry, because my Games had already gone up in smoke. I have nothing against Khelif, and on the contrary if I happened to meet her again I would give her a hug.”
The optics of the match, however, proved irresistible to many online. Numerous false or unproven claims about Khelif’s gender began circulating widely on social media.
One Aug. 1 Instagram post incorrectly called Khelif a “transsexual,” an older term for transgender that many in the community reject.
A Threads post using a manipulated image purportedly showing Khelif with Vice President Kamala Harris falsely claims Khelif “used to be a man” and refers to her as “He/she.”
Several other posts shared screenshots of a Daily Mail story that referred to Khelif as “biologically male.” As we said, the IBA has suggested Khelif has XY chromosomes, which are typical of males, but it’s unclear if that is really true.
Trump also weighed in, sharing a clip of the short fight the same day on his social media platform, Truth Social, and pledging to “KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!”
He again referenced the fight in an interview with Fox Business that aired the next day, Aug. 2, stating, “There will be no men playing in women’s sports when we’re elected.”
The U.S. president, of course, has no say in the gender eligibility rules at contests such as the Olympics. The IOC follows the eligibility rules set by each sport’s international federation.
During a rally in Atlanta on Aug. 3, Trump again brought up the Carini-Khelif fight, this time falsely claiming that Khelif is trans.
“This young girl from Italy, a champion boxer. She got hit so hard, she didn’t know what the hell hit her. It’s a person that transitioned. He was a good male boxer,” Trump said. “And she didn’t even go down. He hit her with two jabs and she said, ‘I’m out.’”
The day of the fight, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, also reshared a clip of the match on X from conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, adding, “This is where Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender lead: to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match. This is disgusting, and all of our leaders should condemn it.”
Khelif Isn’t Trans
Eligibility for women’s boxing in Paris — as it has been for past Olympic Games — is based on the gender listed on a person’s passport. There is no evidence that Khelif identifies as trans, and Algeria does not legally allow people to change genders, according to the advocacy group Outright International and Equaldex, a crowdsourced database measuring the progress of LGBTQ+ rights worldwide.
Following the uproar about her eligibility, Khelif has denied allegations that she is not a woman. “I want to tell the entire world that I am a female, and I will remain a female,” she told reporters after her Aug. 3 win against a boxer from Hungary. Khelif has since won her semifinal match against her opponent from Thailand and is slated to box for gold against a woman from China on Aug. 9. She has boxed in international women’s competitions since 2018, when she started in the lightweight division, including a loss in the quarterfinals at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Her amateur record prior to this Olympics is 38-9, according to BoxRec.
Update, Aug. 9: Khelif bested her opponent and won her gold medal match.
Khelif’s father has also said that his daughter is a woman, showing Reuters a document with her name, birthday and listed sex as female. “Imane is a little girl that has loved sport since she was six-years-old,” he told the news outlet. He similarly told Sky Sports, “My child is a girl. She was raised as a girl. She’s a strong girl.”
Transgender refers to a person’s gender identity not matching their assigned sex at birth. Since Khelif was born female and considers herself a woman, she is by definition not trans.
If Khelif has XY chromosomes — as alleged, but not proven by the IBA — this does not mean she is a man or is trans, Dr. Eric Vilain, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine, and expert on the genetics of sex, told us in an email. That’s because, he said, “chromosomes are only one part of several biological parameters different between men and women. A good example are women with XY chromosomes and complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. They are born and raised as girls.”
As the Endocrine Society explains, differences of sexual development, or DSD, can occur such that the chromosomal sex of a baby doesn’t match their genitals. A child with XY chromosomes, for example, can have ambiguous or female genitals if the testicles don’t develop properly or if the body doesn’t respond properly to the sex hormone testosterone. This is known as 46,XY DSD.
Androgen insensitivity syndrome is the most common cause of 46,XY DSD, according to the National Institutes of Health’s MedlinePlus. In this condition, “the body’s cells and tissues are unable to respond to certain male sex hormones (called androgens) that are important for normal male sexual development before birth and during puberty. As a result, affected individuals may have external sex characteristics that are typical for females or have features of both male and female sexual development.”
It’s not a given that a woman with XY chromosomes would necessarily have an unfair advantage over a woman with XX chromosomes. “If we speculate that a woman boxer has XY chromosomes, there is little evidence that it would provide a disproportionate advantage,” Vilain said, being careful with his language and citing the IOC’s framework for fairness, inclusion and nondiscrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variation, which uses the phrase “disproportionate advantage.”
“The real question is whether it would provide a consistent, unfair, dangerous and disproportionate advantage. For this,” he added, “there is little evidence it does.”
Again, we don’t know if Khelif or Lin has XY chromosomes. The IBA has not been transparent about its gender eligibility findings. The organization disqualified Khelif from the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi mid-tournament, after she won against a Russian boxer who had been undefeated.
IBA’s president, Umar Kremlev, an acquaintance of Russian President Vladimir Putin, told a state-owned media outlet at the time that his organization “identified a number of athletes who tried to deceive their colleagues and pretended to be women” through DNA tests that showed they had XY chromosomes.
In a July 31 statement, the IBA said that Khelif and Lin, who was also disqualified from the same competition, “did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test” that found “both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.”
Days later, in a widely panned and chaotic press conference, IBA officials referenced male chromosomes and high levels of testosterone, but failed to provide specifics, saying they could not say more because they did not have permission to do so, and suggested that reporters “read between the lines.” A subsequent statement did not mention testosterone and cited IBA eligibility rules amended in May 2023 that define men as individuals with XY chromosomes and women as individuals with XX chromosomes.
Vilain said that the IBA’s definitions are “very simple” and go “against the scientific mainstream” definition of sex, “which is a composite of a number of biological parameters (chromosomes, hormones, hormone receptors, external genitalia, internal genitalia, gonads).” He noted that a number of sport federations use testosterone tests to declare some athletes ineligible, but do not use sex chromosomes as a primary factor. For example, he said, World Athletics, which oversees track and field, will declare women with specific DSDs ineligible for female competitions only if they also have a testosterone level above a certain limit.
The IBA has explained the timing of Khelif and Lin’s 2023 disqualifications as being due to when a second test result for each came back.
The IOC suspended the IBA in 2019 and formally withdrew the organization in 2023 due to concerns about governance, integrity of the fights and the group’s financing from Gazprom, a Russian state-owned energy company. The IOC has said that boxing will need a new international federation in order to be included in the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
Update, Aug. 14: After Khelif won her gold medal match on Aug. 9, Trump once again repeated his false claim. “And I’d like to congratulate the young woman who transitioned from a man into a boxer,” he said later that evening during a rally in Montana. “You saw he won. She won the gold medal.”
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