We Must Defend Imane Khelif

[In It to Win It]

The Nation

No paywall

Here on the streets of Olympic Paris, people have been protesting numerous issues—from Israel’s attacks on Gaza to the environmental impacts of the Games to the treatment of the homeless—but the gender of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is definitely not one of them. In an invented “controversy” whipped up by an assortment of transphobes, right-wingers, and fascists (and proliferated by a coterie of useful idiots), Khelif was viciously targeted after her first-round knockout of Angela Carini of Italy. The great lie was that Khelif was a man posing as a woman. Some claimed she was trans—she is not—while others, sounding like amateur epidemiologists telling us not to take the Covid vaccine, proclaimed she had XY chromosomes, rather than XX.

This baseless frenzy was hateful, racist, and dangerous, and it created International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach a rare moment where he actually did the right thing. Bach said that the “hate speech” directed at boxers Khelif (as well as Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting) was “totally unacceptable.” Bach then proclaimed, “We will not take part in a politically motivated…cultural war.… Some want to own a definition of who is a wom[a]n.”

This hasn’t stopped Donald Trump from making this relatively obscure Algerian boxer a part of his stump speeches, where he misgenders her to laughs from his dwindling crowds.

Khelif is a boxer with a 9-5 career professional record and a low knockdown rate. But that did not stop her tormentors, who know nothing about women’s boxing, from trying to make her sound like the young Mike Tyson. Carini is a police officer and favorite of Italian fascists, with a history of quitting early in fights. Again, this did not enter anyone’s analysis on the far right, because why would they let facts get in their way?