It's pretty much impossible to get an understanding of the issues from sources like the BBC: Boxing controversy – what we know and what we don't.
Khelif has always competed in the women's division and is recognised by the IOC as a female athlete.
"The Algerian boxer was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport," IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said on Friday.
"This is not a transgender case. There has been some confusion that somehow it's a man fighting a woman. This is just not the case. On that there is consensus, scientifically this is not a man fighting a woman."
Um…yes it is. That's precisely what it is: a man fighting a woman. As the IOB found, both Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting have XY chromosomes. They're men. That''s why they were banned. We don't know exactly what the issue is, but it's very likely that both have the 5-ARD DSD – the same as Caster Semenya.
Fortunately there are still some journalists who know what they're talking about. Here's Janice Turner in the Times:
After taking questions on the women’s boxing furore with his usual huffy condescension, the International Olympic Committee spokesman Mark Adams strived for a little consensus. “I hope,” he said, “we are all agreed we aren’t going to go back to the bad old days of sex testing.”
Actually, we are not. Adams was perpetuating the myth that sex testing was archaic, cruel and degrading, involving athletes dropping their pants for doctors to check they had the “right” genitals. In fact, a sex test was conducted only once in a female athlete’s career: a quick cheek swab with a cotton bud revealing biological sex was added to her permanent record. Anti-doping tests are far more intrusive and can happen any time.
But at the 1996 Atlanta Games an IOC questionnaire asked female athletes if the cheek swab should continue (82 per cent said yes) and whether it made them “anxious” (94 per cent said no). Nonetheless the IOC ignored almost 1,000 elite women who replied and abolished cheek swabs for Sydney in 2000.
That decision exemplifies the IOC’s contempt for female competitors and is the very reason the tough, seasoned Italian boxer Angela Carini abandoned her bout after 46 seconds to kneel weeping on the canvas with a bloody nose. It is also why in 2016 at Rio, the women’s 800m podium was filled entirely with biological males, including Caster Semenya who took gold.
Those runners and the two controversial boxers at these Games — Imane Khelif of Algeria and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting — have a DSD (difference of sexual development), that wilfully misunderstood phenomenon. They are not “intersex” — ie between or a “mix of” the two sexes — because no one is. They almost certainly have 5-ARD: they are biological males with XY chromosomes but whose bodies lack the receptor that creates external male genitalia.
In developing countries many are read as female at birth and raised as girls. But at puberty their internal testes start producing testosterone at normal levels so they acquire most of the strength, muscle mass, height and power of other men. In other words, they experience male puberty after which many start living as men. Semenya is pictured in her autobiography at 15, broad-shouldered and bare-chested on a beach in swimming trunks.
There are, similarly, pictures of Imane Khelif relaxing – can't find the link now – clearly dressed as a man.
Undoubtedly living in this ambiguous state in countries like South Africa or Algeria with rigid gender roles and violent homophobia is a tough fate. Such people have found refuge in women’s sport where, unsurprisingly, they have excelled. African coaches began deliberately scouting for DSD males to train for high-level female competition, since after 2000 they even had a shot at Olympic gold.
But in recent years, individual sport federations have tightened up eligibility rules regarding trans athletes and those with male DSDs. (These are totally separate, although conflated by trans activists who use DSDs to “prove” sex is not binary but a spectrum.)…
What we see in Paris women’s boxing is the IOC’s ludicrous, dangerous, misogynistic principles given full rein. Since it banished the International Boxing Association (IBA) for unrelated corruption issues, the IOC has run Olympic boxing itself. After being disqualified from IBA world championships for failing gender tests Khelif and Lin, tellingly, did not appeal.
They knew the Olympics beckoned where there was neither sex testing nor testosterone rules. Mark Adams said it was enough they had female passports, a document anyone can change. In other words, the IOC allowed eligibility to women’s boxing — a sport that for safety reasons never stopped being sex-based — to be based purely on self-ID.
This calamity is not merely the IOC’s fault — it is precisely what it wants. This is sport run according to its stated principles of gender inclusion and the obliteration of sex classes. For Paris it even issued a glossary for journalists of “terms to avoid”, including “born female” and “biologically male”.
Yet fewer people will now be censored. The IOC is not just at odds with sport federations but many current female athletes, including female boxing champions who are refusing to fight Khelif and Lin. As the tide goes out on pernicious gender ideology, why does the IOC still deny science? Perhaps to court US sponsors or stay “relevant”.
But mainly because it is profoundly institutionally sexist. In 2015, it allowed any male who reduced testosterone (to a rate still ten times the female average) into female sports without consulting a single woman. It discriminates against female athletes by denying their biology where once it used it against them, banning women from the ski jump until 2014 because it might damage their wombs.
And it abolished a simple test that would have stopped Paris being remembered for televising male violence. Bring back the cheek swab: for female boxers the bad old days are now.
Mick Hartley 