The women's Olympic boxing meta-scandal

People see what they want to see

On Friday August 9th 2024, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif won the Olympic gold medal in the women’s 66kg boxing event, and on Saturday 10th Lin Yu-Ting won the Olympic gold in the women’s 57kg boxing for Taiwan.

These two boxers were both controversial because they had been disqualified from the 2023 Women’s World Championships by the International Boxing Association for failing (for a second time) the “eligibility criteria for IBA women’s events”. Despite this, the IOC allowed them to take part in the women’s Olympic events, because the IOC suspended recognition of the IBA in 2019 and withdrew that recognition in June 2023.

The IBA issued a statement on August 5th, confirming the timeline of events that led them to disqualify the two boxers - they were first tested in 2022, “following many complaints from several coaches” - and going so far as to call the IOC’s claim that they had never been informed about the IBA’s case “a lie”. The Vice President of the World Boxing Organisation also made a statement on August 2nd, that the IOC was warned about the risk these boxers posed to other female boxers, as early as 2022.

Although the IBA statement does not specify how exactly the two boxers failed to meet their eligibility criteria for the female category, it defines men/males and women/females as people having XY or XX chromosomes respectively, and states that the participation of athletes with a DSD (Difference of Sexual Development) was dangerous for health and security of the boxers. Since Khelif and Lin were disqualified based on blood tests, it is fair to assume that they fall into the category of having XY chromosomes and a DSD. The IOC could very easily clear this up by implementing their own tests, but they haven’t done this.

The controversy over the two boxers competing in the Olympics has been fueled by the fact that the IOC allowed them to take part despite the IBA’s ruling, and that the IBA has “Russian ties”. Russia has been disqualified by the IOC because of the war in Ukraine (neither the USA or Israel were or have ever been disqualified for this reason), and has long been the target of highly politicised allegations of doping. Many articles have noted that the IBA ruling came soon after Khelif beat a Russian female boxer with a hitherto perfect record.

The tone of all the western mainstream news articles regarding Khelif has been one of disdain at Khelif’s detractors - decrying ‘gender misconceptions’ and applauding Khelif and Lin for winning ‘in the face of political controversy’ or ‘amid controversy’. The strong suggestion is that those pushing this controversy are sexist, racist, bigoted trolls - Khelif has even filed a legal complaint for online harassment. In the mainstream media, Khelif is firmly described as a victim - there are no stories sympathising with the women she (or he, if he has XY chromosomes) has been fighting and beating.

Timeline of the social media firestorm

On Thursday August 1 2024, Imane Khelif beat Italian Angela Carini in 46 seconds, by way of Carini’s abandonment of the fight, claiming “it’s not fair”. Carini was saying this because she believed Khelif to be male, and after the fight she said that she had “never been hit so hard in my life”. After the referee announced that Khelif was the winner, Carini left the ring in tears and did not shake Khelif’s hand.

There’s no doubt that Khelif looks very masculine, and JK Rowling took the plunge with this tweet:

Then some people really went in on her for it in the comments:

There are currently 50k replies under Rowling’s tweet, and a quick skim of the highest-ranked shows the majority to be hypercritical of her tweet and showing absolute confidence that Khelif is a woman - not trans, but a biological or cis woman, meaning as female as her competitor. A common theme among the comments was complaining that Rowling was making assumptions about Khelif because she doesn’t look like a conventional woman.

IOC spokesperson Mark Adams (who just happens to be an old friend of Kier Starmer) stated on Friday that “The Algerian boxer was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport”. None of those facts matter in terms of Khelif’s physical abilities except the first one, ‘was born female’, which Khelif’s blood tests showed is not true.

IOC president Thomas Bach also defended Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, and also made the ‘born as a woman’ statement that the IBA’s tests had disproved. The media muddied the water by claiming that the disqualification was on the basis of elevated levels of testosterone, which any female boxer could have.

The result of these public assertions that Khelif was in fact a biological woman (although she is not) led some social media users to be extremely dismissive of Carini’s plight, that of having been beaten by a man:

Carini even issued an apology for not shaking Khelif’s hand, accepting the IOC’s ruling on Khelif’s gender.

An image emerged and got widely reposted allegedly showing Khelif as a child, dressed like a girl and with long hair, which was often accompanied by the assertion that Algeria doesn’t recognise trans identities, and therefore she must be a cis woman:

Twitter was rife with competing stories about Khelif, many (like those above) stating plainly that she is a woman and dismissing anyone who would suggest otherwise. The fact that her passport states her sex as female is apparently what qualifies her to take part in the women’s category at the Olympics, but it is not uncommon for babies born with a DSD to have their sex recorded incorrectly (or ‘assigned at birth’, the one time that that phrase actually means what it says) because their genitalia have not formed normally.

The statement that Khelif was “born with a vagina” even got repeated enough that some people came to accept it as fact, although the assertion seems to be based on the statements of the IOC representatives, since Khelif never stated it. As a person with XY chromosomes and a DSD, Khelif would more likely have been born with malformed male genitalia, which may have developed properly later in life, but there are many variations on this. A person with 46XY DSD has even given birth to a daughter (who had the same condition), but there is no way of knowing if this was Khelif or Lin’s case. These highly personal details have not been made public as far as I know, but they are beside the point: a person with XY chromosomes will undergo male puberty, which is the factor that gives male athletes the advantage that excludes them from women’s sports.

None of this nuance or detail made it into the ‘debate’ on social media. The majority of people who took the line that Khelif was female did so because they saw that JK Rowling was saying Khelif was male and instinctively disagreed with her, and they were heavily gaslit by the media painting Khelif as a victim of abuse. The addition of a Russian element, in the IBA, gave those primed to believe that anything that comes out of Russia is evil and corrupt another reason to side with Khelif.

Support for the IBA’s ruling did come from some unexpected quarters, though:

It’s really remarkable how many people - not to mention how many women - were prepared to publicly and angrily support a biologically male boxer beating up female boxers, because they had been assured that that male boxer was female. Even more remarkable was the misogynistic language used, and the complete lack of censure directed at those engaging in the misogyny.

Even after the IBA and the VP of the World Boxing Association released their statements, most of the comments under JK Rowling’s tweet (and many others) are still up, so those people are presumably sticking to their understanding of events - that Khelif and Lin are women, who won the gold medals in women’s boxing fairly, since the IOC allowed them to enter. There are still numerous memes appearing on Facebook that seem to express the opinion that Khelif is a woman, and/or that the controversy was somehow motivated by racism.

If nothing else, this episode shows the power of suggestion and in-group behaviour. A lot of people preferred to go on believing that two women had just won gold medals and that they were brave for having put up with criticism, rather than accept that two biological males had been allowed to compete against women and win.