This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here.
Two women boxers will be allowed to compete in the Paris Olympics despite being disqualified from the 2023 World Championships for failing to meet sex-testing standards, the International Olympic Committee announced Monday. The news should have been no big deal—it was simply the IOC following its own protocol. Instead, it was met with anger, fearmongering, and smears from journalists and advocates who want to keep trans people out of sports.
Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan—neither of whom is transgender—competed in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and have won medals at previous world boxing tournaments. But last year, the International Boxing Association, the governing body for the sport, disqualified Khelif and Lin during the tournament. According to an IOC database, Khelif was removed from the 2023 championships just hours before she was set to compete for the gold medal because “her elevated levels of testosterone failed to meet the eligibility criteria.” Lin competed, and even won the bronze in the tournament, but the IBA took it back after she was found ineligible, “based on the results of a biochemical test” that likely found high testosterone levels or chromosomal variance.
So why the different treatment at the Olympics? The IOC and the IBA have different medical standards for competitors. The two institutions parted ways in 2019, after the IOC stripped the IBA of its Olympic status amid concerns about its integrity, finances, and governance. The IBA president at the time, Uzbekistan’s Gafur Rakhimov, had incurred U.S. sanctions for his alleged participation in the heroin trade and in a Eurasian crime syndicate. The IOC was also wary of the association’s dependence on funding from Gazprom, the Russian state energy firm. (The IBA has since dropped Gazprom as a sponsor.) Since the split, the IBA has taken on a new president, Umar Kremlev, who has accused Khelif and Lin of “trying to fool their colleagues and pretend to be women.”
But the IBA is no longer responsible for running the qualifying matches that lead up to the Olympics—the IOC does that, and it has found that Khelif and Lin are eligible competitors. “All athletes participating in the boxing tournament of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 comply with the competition’s eligibility and entry regulations, as well as all applicable medical regulations,” the IOC said in a statement.
The bottom line is that Khelif and Lin are both women who meet the IOC’s standards for competition in the women’s category. There is no reason why they shouldn’t compete. But right-leaning media outlets and advocates who oppose trans inclusion in sports have latched on to the IBA’s disqualification to smear Khelif and Lin as gender frauds out to cheat their way to Olympic medals. The fact that, according to all public accounts, neither Khelif nor Lin is transgender has not stopped anti-trans journalists and activists from calling the boxers men or biological males and referring to them with the pronouns he and him. (I’ll explain the reasons why the women may have tested higher than average for testosterone a little later, but the short of it is that hormone levels vary from person to person, and some natural differences in sex characteristics can increase the production of testosterone.)
One of the leaders of the media blitz against Khelif and Lin is Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer who became a prominent campaigner against trans people in athletics in 2022, after tying with Lia Thomas, a trans woman, for fifth place in a NCAA championship event. Calling Khelif and Lin “males,” Gaines warned that a woman boxer “is going to die” in the Paris Olympics as a result of their participation. “The Olympics glorifies men punching women in the face with the intent of knocking them unconscious,” Gaines wrote on X.
Aside from the deeper question of whether society should value a sport that revolves around inflicting deliberate personal injury, there is nothing suspect or wrong about women boxers beating each other up during a match. Women’s boxing is all about punching women in the face! But anti-trans advocates are suggesting that what Khelif and Lin do in the ring amounts to misogynistic assault. On X on Tuesday, Robby Starbuck, the director of an anti-trans documentary, posted a 2022 video of Khelif in a boxing match, describing it as “beating up a woman.” Khelif, he wrote, “is NOT a woman. He’s very clearly a man. Is violence against women a sport now?”
In a typical attempt to portray trans rights and women’s rights as mutually exclusive, anti-trans advocates are arguing that feminists should call for the expulsion of Khelif and Lin because they aren’t real women and therefore their participation in boxing amounts to gender-based violence. In a post on X, the co-founder of an Australian anti-trans group commented on a video of Khelif: “Beating women is now a spectator sport. We have never been more aware as a society of male violence against women. Why are the #Olympics allowing this male to enter the boxing ring with a woman?”
Chaya Raichik, the creator of Libs of TikTok, also wrote on X: “So punching a woman in the face is apparently ok as long as the man doing it says he’s a woman and it’s at the Olympics.”
The Telegraph’s Oliver Brown, who often takes an anti-trans bent to the sports beat, likewise claimed that women may be in danger under the IOC’s current medical standards. Khelif and Lin are “two people whose female biology is doubted,” he wrote. “The longer this goes on, the higher the chance there is that someone will be seriously hurt. … Someone could be killed.”
Athletes in the competition are also starting to weigh in, setting the stage for a possible eventual challenge of any medals Khelif and Lin win. Australian boxer Caitlin Parker said she disagrees with the IOC’s decision. “It’s not like I haven’t sparred men before,” she said. “But you know it can be dangerous for combat sports and it should be seriously looked into.”
The history of gender verification tests in athletics—in which institutions assess athletes’ biological markers with the intent of disqualifying anyone who diverges from an established gender standard—is long and tragic. For decades, women who passed these tests got “certificates of femininity” that they had to present before every Olympic competition. Those who didn’t pass, because their bodies differed from what administrators deemed the feminine norm, were exiled from their sports.
In many cases, these athletes had no idea they had chromosomal variations until the Olympic gender-verification authorities gave them their results, right before their events, and found them ineligible to compete. That’s what happened to Caster Semenya, the South African track star who won gold medals in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics before a new testosterone-limiting regulation from the IOC barred her from competing in her event in future games. Today most sports authorities still demand gender tests and impose requirements on trans and intersex athletes that range from hormone therapy to surgery.
But human sex is not as clear-cut of a binary as the guidelines from many athletic governing bodies would have us believe. As one endocrinologist told author Katie Barnes in Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates, what we think of as biological sex consists of “the interplay and collective of your sex chromosomes, sex hormones, your internal reproductive structures and what gonads you have, and your external genitalia.” Many people diverge from the norm in any of these categories; between 1 and 2 percent of people fall under the intersex umbrella.
The IOC used to impose an across-the-board standard for acceptable testosterone levels, but it recently changed its guidelines. In 2021 it pushed the decision back to the governing bodies of each individual sport, allowing them to set their own acceptable ranges of the hormone. On the Olympics website, the IOC notes that testosterone is not always a determinant of physical advantage—and that some cisgender men who compete in elite athletics have testosterone levels that would fall in the “women’s” range of several sports authorities. “In other words, athletic performance varies independently of an individual athlete’s testosterone levels,” the site states.
That won’t prevent anti-trans advocates from using Khelif and Lin—who, again, are not transgender—to stoke fear about trans and gender-nonconforming athletes. In Khelif’s first bout this morning, her opponent quit after 46 seconds, something that rarely happens in Olympic boxing. The opponent cried before she exited the ring and refused to shake Khelif’s hand but said she left because her nose hurt, not because she was making a statement about whether Khelif should be allowed to compete. Anti-trans commentators are calling the outcome “fucking evil.” Lin will have her first fight tomorrow. As both boxers advance, which they likely will, expect the voices smearing them to get louder.
