We’re Having the Wrong Argument Over the Olympic Boxers
8 min read
In the past few days, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, the two boxers at the center of a storm over their eligibility to compete in the women’s category at the Olympics, have been subjected to brutal public scrutiny and appalling abuse. But the International Olympic Committee should never have allowed the ugly spectacle to happen. Both athletes are now guaranteed to win medals—Algeria’s Khelif as a welterweight, Taiwan’s Lin as a featherweight. But both still face questions, a year after the International Boxing Association (IBA) publicly raised the issue, over whether they have XY chromosomes and a disorder of sexual development—also known as an intersex condition—which give them an unfair advantage over other women. Some boxers who have lost to Lin or Khelif at the Paris Games have protested by making double-X gestures, a reference to female chromosomes, with their fingers.
The Olympic bosses have screwed this one up with their ill-preparedness, buck-passing, and passion for incomprehensible language. (The “Portrayal Guidelines” issued ahead of the Paris Games instruct journalists that the phrase biologically male is “problematic,” but without that phrase, explaining the debate becomes impossible.) Social-media commentators have confused and inflamed the situation with inaccurate posts. Right-wing politicians and influencers have piled on, suggesting that these athletes are simply men punching women. Meanwhile, traditional media have often floundered, unable to describe accurately where the disagreement actually rests. The result is a bitter debate fueled by misinformation on many sides, in a sport where matching the size and strength of competitors is vital for safety as well as fairness.
Last year, the IBA disqualified both Khelif and Lin from its Women’s World Championship, saying that the boxers had failed tests to determine their eligibility to compete. The IBA’s leadership has since indicated without providing detail that these were genetic tests that revealed that the two women have XY chromosomes. The IBA and the Olympics fell out several years ago over claims of corruption and mismanagement, and boxing federations in the United States and Britain have broken with the Russian-led association. The IOC argues that the IBA’s testing is flawed and used its own eligibility guidelines for women’s boxing—a passport check, which both Khelif and Lin passed. The Olympic rules state that, as a general principle, athletes “should be allowed to compete in the category that best aligns with their self-determined gender identity.”
In boxing, though, biology really matters. One of the most established sex differences between male and female bodies is upper-body strength, which in boxing means that men can punch much harder. The women’s category is not just about fairness, but about safety. That is why it was such an incendiary moment when Italy’s Angela Carini stopped her match against Khelif after taking a punch to the face, telling reporters afterward, “It could have been the match of a lifetime, but I had to preserve my life as well in that moment.” (She has since apologized for how she handled the fight.)
Olympic bosses have taken to giving press conferences where they seem annoyed to be asked questions, which they then answer inaccurately. Why have the IOC’s statements been so misleading and nebulous? Perhaps because it does not want to compromise the athletes’ privacy by discussing their medical details without consent. And perhaps because the IOC’s leaders are not prepared to defend their own rules, which state that even if Lin and Khelif do have XY chromosomes, they are allowed to compete in Olympic women’s boxing.
The IBA fired back with its own press conference. It was a chaotic, unpleasant event in which the group’s leader, Umar Kremlev, ranted in Russian about the supposed disrespect to Christianity shown by the opening ceremony. (With Russia banned from the Paris Games, the Kremlin must be enjoying the IOC’s embarrassment on this issue.)
Both sides have demonstrated a lack of interest in women’s sports, and the well-being of all its competitors, that is tantamount to contempt. A simple cheek swab could clear this up, revealing the presence (or not) of a second X chromosome. If either athlete was XY instead, she could have further genetic testing to get a precise diagnosis and determine if it affected her ability to participate fairly. If Lin and Khelif are straightforwardly female athletes with XX chromosomes, they could have appealed their IBA bans to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an independent body based in Switzerland. (Lin did not do so, according to the IBA, while Khelif withdrew her appeal. The process can be costly for athletes.)
In recent years, most controversies over eligibility for women’s sports have involved trans athletes. IOC President Thomas Bach dismissed the past week’s debate as a “culture war,” which might be true—many newly minted women’s-boxing enthusiasts have emerged with strong opinions—but ignores the fact that addressing intersex conditions is an ongoing challenge in women’s sports. Trying to suppress people’s questions doesn’t work, and just makes life harder for the athletes involved.
For years, doubts over the South African runner Caster Semenya were deemed to be racist, and rival runners who questioned her eligibility in the female category suffered abuse and death threats. Yet the court’s judgment in her case revealed that she was not simply, as she had often been described, a female runner with “naturally high testosterone.” She had male XY chromosomes and a condition called 5ARD.
