Olympics 2024: Imane Khelif at the heart of a gender war exploding in the boxing ring

46 seconds of what was supposed to be a 9-minute boxing bout and an emotional outburst from an aggrieved Neapolitan dropped a bombshell on the Paris Olympics on Thursday.

“Explain why you’re OK with a man beating a woman in public for your entertainment. This isn’t sport,” tweeted JK Rowling, echoing a storm of moral outrage enveloping the round of 16 match involving Italy’s Angela Carini and Algeria’s Imane Khelif, who social media was quick to decry as a ‘biological man’ sneakily taking part in women’s sports.

The basis of this assumption was the visual evidence of how strong Khelif’s punch was in those 46 seconds and a previous disqualification by IBA, the world boxing body (importantly, not the organisation overseeing boxing at the Olympics), on grounds of a gender test of an undisclosed nature.

The Algerian boxer’s silence has been loud in the aftermath of the controversy.

Hours after her win, as anger continued to grow on social media, so much so that Prime Ministers and gender rights activists chipped in to condemn her, she casually uploaded an unrelated photo on Instagram with her training staff.

“I am here for gold, I will fight anybody, I will fight them all,” she said briefly in the mixed zone, even as videos of her opponent’s impassioned comments continued to be shared widely.

Khelif would have been referring to her next opponents (her quarterfinal opponent from Hungary, meanwhile, has vowed to beat her - and not forfeit), but she is currently facing three other mightier challenges - a public trial about her gender, a question of identity for those who lie outside a rigid gender binary structure, and one of the most perplexing issues facing sports and society - that there is no indisputable way to draw a line between male and female when most competitions have only two categories.

Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better? The smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered. #Paris2024 pic.twitter.com/Q5SbKiksXQ

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) August 1, 2024

IOC vs IBA

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) came out with a statement following the uproar, saying, “(Khelif) complies with the competition’s eligibility and entry regulations, as well as all applicable medical regulations. As with previous Olympic boxing competitions, the gender and age of the athletes are based on their passport.”

Saying it is saddened by the ‘abuse’ being directed at Khelif, the Olympic body added that Khelif is a victim of a ‘sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA’.

“This decision (to disqualify her) was initially taken solely by the IBA Secretary General and CEO…The current aggression against these two athletes (Khelif and Lin Yu‑ting of Chinese Taipei, another boxer in a similar quandary) is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years,” the IOC defence read.

The IBA, the former governing body for amateur boxing but one the Olympic body is now at loggerheads with, said in a statement Khelif had been disqualified from the 2023 World Championships after failing to meet eligibility criteria for women’s events, specifying that she “did not undergo a testosterone examination but was subject to a separate and recognised test, whereby the specifics remain confidential.”

IBA president Umar Kremlev had told Russian news agency TASS last year that the test “proved she had XY chromosomes and was thus excluded.”

The lack of transparency surrounding the tests by IBA and eligibility criteria of IOC only makes any verdict even harder to pass.

As Irish boxer Amy Broadhurst, the last boxer who beat Khelif in 2022, said on the social media platform X : “If this is a man and it becomes 100% fact, I’ll be disgusted that I was in the ring and so were many others. A man vs a woman is far from ok. But right now nobody knows what the true facts are.”

Khelif has a 37-9 win-loss record. Before Thursday, only one previous opponent had given her a walkover, in 2021, that too a boxer who was on her debut.

There is one visible common thread between Khelif and other famous Olympians who have been put up to similar scrutiny - Caster Semenya, Dutee Chand, Annet Negesa - they are all from the global south.

Khelif’s case is of course different in having more fodder for social media outrage because she competes in a combat sport.

Sports' uneasy relations with athletes with DSDs

Khelif’s only comment on being disqualified last year was saying that she was victim of a conspiracy.

She has never identified as a man, as transgender, or as intersex—which refers to people with both male and female sex characteristics. The Algerian Olympic Committee has also defended their star boxer, slamming ‘baseless propaganda from certain foreign media outlets’.

The controversy, however, has brought the spotlight on the place of those with DSDs in the sporting arena.

Differences of Sexual Development (DSD) are a group of rare conditions involving genes, hormones and reproductive organs. Some people with DSDs are raised as female but have XY sex chromosomes and blood testosterone levels in the male range.

In sports, people with DSDs should have a physical advantage, but multiple studies have concluded that it is impossible to quantify this advantage.

Sports governing bodies have constantly evolving takes on the matter.

Athletics, cycling and swimming are among sports which have been banning intersex athletes from some women’s competitions over recent years. For instance, Semenya was not allowed to compete in any distance between 400m and the mile since 2018 unless she maintains medically induced lower testosterone levels, before expanding the ruling to all distances in 2023.

In Olympics boxing, the IOC’s rules on the inclusion of athletes with DSDs and gender diversity apply because of the IOC vs IBA tussle, and the most recent guidelines from IOC in 2021 state that inclusion should be the default in such cases and that athletes should only be excluded from women's competition if there are clear fairness or safety issues.

Details of Khelif’s failed gender test remain confidential, but biologist Carole Hooven tried to summarise in medical terms the reason for the outrage: “Athletes with XY DSDs who have testes (usually internal), XY sex chromosomes, male-typical levels of testosterone, and functional androgen receptors are often described as females with "hyperandrogenism," i.e., abnormally high levels of testosterone. The issue for sports is that athletes with the XY DSD 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), may be socialized as female, may be legally female, and may live and identify as female; but they are male.”

The biggest controversy yet of the Paris Olympics is hardly over.

Lin Yu Ting, the other boxer disqualified by IBA but allowed by IOC, will take the ring for her R16 match on Friday evening, while Khelif will be in action again in her quarterfinal on Saturday.

If indeed boxing’s death knell at the Olympics is ringing in Paris, the final scenes are proving to be as ignoble as they get.