After enduring the most despicable abuse hurled at any athlete in Paris, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif earned the best possible ending for herself on Friday when she defeated Yang Liu to win gold in welterweight boxing. While all the right-wing freaks who accused her of being a man can now go back to ignoring women's sports, Khelif can hold an everlasting reward for both her athletic ferocity and her out-of-ring grace.
From my perspective, the weight of public opinion is firmly in her favor, with blustery pundits chastened by their blatant inaccuracy and normal people sympathetic to what she's been through. But Khelif's gotten an extra boost, too, from the fact that nobody in the Western world trusts a Russki.
The reason anyone yelled about Khelif's femininity in the first place is that in 2023, she and fellow Olympic boxer Lin Yu-ting were banned from the world championships by the Russian-controlled International Boxing Association due to a failed eligibility test. While these tests are shrouded in mystery, the president of the IBA, Umar Kremlev, said that they showed the boxers had XY chromosomes.
Khelif's case has been helped, however, by the sheer untrustworthiness of the IBA, which was removed from its Olympic governing role by the IOC in 2019 because of its alarming history of corruption. Any mainstream article about Khelif's gold pokes holes in the initial controversy by portraying the IBA as an unreliable source, and Anna Merlan's piece at Mother Jones astutely connects the IBA's antagonism of Khelif and Lin with both the American and Russian right's overall hatred of queerness.
As this fishiness became more common knowledge over the past week, and more and more people decided the XY claim had to be false, the narrative around Khelif changed. Her story is no longer about the complexity of gender as we perceive it—challenging the assumptions that all men or women can fit into a tightly constructed box. It's now about a great athlete screwed by the Russians—a tale as old as most fans of the Olympics, and a comforting one that doesn't mess with anyone's priors.
Chromosomes shouldn't have ever factored into the discussion about Khelif's eligibility. Obviously they don't separate a man from a woman, because those social categories long predate their discovery. To understand their insignificance to a person's actual experience, one merely needs to put themselves in the shoes of someone receiving this kind of test result. If you saw a "Y" where there should be an "X" or vice versa, you'd say, "Wow, that's wild," and then go on being the same person you always were.
Khelif is a cis woman—meaning assigned female at birth and cool with it—because otherwise Algeria wouldn't let her put an "F" on her passport, which the IOC says she has. But her cisness, too, was irrelevant at these Olympics, because people aimed their derangement at her as if she were trans anyway, using photos to illustrate her "manhood" while whining about the physical difference she possessed only in their minds. Invisible genetic material was never really the focal point of debate, but rather the desire to punish women who don't fit traditional male ideals of femininity. You could see that narrow essentialism in this AI-looking image shared by Khelif opponent Anna Luca Hamori, which pitted the most fragile female boxer I've ever seen against a demon who I struggle to classify as any gender. Every woman who's ever been called "a man" for some arbitrary trait they possess, like broad shoulders or a deep voice, knows Khelif's situation, and men who've been insulted as "girls" should be able to empathize, too.
It's possible that Khelif really did register XY chromosomes on a test, because some cis women can do that. It's also possible that she's the victim of a Russian conspiracy. Given the available information, the latter seems more probable. But neither path actually changes who Imane Khelif is. We know she's a woman, because she told us. And we know she's an Olympic champion, because she fought like hell for it.
