The Imane Khelif Discourse, the IBA, Fascism and Russian Oligarchs
The Imane Khelif Discourse, the IBA, Fascism and Russian Oligarchs
Algerian boxer Imane Khelif landed a punch against Italy's Angela Carini. What happened next sparked a toxic discourse that serves the interest of Russian expansionism and fascist revisionists.
I was going to write about the diminishing importance of preseason games in light of the fact that the Texans and the Bears won’t be playing any of their anticipated starters in the Hall of Fame game. Instead, a remarkable discourse has erupted around the participation of trans women in women’s sports despite the fact that the kickoff to this discussion was about a cis woman boxing against a cis woman.
The behavior of the International Boxing Association (IBA), an organization rife for corruption even by the high standards set by boxing, has complicated and confused the issue even further.
For those unfamiliar, the IBA had disqualified Algerian boxer Imane Khelif during the 2023 World Championships in New Delhi for failing to meet gender eligibility criteria.
Because the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had already decertified the IBA, Khelif and another boxer disqualified in the same tournament, Taiwan’s Lin Yu Ting, were allowed to compete in the Olympics.
Their participation had drawn some mild controversy before they had fought a single match, but it wasn’t until Khelif quickly defeated Italian boxer Angela Carini that controversy captured widespread national and international attention.
Carini, who resigned 46 seconds into the match after taking a hit to the jaw, remarked after the fight that she had never been hit that hard before – though was quick to add that she does not have an opinion on eligibility for participation.
At the time, the IBA released a statement quoting the president of the IBA, Umar Kremlev. A roughly translated version of that statement quotes him as saying “we identified a number of athletes who tried to deceive their colleagues and posed as women. Test results have proven that they have XY chromosomes.”
Update: As Bruce Arthur of the Toronto Star reports, the president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, has indicated that neither boxer in question has DSD. After the presser, the IOC released a correction.
This correction could either mean that the IOC believes that either or both boxers have XY chromosomes or that they do not have evidence to deny the claim that either boxer has XY chromosomes. That distinction may be crucial.
As will be detailed below, there’s actually not much reason to trust the IBA’s word on this and there is good reason to believe that this isn’t the case, something the IOC seems to agree with.
We Don’t Talk About Khelif When We Talk About Khelif
A strong piece of evidence against the notion that Khelif is a trans woman – which is what the IBA is suggesting when they suggest there is deception at hand – grew up in and represents Algeria, a country extraordinarily hostile to queer rights.
Algerian officials have equated homosexuality with treason, calling protestors “traitors, mercenaries and homosexuals” and punishing same-sex behavior with imprisonment. The Algerian legal code does not even recognize gender identity and it’s often the case that gender and sexual orientation are conflated and criminalized when deviating from the norm.
These are not dead-letter laws; they are harshly enforced. In 2020, for example, Human Rights Watch noted a mass arrest of 44 attendees and participants of an event that police reports argued was a wedding because of the presence of decorations, flowers and sweets – as well as a “supposedly gay appearance.”
Algeria does not have a process for changing one’s gender marker because gender is not recognized in the law as a distinct concept from sex. It is functionally illegal as a matter of process to transition, socially or otherwise, and any attempt will be criminalized as part of the penal code that governs acts that violate public decency.
The fact that Khelif has a passport marking her as female is significant – not to mention a well-told backstory including a father that barred her participation in sports as a child because it was unladylike.
Indeed, it was the violence she received from other boys growing up who didn’t like her participation in soccer that encouraged her to get into boxing. It is beyond unlikely that a trans boxer was recognized as female as a young child despite being assigned male at birth and supported in that transition.
That’s why it’s notable that the Algerian Olympic Committee issued a strong statement defending Khelif, arguing that the controversy relied on “baseless propaganda” and amounted to “unethical targeting and maligning of our esteemed athlete.”
Notably, the panic surrounding Khelif could endanger her back in Algeria. There very well could be enough people who buy into the panic and put her life at risk – hate crimes against queer people in the country are, unsurprisingly, common.
