We Must Defend Imane Khelif

August 5, 2024
By: Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff

Transphobia also hurts cisgender women like the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif who don’t conform to a narrow, Eurocentric vision of womanhood.

Here on the streets of Olympic Paris, people have been protesting numerous issues—from Israel’s attacks on Gaza to the environmental impacts of the Games to the treatment of the homeless—but the gender of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is definitely not one of them. In an invented “controversy” whipped up by an assortment of transphobes, right-wingers, and fascists (and proliferated by a coterie of useful idiots), Khelif was viciously targeted after her first-round knockout of Angela Carini of Italy. The great lie was that Khelif was a man posing as a woman. Some claimed she was trans—she is not—while others, sounding like amateur epidemiologists telling us not to take the Covid vaccine, proclaimed she had XY chromosomes, rather than XX.

This baseless frenzy was hateful, racist, and dangerous, and it created International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach a rare moment where he actually did the right thing. Bach said that the “hate speech” directed at boxers Khelif (as well as Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting) was “totally unacceptable.” Bach then proclaimed, “We will not take part in a politically motivated…cultural war.… Some want to own a definition of who is a wom[a]n.”

This hasn’t stopped Donald Trump from making this relatively obscure Algerian boxer a part of his stump speeches, where he misgenders her to laughs from his dwindling crowds.

Khelif is a boxer with a 9-5 career professional record and a low knockdown rate. But that did not stop her tormentors, who know nothing about women’s boxing, from trying to make her sound like the young Mike Tyson. Carini is a police officer and favorite of Italian fascists, with a history of quitting early in fights. Again, this did not enter anyone’s analysis on the far right, because why would they let facts get in their way?

Yet this is a firestorm whose spark begins not with Khelif’s knockout of Carini or Trump’s lies but in the dark, corroded corners of international sports. It originates from assertions by the International Boxing Association that Khelif had failed a test at the 2023 World Championships that supposedly showed she had “competitive advantages over other female competitors.” Umar Kremlev, the IBA president hailing from Russia, told Tass, a Russian state news agency, that the 25-year-old Algerian boxer was disqualified because “it was proven they have XY chromosomes.”

Setting aside the fact that it is medically possible for women to have XY chromosomes and setting aside the fact that numerous health conditions can spur a rise in the production of male hormones and setting aside all the problems with assuming that there is a tidy biological “gender binary” that Khelif is somehow guilty of violating, there’s the matter of the messenger.

The International Boxing Association is shady. In its 130 years of existence, the IOC has withdrawn recognition from only one international sports governing body: the IBA in 2023—remarkable given the long history of corrupt sporting governing bodies. For his part, Kremlev released videos on X after the Paris 2024 opening ceremony railing against Bach as the “chief sodomite” and the IOC as “society’s outcasts.”

After Khelif knocked out Carini, Kremlev announced that it would give Carini “prize money as if she were an Olympic champion.” This amounts to $100,000, with Carini receiving $50,000, the Italian national boxing federation getting $25,000, and her coach another $25,000. Olympics watchers have long noted the strong links between Kremlev, the IBA, and Russia, a country at war with the IOC since its Olympic competitors have been forced by the IOC to compete as “individual neutral athletes.”

There is zero available evidence of these supposedly failed tests that the IBA is howling about. Nothing has been released to the public. As Dan Wolken noted in USA Today, “We don’t know what kind of tests those were, what they were testing for or which organization oversaw the lab work.” In addition, “We don’t know exactly what Khelif and Lin are being accused of, by the IBA or anyone else.”

That hasn’t stopped the right-wing hate machine, alongside a relentless contingent of transphobes who have made “Save Women’s Sports” their mantra, apparently unconcerned that they are throwing women like Khelif, Lin Yu-Ting, and anyone else who fails to pass their looks test. (Lin, who has clinched at least a bronze medal in Paris, is another boxer who failed an unspecified IBA gender test in 2023.) Moreover, they don’t appear to be worried about the fact that in Algeria, it is illegal to be transgender—and, again, to be absolutely clear, Khelif is not trans—so, making these sorts of unfounded claims could put the boxer’s life in danger.

