Thursday’s Olympic contests saw two of the greatest American athletes ever solidify their status as legends . Simone Biles won her sixth Olympic gold medal in the women’s gymnastics all around, making her the most decorated gymnast in American history. Swimmer Katie Ledecky became the most decorated woman in American Olympic history after the U.S. placed second in the 4×200-meter freestyle relay — she’d clinched gold in the women’s 1500-meter freestyle the night before.
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But online, the conversation about the Olympics was not dominated by the triumphs of female athletes who’d worked the better part of their lives to represent their country — but by false allegations that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was secretly a transgender man who had infiltrated the women’s category of the games.
On Thursday, Khelif — a boxer of modest success on the international circuit — won her second-round match in the women’s welterweight division, after her Italian opponent Angela Carini withdrew less than a minute after the fight began. Carini had dropped her guard and taken a monster punch from Khelif to the face, the pain of which was apparently too much. “I have never been hit so hard in my life,” Carini said afterwards.
The 46-second match — and Carini’s tears in its aftermath — ignited a firestorm in conservative media. Politicians, influencers, and prominent right-wing figures attacked Khelif, accusing her of being a transgender man who had physically abused a defenseless woman on the biggest stage in sports.
Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt referred to Khelif as a “biological male,” who “identifies as a trans woman.”
Former college athlete turned anti-trans crusader Riley Gaines claimed that “the Olympics glorifies men punching women in the face with the intent of knocking them unconscious,” in an X post showing the moment Khelif hit Carini. “Imane Khelif is 1 of 2 male boxers fighting women at the Olympics. A woman is going to die,” she wrote.
Right-wing billionaire Elon Musk posted multiple times on X about the match between the two women, agreeing that “men don’t belong in women’s sports.” Anti-trans author J.K. Rowling railed against Khelif as a cruel “male who knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment,” who was “enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.”
“A young female boxer has just had everything she’s worked and trained for snatched away because [the International Olympic Committee] allowed a male to get in the ring with her,” Rowling wrote in another post .
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Even former President Donald Trump weighed in on the clamor, writing on Truth Social that he will “keep men out of women’s sports!” Speaking on the “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show,” Trump said that at his rallies, “what gets the biggest applause” is saying “we will not allow men to play in women’s sports.”
There’s just one problem: Khelif is not transgender and has never identified as a man. Khelif was born a woman and has identified as such her entire life. She represents a nation where being LGBTQ+ — and attempting to change one’s gender — is outright illegal .
The basis for the accusations stemmed from a 2023 incident in which Khelif, and fellow boxer Lin Yu-ting, were abruptly suspended from the International Boxing Association (IBA) Women’s World Boxing Championships. Both are competing at the Paris games. IBA President Umar Kremlev claimed that genetic testing had proven Khelif “had XY chromosomes,” and was therefore ineligible to compete. The specific tests conducted and their results were never made public, and Khelif challenged the claim. It should be noted that the IBA was stripped of its role in organizing the Olympic games in 2019 amid ongoing corruption allegations, and evidence the organization rigged matches at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Certain genetic conditions can result in some women having XY chromosomes with little to no indication in their physical presentation. The same is true for men, who can present the physical characteristics of a male while having XX genotype.
The Olympics and international sporting bodies have a long and complicated history of attempting to police the gender presentation of female athletes, and “sex-testing” them to confirm their biology, and while sporting agencies continue to malign female athletes with so-called “disorders of sex development,” , the International Olympic Committee and Paris 2024 Boxing unit stood by Khelif.
“We have seen in reports misleading information about two female athletes competing at the Olympic Games Paris 2024,” the International Olympic Committee and Paris 2024 Boxing Unit wrote in a joint statement on Thursday. “These two athletes were the victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA. Towards the end of the IBA World Championships in 2023, they were suddenly disqualified without any due process.”
“The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years,” the organizations added in the statement.
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