With the judges unanimously declaring her the victor over China’s Yang Liu, Algeria’s Imane Khelif secured the gold medal in the women’s boxing 66-kilogram (146-pound) weight class, capping an Olympic run beset with controversy and misinformation.
The saga began during Khelif’s preliminary match, when she delivered a painful blow to the face of Italy’s Angela Carini, who abandoned the fight after 46 seconds.
“I’ve never been hit with such a powerful punch,” Carini told reporters after the match.
The incident might have been relatively uncontroversial were it not for what had happened during the 2023 International Boxing Association (IBA) Women’s World Championships.
During that tournament – two days before its conclusion – officials had disqualified Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, who fights at 57 kilograms (126 pounds). The IBA issued an official statement asserting that the women “did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.”
So how, some might wonder, were Khelif and Lin allowed to fight in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris? What “necessary eligibility criteria” did the IBA use to make the judgment? And do those criteria give Khelif and Lin competitive advantages?
A tortured history of sex testing
In my book “Regulating Bodies,” I explore what I call “protective policies” in elite sports.
These are regulations designed to protect the spirit of fair play, safeguard athletes’ health and well-being, and protect the image and interests of sports. They include policies that regulate doping and genetic enhancement, set age limits and weight classes and, in the case of Parasports, establish classes for competition.
Protective policies can also regulate whether athletes compete in men’s or women’s events. But history shows that there are no conclusive ways to determine sex – and no consensus over the extent to which the distinction matters.
In the 1940s, sports’ governing bodies began requiring women to submit letters from physicians confirming they were, in fact, women.
In the 1960s, some athletic organizations briefly required gynecological exams and visual inspections of unclothed women before turning, in 1967, to sex chromatin tests that looked specifically for female-typical XX sex chromosomes.
When, in the 1980s, it finally became clear that women could have the male-typical XY sex chromosome pair and receive no athletic benefit, there was a brief dalliance with genetic analysis before the turn toward “suspicion-based testing.” Under this system, if someone challenged an athlete’s sex, the suspected athlete could be asked to submit to a multifaceted gender verification process.
Beginning around 2010, the conversation in international sports turned to natural testosterone levels, the ways that women’s bodies responded to that testosterone and specific diagnoses of intersex variations.
Yet every version of sex testing collapses under scrutiny. That’s because most sports are organized according to a strict male-female binary. Nature isn’t.
A ban ‘contrary to good governance’
Each Olympic sport is governed by its own international federation, and the International Olympic Committee permits each federation to establish its own eligibility criteria when it comes to issues such as age, citizenship and sex.
The 2021 “IOC Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations” offers a series of recommendations for federations to consider, but also recognizes that “it must be within the remit of each sport and its governing body to determine how” to determine eligibility to compete in women’s events. In other words, the IBA can decide how, for the purposes of boxing, it defines “woman.”
But there were two big problems with the IBA’s decision to disqualify Khelif and Lin – both of whom have been competing in the sport for years and whose passports confirm that they are women.
First, the boxing association was not acting in accordance with its official regulations. The IOC has since stated that the IBA “suddenly” disqualified the women from the 2023 World Championships “without any due process” and that the decision was “contrary to good governance.”
Second, the IOC no longer regards the IBA as boxing’s international federation. After a series of concerns about the IBA’s finances, governance and ethics, the IOC stripped the IBA of its official recognition in 2023 and instead appointed the Paris 2024 Boxing Unit to organize the Olympic tournament.
The Paris 2024 Boxing Unit relied on the IBA’s established eligibility requirements, drafted after the 2016 Rio Games, which had allowed Khelif and Lin to compete. Those same requirements also allowed the two women to compete in the 2020 Olympic Games, where Khelif finished in fifth place and Lin finished ninth.