Although genetically male, people with the condition lack a crucial enzyme, 5-alpha reductase, which means that as fetuses, their bodies cannot process a masculinizing hormone called DHT, which helps determine how the reproductive system develops. They are therefore born with internal testes but external female genitalia—and thus many are raised as girls. At puberty, their internal testes start to produce a different masculinizing hormone, testosterone, which their bodies are able to metabolize. And so they develop typically male muscle mass and proportions, and their genitalia take on a more male appearance. At this point, some people with 5ARD feel more comfortable identifying as men rather than as women.
This is why the IOC’s insistence that Lin and Khelif were “born as women”—a phrase banned by its own guidelines, but never mind—is unenlightening. With 5ARD, a child can be registered as female at birth, but later develop a significant athletic advantage during puberty from the effects of testosterone. Some other intersex conditions, such as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which a genetically male body is completely unable to process masculinizing hormones in the womb and throughout puberty, provide no edge in sports and so are not a barrier to competing as a female.
After the court ruling, Semenya was asked to reduce her testosterone levels to compete in the female category; she declined. “For me I believe if you are a woman, you are a woman,” she said at the time. Semenya, who retired from athletics and is raising a young family with her wife, has since written a book about how she found the scrutiny over her case humiliating and degrading. Many athletes subjected to previous forms of sex verification—which involved genital inspections and even “naked parades”—have said the same. Added to that, many people with 5ARD have no idea of their condition until adolescence, when they are forced to reassess their identity at a profound level. To have your sense of self challenged like this must be an extraordinarily tough experience—even more so amid a social-media circus.
World Athletics, the governing body for running, track and field, and related sports, has tightened its rules since Semenya was competing, as have authorities in other sports—and the IOC defers to them, having scrapped its own sex testing in the 1990s. World Rugby in particular should be praised for holding a long and impressive consultation period during which the organization heard from all sides. Sporting bodies regulate the use of shoes and swimsuits that give competitors even a tiny boost, so it’s no wonder that they would need policies governing athletes who identify as women but have male chromosomes and high testosterone levels. “The performance gap between males and females becomes significant at puberty and often amounts to 10–50% depending on sport,” the academics Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg found after analyzing the data. The fastest women’s 100-meter sprint time is 10.49 seconds, a record held by Florence Griffith-Joyner; the men’s record, held by Usain Bolt, is nearly a whole second faster, at 9.58 seconds. Victory hinges on far smaller margins; 0.005 seconds separated the gold and silver medalists in the men’s 100-meter sprint earlier this week.
Now, one can argue that the benefits of male puberty are overstated: The sports scientist Joanna Harper, who is herself a runner and a trans woman, has queried just how big an advantage biologically male athletes who suppress their testosterone really have. That’s a question that can be investigated and answered empirically. But too many people who have sprung to Khelif’s and Lin’s defense have assumed that bigotry is the only possible motivation for their opponents. “Challenge: find a single person whining about trans people in women’s sports who has done or said anything supportive of women’s sports previously,” David Roberts, a popular science influencer, posted on X. Okay then, challenge accepted: the tennis legend Martina Navratilova. The boxing champion Nicola Adams. The former swimmer Sharron Davies. Shall I go on?
This debate is not about whether to accept someone’s sense of their own gender, or about an intolerance of gender nonconformity—both Navratilova and Adams are lesbians who faced abuse for their appearance during their career. After all, a transgender boxer is competing in these Games with absolutely no pushback at all. Hergie Bacyadan, a Filipino trans man—a biological female—is competing in a women’s event. He has no sporting advantage, because he has chosen not to take testosterone to masculinize his body. During the same American collegiate swimming season when the transgender woman Lia Thomas became a national talking point, another trans swimmer was competing in the female division. His name was Iszac Henig, and he was a trans man who had undergone a mastectomy but stayed off hormones. Henig also competed fairly against other biological females, with no backlash at all.
Those two examples show that the current debates over gender and sports are not simply driven by prejudice—although the subject has undoubtedly attracted bigots and provocateurs. The debate should be a respectful one grounded in evidence about the effects of testosterone and male puberty. Sporting categories are not inherently offensive or degrading: We don’t let flyweights take on heavyweights. Having clear, transparent, and well-accepted rules would stop individual athletes from being subjected to cruel and embarrassing questions—and would prevent the discussion from being hijacked by culture-war bomb-throwers.
Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting have been through hell over the past week, and the determination and discipline they have shown are admirable. But if the questions around their eligibility remain unresolved, the medals they win will always have an asterisk next to them. That isn’t fair to them, or to their opponents.
