Outrage has erupted after it was revealed that two boxers currently competing in the women’s Olympic category were previously disqualified from the World Championship for failing to meet the gender eligibility requirement of being genetically female (XX). Logically, since biological sex is binary, the only other conclusion to be drawn is that the two boxers in question are male.
Imane Khelif is an Algerian in the 66kg class (welterweight). Lin Yu-Ting is from Chinese Taipei and fights in the 57kg class (featherweight). Khelif’s Italian opponent Angela Carini said she had 'never felt a punch' like Khelif’s. One of Lin’s opponents, Svetlana Staneva of Bulgaria, used her fingers to make XX symbols in the ring after losing her bout.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) took over the regulation of Olympic boxing at Tokyo 2020 and Paris2024 for governance reasons (alleged corruption by the International Boxing Federation, the IBA). The IOC says these boxers are eligible because their passports say “female”. The IBA says they are not because they failed “gender tests”.
At the IOC’s daily media briefings, spokesman Mark Adams and President Thomas Bach have said that there is no scientific consensus on how to define a woman, and that they would be interested to hear of such a consensus. Despite this, the three largest Olympic sports, athletics, swimming and cycling, have all moved to restrict the female category in recent years. The eligibility rules of World Aquatics include the right to conduct sex screening. World Athletics has different rules for transgender athletes and those with DSDs, but both are restrictive, recognising that male advantage is a threat to fairness for women.
The IBA held a press conference and issued a detailed statement on 5 August about its testing in 2022 and 2023. It says it took blood samples with the boxers’ permission to conduct “gender tests” at world championships in both 2022 and 2023, and that two separate labs have deemed these boxers ineligible for the female category based on their chromosomes. The IBA informed the IOC of these test results in 2023, a fact which the IOC has acknowledged. In the 5 August statement its definitions of male and female are based on chromosomal make-up, XY for male and XX for female. In the press conference, the IBA chief executive, Chris Roberts OBE, explained that the IBA has just received letters from the national Olympic committees of Algeria and Chinese Taipei saying the IBA it did not have permission to disclose any test results. Instead the IBA showed the cover pages of the test results and gave details of the laboratories involved. Roberts pointed out that one boxer had not challenged the result, while the other had initiated but not pursued a challenge.
Adams and Bach have also stated repeatedly that the two boxers in question were “born as women, raised as women”, whose passports say they are women and who have competed for many years in women’s boxing. They have also said that sex registered on passports is the sole criterion on which eligibility is determined.
The IOC has said these are DSD cases not transgender. The most likely is 46XY-5ARD, the condition affecting South African 800m runner Caster Semenya. Babies born with 5ARD may be wrongly registered as female but later go through a testosterone-fuelled male puberty. If, as it seems, these two boxers have male advantage, the effect is the same, and women lose out. DSD in sport is explained in this one-page briefing from Sex-Matters.org .
Contacts
North America
Dr Linda Blade, Sport Performance Professional, ICFS co-founder, coachblade@gmail.com, DM @coachblade on X
Europe
Sally Parkin, Sex Matters, sally.parkin@sex-matters.org
About the International Consortium on Female Sport
The ICFS is an international lobby group that advocates for the preservation of the female sports category. it is a non-partisan, single-issue collective of women’s sports advocates from across the political spectrum. Its foundational principle is that fairness and safety for female athletes in sport is ensured by having a dedicated category for those born female, and that identity does not change this.
What is going on in Olympic boxing?
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