An unprecedented scene unfolded at the Paris Olympics today. In a boxing ring two contestants were announced: a woman from Italy and an opponent from Algeria who only last year failed a sex test and was barred from competing against women.
After just 46 seconds of fighting and two blows to the face, Italy’s Angela Carini immediately abandoned the bout against Algeria’s Imane Khelif. Carini broke down in tears, saying Non è giusto. Non è giusto!
Translation: “It’s not fair. It’s not fair!”
Later, in an interview, Carini said: “I have never been hit so hard in my life.” She wept as she described how she had to give up on her dream for gold, which she had pursued in the memory of her dead father. “Until the end, I fought with blood in my eyes because I wanted this victory at all costs. Just for my father.” Khelif will now advance to the quarterfinals.
How did we get to this point?
For the first time in history, the International Olympics Committee this year has permitted two athletes whose sex is unclear to compete in the women’s boxing championships. In addition to Khelif, competing in the 66 kg category, there is Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan, competing in the 57 kg category.
This is happening even though Khelif and Lin were disqualified from the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships last year after the president of the International Boxing Association (IBA) said DNA tests “proved they had XY chromosomes.”
But the International Olympics Committee has given the boxers the go-ahead because, according to the IOC spokesman, “everyone competing in the women’s category is complying with the competition eligibility rules.” Those eligibility rules are “incredibly complex,” he added.
What he didn’t say: the IOC’s rules appear to be colored by gender ideology. According to the body’s “Portrayal Guidelines” for members of the media, the terms biologically male and biologically female are “problematic,” and “a person’s sex category is not assigned based on genetics alone.”
In 2023, the president of the International Boxing Association announced that “a series of DNA tests” had “uncovered athletes who were trying to fool their colleagues and pretended to be women.” Speaking to an Algerian TV network, Khelif rejected the IBA disqualification as a “big conspiracy.” Despite speculation, neither Khelif nor Lin has claimed transgender status or a disorder of sex development (DSD)—medical conditions in which reproductive organs and genitals develop abnormally.
Regardless of their reasons for letting these particular athletes into the ring with women, critics say the IOC is putting female athletes in danger. “Males—however they identify—pack a punch that is 162 percent more powerful than women—THE biggest performance gap between men and women,” Nancy Hogshead, an American Olympic gold medalist, posted on X. “Gender ideology will get women KILLED.”
One female boxer, Brianda Tamara, recalls how difficult it was fighting with Khelif in a previous tournament. “Her blows hurt me a lot, I don’t think I had ever felt like that in my 13 years as a boxer, nor in my sparring with men,” Tamara wrote on X. “Thank God that day I got out of the ring safely.”
Asked about Khelif and Lin’s participation in the Olympics, Mark Adams, the IOC spokesman, said at a press conference, “I am not going to comment on individuals.” Then he went on to comment on individuals, saying: “They are women in their passports and it is stated that is the case.”
No matter what their passports say, if the athletes have XY chromosomes, “that means they’re male and they have no business competing in the women’s category,” Kara Dansky, feminist, lawyer, and author of The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls tells The Free Press.
“This is nothing other than male violence against women for sport and entertainment,” she says.
It’s also bloody unfair.
Madeleine Kearns is an associate editor at The Free Press. Follow her on X @madeleinekearns. Read her piece “Biden’s Supreme Court Reforms Are Unconstitutional.”
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