As trans activists have said, transphobia also hurts cisgender women who don’t conform to a narrow, Eurocentric vision of womanhood proffered by J.K. Rowling, Riley Gaines, or other high-profile purveyors of hate who cower behind the banner of “protecting women’s sports.” Sports is an entry point to attack trans people in all walks of life.

“The rhetoric used to exclude Khelif and Lin from the category of woman is underpinned by eugenics,” Satoko Itani of Kansai University in Japan told us. “This incident illustrates how dangerously widespread the hatred towards transgender has become and how it harms all women, especially women of color.”

The onslaught targeting Khelif also echoes the horrific treatment of Caster Semenya, the great South African middle-distance runner, and they are just as racist. Katrina Karkazis, a professor of sexuality, women’s, and gender studies at Amherst College, told us, “The targeting of Khelif and so many other women athletes of color before her make it impossible to miss the optics of this controversy.” The situation, she said, “reflects the racial politics that emerged in the context of Western colonialism, where racialized ideals about women’s bodies were used to construct women who do not fit the ideal as somehow outside the natural order.”

Karkazis added, “What makes these episodes dangerous is the way these terrorizing systems view the very existence of these women as the problem, rather than racism, sexism, or homophobia.”

This fresh wave of attacks against women of color has also emerged amid Trump’s racist, floundering presidential campaign. Desperate for an issue to divide and inflame, Trump’s toadies have taken a break from going after the Olympic opening ceremony and swerved their attention onto the Algerian boxer like a cat chasing a Fox News laser pointer. Carini as well as several people who initially ran with the bogus story have apologized, but many others just keep stoking this fabricated moral panic.

It’s depressing that tennis legend Martina Navratilova has piled on. Navratilova, in contrast to her many laudable and brave political positions, has long been an uncritical supporter of Rowling, retweeting her most inflammatory statements about trans people and sending out many of her own. But in the case of—again, the cisgender—Khelif, her invective has a special sting. As a tennis star in the 1980s, Navratilova had a musculature that women’s tennis hadn’t seen before. Her relentless power caused one sportswriter to say that she “must have a chromosome loose somewhere.” The media’s crass disparagement of the tennis great was driven by her rivalry with paragon of American blondeness Chris Evert. Navratilova was dubbed the muscled robot from the Eastern Bloc, and, even after her defection to the United States, was held in suspicion. To see Navratilova use rhetoric against Khelif similar to what was weaponized against her is to witness an ugly cycle of abuse.

Does Khelif have “biological advantages”? Show us the great athlete who doesn’t. Does Rowling want US Olympic hoopster Brittney Griner to play on her knees so short white players can get a rebound? Did Elon Musk complain when Michael Phelps used his naturally occurring flipper hands to win 28 Olympic medals? As Lindsay Gibbs wrote in Time,

At the elite level, especially the Olympics, sports are all about celebrating the extraordinary. None of the athletes we are seeing competing in Paris or in any other Olympiad are “normal.” They are the best in the world at their sport. And while it certainly takes hard work, passion, relentlessness, and a top-tier support system to make it to the biggest stage in sports, it also takes some form of biological superiority, especially for the record-setters.

One of the grimmer aspects of all of this is seeing so many people in the media who do not understand the issue, the sport, or the participants joining this carnival of hate—but even worse are the apologies for calling Khelif trans. This makes it seem like if she was trans, she’d deserve the abuse. It’s reminiscent of that famous moment when John McCain was asked if Barack Obama was a Muslim, and McCain shook his head and said, “No, he’s a decent person.” The media praised McCain for this answer because he was standing up to the GOP’s emergent racist right wing. But all it did was legitimize the idea that if Obama were a Muslim, that would in fact be a problem. The abuse right now is targeting both Khelif and the trans community. If we are not defending them both, then we are playing the right’s dangerous game.