Imane Khelif’s gold medal is a loss for women

My latest in Unherd.

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Imane Khelif just won an Olympic gold medal in women’s boxing in the super lightweight division, dominating China’s Yang Liu in three short rounds before a raucous pro-Algerian crowd. This victory makes Khelif the second Algerian to win gold in Paris.

Khelif was favored to win gold after winning all of the lead-up matches 5-0 in unanimous decisions. What is not unanimous is whether or not Khelif is actually a woman — genetically speaking, which is the only way to be an actual woman if we’re going to live in material reality.

The physical differences could not be more pronounced in a sport like boxing. Men have 90% increased bicep strength and 162% greater punching power, which is why Olympic boxer, Angela Carini ended her bout with Khelif after just 46 seconds, declaring ‘non é giusto’ (it’s not fair). If I were a betting woman, I’d bet on XY vs XX too.

Sex is the single biggest determinant of athletic performance. Nothing compares. Not steroids, blood doping, or tough training. None of it. Just being male all but assures a win against a female in elite level competition. Yet for some reason, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) stopped sex eligibility testing in 1999.

At the 2023 World Championships, Khelif did not pass the sex eligibility test. But it seems the IOC doesn’t care. According to IOC spokesperson Mark Adams, the organization chooses to trust what an athlete’s passport says. Because, in the words of IOC President Thomas Bach, there is no reliable way to test for sex.

Even if we did have a reliable test (we do — as the International Boxing Association has already established) the IOC claims that to test would be stigmatizing and an invasion of privacy.

These governing bodies seem to have no problem testing for drugs. They even test for drugs like marijuana and cold medicine and ban athletes for showing up positive for these substances, even though these can hardly be considered ‘performance enhancing.’

It’s also important to point out that Khelif is not trans. However, this conundrum certainly has roots in the gender movement. If you say you are a woman, claim activists, then you are.

Based on the implied results of the sex eligibility testing at the World Championships by the IBA, it can be gleaned that Khelif tested positive for XY chromosomes. They’ve not released the actual test results, but in cobbling together the statements they have made, it seems likely that Khelif has a DSD (difference in sex development), perhaps 5-ARD (just like Caster Semenya, the gold medal winning track and field athlete now banned from competing in the Olympics for being XY). If this is the case, Khelif has all of the advantages in the ring that come from being male.

This comes at a time when the IOC has the audacity to brag about the Paris games being the first ever ‘gender equal’ Olympics.

If by ‘gender-equal’ they mean the first Olympics where men who think they are women get to compete against women in the boxing ring, rabbit punching them in the back of the head like Lin Yu-Ting — another boxer who failed sex eligibility testing at the World Championships in 2023 — did without being disqualified, then yes, gender equality has arrived!

And so, at this very first gender-equal Olympics we’ve seen one male win gold in women’s boxing and another who very well may do so tomorrow. If this is what fairness is meant to be, then I want no part of it.