What’s Going On With the Two Women Boxers Who “Failed” a Gender Test

They’ve both been cleared to compete in the Olympics, and anti-trans activists are furious—even though the women aren’t trans.

This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here. Two women boxers will be allowed to compete in the Paris Olympics despite being disqualified from the 2023 world championships for failing to meet sex-testing standards, the International Olympic Committee announced Monday. The news should have been no big deal—it was simply the IOC following its own protocol. Instead, it was met with anger, fearmongering, and smears from journalists and advocates who want to keep trans people out of sports. Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan—neither of whom is transgender—competed in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and have won medals at previous world boxing tournaments. But last year, the International Boxing Association, the governing body for the sport, disqualified Khelif and Lin during the tournament. According to an IOC database, Khelif was removed from the 2023 championships just hours before she was set to compete for the gold medal because “her elevated levels of testosterone failed to meet the eligibility criteria.” Lin competed, and even won the bronze in the tournament, but the IBA took it back after she was found ineligible, “based on the results of a biochemical test” that likely found high testosterone levels or chromosomal variance.

So why the different treatment at the Olympics? The IOC and the IBA have different medical standards for competitors. The two institutions parted ways in 2019, after the IOC stripped the IBA of its Olympic status amid concerns about its integrity, finances, and governance. The IBA president at the time, Uzbekistan’s Gafur Rakhimov, had incurred U.S. sanctions for his alleged participation in the heroin trade and in a Eurasian crime syndicate. The IOC was also wary of the association’s dependence on funding from Gazprom, the Russian state energy firm. (The IBA has since dropped Gazprom as a sponsor.) Since the split, the IBA has taken on a new president, Umar Kremlev, who has accused Khelif and Lin of “trying to fool their colleagues and pretend to be women.”

But the IBA is no longer responsible for running the qualifying matches that lead up to the Olympics—the IOC does that, and it has found that Khelif and Lin are eligible competitors. “All athletes participating in the boxing tournament of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 comply with the competition’s eligibility and entry regulations, as well as all applicable medical regulations,” the IOC said in a statement. The bottom line is that Khelif and Lin are both women who meet the IOC’s standards for competition in the women’s category. There is no reason why they shouldn’t compete. But right-leaning media outlets and advocates who oppose trans inclusion in sports have latched on to the IBA’s disqualification to smear Khelif and Lin as gender frauds out to cheat their way to Olympic medals. The fact that, according to all public accounts, neither Khelif nor Lin is transgender has not stopped anti-trans journalists and activists from calling the boxers men or biological males and referring to them with the pronouns he and him. (I’ll explain the reasons why the women may have tested higher than average for testosterone a little later, but the short of it is that hormone levels vary from person to person, and some natural differences in sex characteristics can increase the production of testosterone.)

One of the leaders of the media blitz against Khelif and Lin is Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer who became a prominent campaigner against trans people in athletics in 2022, after tying with Lia Thomas, a trans woman, for fifth place in a NCAA championship event. Calling Khelif and Lin “males,” Gaines warned that a woman boxer “is going to die” in the Paris Olympics as a result of their participation. “The Olympics glorifies men punching women in the face with the intent of knocking them unconscious,” Gaines wrote on X.

Aside from the deeper question of whether society should value a sport that revolves around inflicting deliberate personal injury, there is nothing suspect or wrong about women boxers beating each other up during a match. Women’s boxing is all about punching women in the face! But anti-trans advocates are suggesting that what Khelif and Lin do in the ring amounts to misogynistic assault. On X on Tuesday, Robby Starbuck, the director of an anti-trans documentary, posted a 2022 video of Khelif in a boxing match, describing it as “beating up a woman.” Khelif, he wrote, “is NOT a woman. He’s very clearly a man. Is violence against women a sport now?”