Algerian boxer Imane Khelif has faced a furious misinformation campaign ever since her first bout at the Paris Olympics, in which her Italian opponent, Angela Carini, quit in less than a minute. Her detractors, including J.K. Rowling, J.D. Vance, and Elon Musk, accuse her of having an unfair advantage over her rivals even though Khelif has always competed as a woman. Vocal crowds have since shown up to support Khelif in the face of the online hate, and on Friday, she defeated China’s Liu Yang to win her country’s first gold medal in women’s boxing.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) says Khelif was assigned female at birth, and it says so on her passport, which is the organization’s threshold for eligibility. (The IOC does not conduct any other sex testing.) And not only does Algeria criminalize LGBTQ+ people, it also specifically prohibits gender-affirming care and changing one’s gender identity on official government documents.
The outcry over Khelif’s participation instead stems from a decision by the International Boxing Association, the amateur boxing government body that was expelled by the IOC last summer. (The sport remains in the Olympics for the time being.) In 2023, the IBA disqualified Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting, also a cisgender female athlete, from its world championships after both allegedly failed the organization’s gender-eligibility tests. However, the IBA has not disclosed the type of testing conducted and why the boxers failed, citing confidentiality. Both Khelif and Li are now facing hateful attacks. “The current aggression against these two athletes 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 said in a statement. “Such an approach is contrary to good governance.”
For science journalist Rose Eveleth, the controversy over Khelif’s participation in the Olympics is history repeating itself. Eveleth is the host of Tested, a new podcast exploring the history of sex testing in sports that highlights similar accusations levied against elite female runners, including South African runner Caster Semenya. “We’re just in this horrible Groundhog Day over and over again,” Eveleth says. “Women keep being thrust into this nightmare media circus around their so-called ‘true identity’ and who they really are by random people who’ve never met them, and who somehow know more about her biology and who she really is inside than she does.”
I caught Eveleth on the phone on August 2, just after they landed in Paris for the Olympic track-and-field events to talk about the controversy surrounding Khelif, how eligibility testing disproportionately impacts Black and brown women from the Global South, and the ways falsely labeling cisgender female athletes as trans can put them in danger.
The IOC cleared Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting to compete in women’s boxing. It’s the International Boxing Association that said they failed eligibility tests last year and stripped them of their world-championship medals. What are these eligibility tests, exactly, and how do they work?
There are all kinds of different tests that international federations will do. Depending on the federation and the time, there have been all sorts of different tests used to try and verify the sex or gender of a competitor. From 1936 through 1966-ish, it was a visual exam, literally asking athletes to get naked and looking at their bodies to see if they’re women. We moved past that, and then it was a chromosome test for a while in some sports. Now it’s sort of a testosterone test, plus a bunch of other medical tests like a physical exam, sometimes an ultrasound and a chromosome test, depending on the federation.
The International Boxing Association is complicated. They were stripped of their status by the IOC because they were really corrupt. They’re a bit of a mess in general, not just on this topic. The Boxing Association, as far as I understand, has not been clear about what specific test they actually did for these athletes. They have said that it is not a testosterone test, but they also made the claim that these athletes have Y chromosomes, so maybe it was a chromosome test. I’m not sure why they are being so vague about it.
I’m curious, who are the people typically impacted by this type of testing? I’m thinking of conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), which causes high levels of testosterone, or people who are intersex. Where does it get complicated?
World Athletics — now the track and field organization — has really been the most vocal about these tests. They have whittled down what they call “eligibility policies” over time to only apply to women with a very specific subset of what are called DSD, differences of sex development. It’s not all women with high testosterone, it’s not even all women who have a Y chromosome. It’s this very specific subset where the common factor is that you have a Y chromosome and you have high levels of naturally occurring testosterone that your body can use. There are some women who have very high levels of testosterone, but their body can’t use it — they have what’s called androgen insensitivity syndrome, and that just means that their body doesn’t process testosterone. World Athletics does not consider PCOS, for example, a DSD. It gets really complicated and, some might argue, arbitrary.
Everyone I’ve talked to has said that the only people who seem to be affected by these policies are Black and brown women from the Global South. There’s a big racial component, a class and global economic component here. There are a couple reasons for that. They’re not testing every woman in track and field or every woman in boxing. They’re only testing people based on suspicion. That’s a subjective judgment: Who rises to a level of suspicion? Many people have argued, and I think this is fair, that this has a deeply rooted racist history. This idea that Black and brown women don’t look like women, that there’s a certain paragon of femininity and it is a white woman who is slender and who is X, Y, and Z. These women don’t look like that.
There’s also a health-care disparity happening here. This is very broad strokes, but babies that are born in the Global North tend to be born in hospitals, tend to be going to pediatric checkups. If you are born with some of these DSD conditions or if you are born intersex, you are often identified at a young age if you live in the Global North. The women I spoke with who were tested — born in Kenya, Namibia, Uganda — did not have that same access to pediatric health care. They are learning this about themselves as adults.
