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We Must Defend Imane Khelif [1]

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Date: 2024-08-05 15:55:58+00:00

Society / We Must Defend Imane Khelif Transphobia also hurts cisgender women like the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif who don’t conform to a narrow, Eurocentric vision of womanhood.

Imane Khelif of Algeria celebrates victory against Anna Luca Hamori of Hungary in the Olympic women’s quarterfinal 66kg boxing match on August 3, 2024, in Paris.

(Richard Pelham / Getty Images)

Here on the streets of Olympic Paris, people have been protesting numerous issues—from Israel’s attacks on Gaza to the environmental impacts of the Games to the treatment of the homeless—but the gender of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is definitely not one of them. In an invented “controversy” whipped up by an assortment of transphobes, right-wingers, and fascists (and proliferated by a coterie of useful idiots), Khelif was viciously targeted after her first-round knockout of Angela Carini of Italy. The great lie was that Khelif was a man posing as a woman. Some claimed she was trans—she is not—while others, sounding like amateur epidemiologists telling us not to take the Covid vaccine, proclaimed she had XY chromosomes, rather than XX.

This baseless frenzy was hateful, racist, and dangerous, and it created International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach a rare moment where he actually did the right thing. Bach said that the “hate speech” directed at boxers Khelif (as well as Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting) was “totally unacceptable.” Bach then proclaimed, “We will not take part in a politically motivated…cultural war.… Some want to own a definition of who is a wom[a]n.”

This hasn’t stopped Donald Trump from making this relatively obscure Algerian boxer a part of his stump speeches, where he misgenders her to laughs from his dwindling crowds.

Khelif is a boxer with a 9-5 career professional record and a low knockdown rate. But that did not stop her tormentors, who know nothing about women’s boxing, from trying to make her sound like the young Mike Tyson. Carini is a police officer and favorite of Italian fascists, with a history of quitting early in fights. Again, this did not enter anyone’s analysis on the far right, because why would they let facts get in their way?

Yet this is a firestorm whose spark begins not with Khelif’s knockout of Carini or Trump’s lies but in the dark, corroded corners of international sports. It originates from assertions by the International Boxing Association that Khelif had failed a test at the 2023 World Championships that supposedly showed she had “competitive advantages over other female competitors.” Umar Kremlev, the IBA president hailing from Russia, told Tass, a Russian state news agency, that the 25-year-old Algerian boxer was disqualified because “it was proven they have XY chromosomes.”

Setting aside the fact that it is medically possible for women to have XY chromosomes and setting aside the fact that numerous health conditions can spur a rise in the production of male hormones and setting aside all the problems with assuming that there is a tidy biological “gender binary” that Khelif is somehow guilty of violating, there’s the matter of the messenger.

The International Boxing Association is shady. In its 130 years of existence, the IOC has withdrawn recognition from only one international sports governing body: the IBA in 2023—remarkable given the long history of corrupt sporting governing bodies. For his part, Kremlev released videos on X after the Paris 2024 opening ceremony railing against Bach as the “chief sodomite” and the IOC as “society’s outcasts.”

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[1] Url: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/imane-khelif-olympics-paris-boxing-transphobia/

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