We Do Not Understand Sex Differences
Let’s Talk Chromosomes
The fact that Khelif isn’t trans doesn’t disprove that Khelif may have XY chromosomes – it is possible for a cis woman to be born with XY chromosomes but never express any of the genes on the Y chromosome, resulting in a pair of conditions once referred to as Swyer syndrome or Morris syndrome but now generally referred to as disorders of sex development, or DSD.
In the womb, these women do not develop primary sexual characteristics associated with male bodies (keeping the primary sexual characteristics of females) and, depending on the nature of the gene expression, can develop secondary sexual characteristics associated with women through puberty.
In some cases, it could result in naturally higher levels of testosterone, could impede or stop breast development or could complicate or entirely inhibit the ability to become pregnant.
None of this is to say this is what happened with Khelif, whose determination as someone with XY chromosomes relies on a single statement provided by one person to one press outlet and not confirmed by the boxing association that disqualified her.
What They Say About Khelif and Lin Isn’t Real
Khelif and Lin have competed for years, and though they’ve been successful in recent fights – that’s why they made the Olympics – neither have had the history of dominance suggested by critics accusing both of being “secret men” or a “danger to other women” in the sport.
Lin is the top seed in her division, the 55kg women’s division, but she’s also not an overwhelming force by any stretch of the imagination. She ranks sixth in her weight class in win percentage and in wins over .500. She has one of the lowest knockout rates of all competitors at 2.5 percent, ranking 12th among the 14 featherweights who have had any knockouts at all in a field of 22 total featherweights.
She simply doesn’t have the profile of a power boxer suggested by critics.
As for the Algerian boxer, there’s a reason Khelif is the fifth seed rather than the top seed. Khelif’s 9-5 record in official competition has been widely cited, though it’s difficult to figure out where it comes from.
If true, it would put to rest the idea that she’s been consistently dominant. It doesn’t seem to be, but we do have her record in all amateur competitions recognized by BoxRec and we can see that her record is 37-9 in their database.
That is fairly good but not unusual among the Olympic field, all of whom had to win their last several bouts to qualify for the tournament. She ranks third among the 21 entrants in the 66kg division in win percentage and fifth in wins over .500.
Khelif finished 33rd in the 2019 Women’s World Boxing Championships and was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the 2020 Summer Olympics. Her boxing improved heading into 2022, where she competed in the Women’s World Boxing Championships and took silver, losing to Amy Broadhurst in the final.
By percentage of wins that came by knockout, Khelif ranks seventh among the 66kg women’s boxers at this year’s Olympics. By percentage of all bouts ending in a winning knockout, Khelif ranks sixth. Her upcoming opponent in the quarterfinals, Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori, has a higher knockout percentage. It hardly seems to be the case that Khelif packs an overwhelming punch.
Carini has had bouts against more prolific knockout artists like Rosie Eccles and Aneta Rygielska. Both have higher knockout percentages than Khelif and have more total wins by knockout. Carini has never been knocked out by either boxer and has a 2-2 record against them.
She should have perhaps been more worried by the top-seeded boxer, Busenaz Surmeneli from Turkey, who has a 3-0 record against her, including one by knockout – the only person to knock her out in her 108 bouts.
All of this parsing, however, is absurd.
The Point Is Not Fairness, It’s Exclusion
While we can point to this or that oddity in the argument to highlight how removed from reality the exclusionary argument is, it’s more important to point out that these witch hunts do nothing but marginalize and destroy vulnerable people.
This process holds up a cis woman to imaginary and arbitrary standards of performance that put them under suspicion as soon as they excel.
American rugby star Ilona Maher and American swimming legend Katie Ledecky both found themselves subject to what has colloquially become known as “transvestigation,” the obsessive act of picking apart women’s bodies to identify the least conventionally attractive elements and using them to call a woman a man.
This drive to police women’s bodies, expression and performance doesn’t just stop at athletics. The need to police women has extended into every area of the culture war, and cis women have been mistaken for trans women and harassed or attacked in bathrooms.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Wide Left to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.