Imane Khelif’s critics have been vindicated

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif became notorious at the Paris Olympics in 2024, winning gold in the women’s welterweight division despite allegations that Khelif was biologically male. Well, Khelif made an astonishing admission last week.

Speaking to French magazine L’Equipe, Khelif admitted to having not just a ‘female phenotype’, but also the SRY gene. This gene is essentially the ‘start button’ of male development, triggering the formation of testes. You heard that right. In a dangerous contact sport, one competitor in the female category has just admitted to having male biology.

What makes this admission more remarkable is that for the past few years, anyone who questioned Khelif’s claim to be a woman was branded a ‘bigot’. ‘Gender essentialists have issues with strong Olympians’, insisted one publication, scolding the ‘weirdos’ who speculate ‘on the genitalia of Olympic athletes’. Khelif’s ‘progressive’ champions claimed that JK Rowling, Elon Musk and others criticising the presence of men in women’s sports were waging a campaign of ‘cyberbullying’ and ‘misogynist, racist and sexist harassment’. Sports presenter Laura Woods even received death threats after showing support for an article highlighting the danger Khelif’s presence in the women’s category posed to female athletes.

For those wondering if an apology is in the works now that Khelif has admitted the truth, I wouldn’t hold your breath.

After all, Khelif and those supporting the boxer have ridden out similar storms of controversy before. In 2023, the International Boxing Association’s (IBA) sex tests indicated that Khelif was in possession of a male Y chromosome. The IBA promptly banned Khelif from all its competitions, citing unfair ‘competitive advantages over other female competitors’.

Yet Khelif continued to try to fight in the women’s category, aided and abetted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Operating under its 2021 framework that all athletes ‘be allowed to compete in the category that best aligns with their self-determined gender identity’, the IOC allowed Khelif to participate in the women’s welterweight category at the 2024 Paris Olympics. It was a devastating decision. Khelif’s very first match at the Olympics, against Italy’s Carini, lasted all of 46 seconds. Carini was punched twice with a strength she had ‘never felt’ before, leaving her weeping on her knees in the ring. Khelif swept aside all her opponents with similarly brutal ease.

The IOC may have since announced plans to amend its policy on transgender athletes in women’s sports, but so far nothing has actually changed. Little wonder perhaps that Khelif is only willing to undergo eligibility testing ‘administered by the IOC’ – presumably due to its reliable track record of throwing female athletes under the bus. ‘It is not as easy as some may in this culture war… want to portray it’, said IOC president Thomas Bach of the Khelif scandal back in 2024. In other words, protecting women comes second to stroking the IOC’s own ‘progressive’ sensibilities.

Khelif is still determined to fight as a woman at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, insisting that ‘I am not a transwoman, I am a girl’. ‘I was raised as a girl, I grew up as a girl, the people in my village have always known me as a girl.’ Khelif goes on to say that critics, including US president Donald Trump, ‘cannot distort the truth’.

Where was this commitment to the truth when female opponents were being socked in the face by an opponent who had undergone an unspecified degree of male development? How is such information on the biological make-up of Khelif being added like a footnote, years after the fact, in a sport where a category error can result in serious physical injury?

If the IOC had an ounce of integrity, Khelif never would have been in the ring with Carini – or any female athlete for that matter. Its policy of endless ‘inclusivity’ has resulted in deep sporting injustice. Far from flinging the doors wide open to everyone, the IOC’s only achievement is convincing the next generation of girls in sport that maybe they shouldn’t bother.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.