Last week’s news from the 2024 Olympics was dominated by the story of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif who defeated her Italian opponent Angela Carini in the Women’s 66kg (Welterweight) division. Carini quit after 46 seconds saying that she was hit so hard that it hurt. It is surprising that she would even enter the Hitting Each Other In The Face event if she were going to complain that her opponent hit her in the face, Anyway, Khelife subsequently won her next bout against Hungarian Luca Hamori to proceed to the semi-finals and is thereby guaranteed a medal. I hope she wins the Gold for all she’s had to put up, not only for the past few days. She seems to have had a tough life generally.
Khelif’s deserved success has ignited what has been called a “gender row”, based on the fact that she and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting (who is also competing in the 2024 Olympics, in the 57kg category) were disqualified from the IBA World Championships allegedly for failing “gender eligibility tests”. This decision was made suddenly by the Secretary General of the IBA without any due process and the only documentation available is a message on the dodgy social media platform Telegram. You can draw your own inferences about the motivation for the deliberate manufacture of a scandal by the International Boxing Association, but my own view is that it reeks of sour grapes: the IBA, which has been mired in corruption scandals for decades, is no longer recognized by the International Olympic Committee. I think this whole row was deliberately manufactured.
Such are the levels of ignorance and prejudice about anything to do with gender these days that the usual bigots lined up to condemn Khelif and the IOC on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. Widely circulated claims that Khelif has XY chromosomes and/or high levels of testosterone are neither documented nor verified, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the haters.
I’ve seen posts and comments all over the place asserting that women don’t produce testosterone at all. They do. Men produce oestrogen, too. In both cases it’s a question of quantity. Some women have higher testosterone levels than others. So what? If that makes them better at boxing then so be it.
(I even saw a photograph on social media showing that Khelif wears a groin guard under her boxing shorts. Indeed she does: that’s actually mandatory in both men’s and women’s boxing. The person who posted the image however said that wearing a groin guard is something only men do. Clearly he is unaware that a women’s private parts are also sensitive. I guess he’s never had the opportunity to find out.)
It has been argued that “biological factors” have given Imane Khelif an unfair intrinsic biological advantage over competitors. If that were the case then you would expect her to have been an outstanding boxer from the outset. She wasn’t. In fact she had a poor start to her boxing career, losing her first two competitive bouts; she has lost to other women 9 times altogether. Hardly the performance of some kind of superhuman monster as she is being portrayed. She has improved because she has worked hard on her fitness and technique. She is quite tall for her weight division – 1.78 m (5 ft 10 in) – and has learnt to make use of her long reach, but how is that unfair? I think she might well struggle against an opponent who can get inside and fight at close range. Tall and rangy versus short and powerful is a contrast you often find in these mid-range weight divisions, which is one of the things that make such contests so interesting.
In any case, don’t all athletes have some sort of intrinsic advantage over the rest of us? Michael Phelps certainly did. People who excel at sports often have extreme physical characteristics, whether physical size, muscular strength, cardio-vascular endurance or whatever. Usain Bolt certainly had the advantage of being born Usain Bolt rather than someone else. Which is not to say that he didn’t have to work on making the most of his physique.
There being no documentary evidence to support their claims that Khelif is a man, others have resorted to crude stereotypes based on her looks. I’ve seen the same sort of comments about black female athletes who are accused of looking like men because they don’t conform to white ideals of femininity. A summary of this type of argument is “women should be banned from boxing if they display masculine characteristics, such as being good at boxing”.
None of this alters the fact that Imane Khelif is a woman and indeed a woman who deserves to be celebrated not only her success in her chosen sport, but also for the dignified way she has braved the abuse she has received. I hope she wins Gold and sends the haters into a state of apoplexy.
J. K. Rowling is 59.