What you’ll see is that kids who are born with these conditions in the United States get treated at a really young age. There’s a big debate about whether that’s appropriate or necessary, whether these kids actually need treatment. But when they get to be Olympics-aged, they have either already had some kind of intervention that changes their bodies or their testosterone levels. In some cases, I’ve heard they get discouraged from even entering sports because they know this is going to be an issue. We know of at least one woman who opted out of becoming a professional because she knew she was intersex and that it was going to become a problem. Her name is Kendra Little; she’s a golfer. She basically said, “I know that if I go pro, this is going to become a conversation and I just don’t want to have to deal with that.” So she just walked away. All of these factors are accumulating into this sex-testing situation.
It’s striking that this controversy seemed to bubble up only after Khelif’s bout, where her Italian opponent quit in 46 seconds after being punched in the nose and tearfully told reporters that she’d never been hit like that. What do you make of what happened and the speed in which this has become a political issue?
You see these echoes through history. In 1928, when women were first allowed on the track, you had a Canadian columnist who was there as a part-time coach complaining that her beautiful, feminine girls were getting beaten by these “borderline cases,” as she called them. It’s sort of depressing. I’m like, Wow, some of the headlines that I’m seeing in 2024 could have been printed in 1928. We’re having the same conversation. The other thing that I think is worth noting about these women in particular is that they didn’t just show up at the Olympics. Khelif has been boxing for years, and she has never had anybody say — publicly, at least — any of the things that you’re hearing now. So I have to wonder: How much of this is that the fight didn’t go the way you wanted? To be clear, I don’t know these people. It is hard to be an elite athlete. It’s hard to lose. But you see that many people only care about these women when they’re winning.
Right, I saw Irish boxer Amy Broadhurst tweet that she didn’t think Khelif cheated in any way and that the Algerian boxer has been “beaten by nine other women before,” including Broadhurst herself.
Is the problem that these women exist in the sport, or is the problem that they are winning? It seems to be the latter, right? Because if it’s the former, people don’t seem to care. There are athletes competing in track and field who are known to have DSD conditions and who are considered eligible athletes. This is speculation on my part, but I think it’s because they just aren’t that good, so as long as they’re not threatening anybody to win, no one’s going to stick their neck out and make this challenge. I’ve been reporting on this topic for eight years now, and I’ve seen the ways in which the online transphobia has shifted. The way these conversations go, there’s a certain tenor and forest-fire speed at which this suddenly blows up into a chaotic, terrifying online frenzy fueled by this very specific kind of extremely online transphobe who’s just looking for something to harp on. These people don’t care about boxing. These people don’t care about women’s sports. They’re not out here trying to advocate for the things that female athletes actually want and need, like equal pay. Much of this is disingenuous, right? It’s not in good faith. We’re not having a real conversation about what is truly fair for female athletes.
We’re talking about something else. And it makes it really hard to have the more interesting and important conversation about what the future of women’s sports should look like, and how we keep sports inclusive and fair. You can’t have that conversation when people are just screaming things and calling these women trans, which they are not. There’s so much misinformation and disinformation.
Some observers are concerned about Khelif’s well-being because Algeria criminalizes homosexuality and bans people from changing their gender identity on official documents such as passports. Have you found other instances in which this type of pile on puts athletes at risk?
I do worry about it. I hope that she has good people around her. When I was reporting for Tested, one of the big questions athletes would all ask is “Is this going to be a show about trans athletes? And if so, I don’t want to participate because I cannot be lumped in with trans people.” You could die when there is so much confusion and intentional muddying of the waters with people calling these women trans when they’re not. Suddenly, it’s no longer safe in their country.
One of the athletes I interviewed, Nisha, is from Uganda, which has incredibly regressive and terrifying laws around being queer. She had to seek asylum in Germany because she is queer. She also was targeted by these policies around eligibility by World Athletics. I also know one athlete from Africa — and I’ll be vague here because I don’t want to out her — who is trying to get asylum in the U.S. There are real-world implications and dangers here.
How does what’s happening now with Olympic women’s boxing fit into the broader history you examined in the podcast of sex testing in elite sports?
We’re in this horrible Groundhog Day over and over again. Women keep being thrust into this nightmare media circus around their so-called “true identity” and who they really are by random people who’ve never met them, and who somehow know more about her biology and who she really is inside than she does. There is a lot of variation in human sex biology, far more than I think most people realize. Women can have Y chromosomes in some or all of their cells. Women can have high testosterone. Women can have internal testes. You can have it all, and this is before we start talking about trans identity. There’s no one test that you can give to everybody and say, “Okay, this test is going to tell me who’s a man and who’s a woman.” It does not exist, because human biology is more complicated than that. So what are we doing here? We have to treat these people better.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
