That Olympics boxing match offered a scary taste of possible harm when males compete against females

“This is unjust!” yelled Italy’s Olympics boxer Angela Carini after being twice punched in the face hard by Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and calling it quits in tears 46 seconds into a women’s welterweight bout.

Hard hits aren’t unusual in boxing, of course, but Khelif is suspected of being a biological male — and was disqualified at last year’s World Championships after testing positive for high levels of testosterone.

Thursday’s fight offered a taste of what could happen when biological males are allowed to compete against biological women.

Another women’s boxer, Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, who was also disqualified from the 2023 world championships — and stripped of her bronze medal after failing to pass gender-eligibility tests — is set to fight Friday.

Cross your fingers that her opponent, Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova, doesn’t suffer too badly.

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Both Khelif and Lin have passports ID’ing them as female; neither has claimed to be transgender or intersex — and both competed as women in Tokyo in 2021.

Intersex athletes in the past have had to maintain a certain testosterone level to compete against women.

But biological males clearly have an anatomical head start. And that not only makes competition unfair, but it poses huge risks that their female opponents may be seriously hurt.

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After all, trans women have injured women in sports events before:

• In 2022, a North Carolina transgender high-school volleyball player severely injured a female opponent with a spike to the face.

• Last year, a female Massachusetts field hockey player was injured after being struck off a shot by an opposing transgender player.

In the last few years, the governing bodies of cricket, cycling, athletics and swimming have tightened eligibility for elite women’s competitions.

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Other sports allow transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports if they can show reduced levels of testosterone.

Will it take a female boxer left with life-altering injuries — or worse, a female boxer killed — before the Olympics governing board (and even some lefty US towns and states) to ban transgender athletes, or at least set strict testosterone levels for intersex ones?

We pray not.

Sports leagues must adopt sensible gender-eligibility standards — including establishing verifiable hormonal levels.

Doing nothing, as Angela Carini said, is “unjust.”

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