If you’ve been following this story for a while now then the outcome isn’t a shock. Olympic boxer Imane Khelif has finally admitted to having male chromosomes and also to using hormone therapy to lower his level of testosterone for competition.
Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif has confirmed that he has the male chromosome, revealing the biological reality months after identifying as female in order to compete against women in the 2024 Paris Olympics…
The boxer has the “SRY” or Sex-determining Region of the Y gene, which is a gene only carried on Y chromosomes. The gene triggers typical male sexual development.
A report leaked 8 months ago indicated that gold-medal winning “female” boxer had male chromosomes so the only news here is that Khelif is finally admitting what we all knew. Khelif spent months refusing to take a genetic test which was required by the governing body for boxing as of last year. That meant dropping out of one major competition after another. Last September he even appealed the testing requirement and tried to bypass it.
The Algerian has filed an appeal which is attempting to overturn a decision made by World Boxing in May to introduce mandatory testing for its competitions.
Khelif’s appeal also requested Cas declares the 26-year-old eligible for the 2025 World Boxing Championships from 4-14 September without a test.
Now Khelif seems to have realized the only way forward is to admit the truth. But despite admitting it, he’s somehow hoping to get back in the ring to fight women again in 2028.
“For the next Games, if I have to take a test, I will. I have no problem with that,” Khelif said. “I’ve already taken this test. I contacted World Boxing, I sent them my medical records, my hormone tests, everything. But I haven’t had any response. I’m not hiding, I’m not refusing the tests.”
There’s a little wrinkle in this story which trans activists and journalists have been using to deny the obvious. Khelif is technically not trans because he never transitioned. Confusion over that created a rhetorical loophole Khelif has exploited since 2024. I explained it last year.
Khelif never transitioned. Instead, it seems likely Khelif has a DSD or difference in sexual development, meaning Khelif has male chromosomes and male levels of testosterone but might present as female at birth.
So, again, it’s not accurate to say Khelif is trans if Khelif never transitioned, but the more salient point is that Khelif (according to the testing) is biologically male.
What really mattered here in the context of boxing was that Khelif was biologically male. But so long as some people, including President Trump at one point, were saying Khelif was trans, Khelif and many news outlets ran interference by saying that wasn’t true. Khelif wasn’t trans but Khelif was a biological male claiming to be a woman. Back in 2024, CNN used this confusion to bring on Jemele Hill and have here attack everyone who criticized Khelif as transphobic (even though Khelif isn’t technically trans).
August, 2024. CNN’s Laura Coates and Jemele Hill rail against Elon, Trump, Jake Paul, and anyone else questioning if Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is a woman.
She is a woman! She is someone’s daughter you bigots!
They even go so far as to attack a woman boxer that Khelif beat. pic.twitter.com/tvMbUwxKuQ
— MAZE (@mazemoore) November 4, 2024
Jump forward to this week and CNN is still bending over backwards to pretend Khelif’s pronouns matter more than his genetics. And they’re still allowing him to exploit the confusion over the idea that he’s not trans.
Since her Olympic gold win at the 2024 Paris Games, the Algerian boxer has been subjected to a sustained campaign of abuse and invasive scrutiny, driven by some of the world’s most powerful figures.
Among them is US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly cited her victory to justify restrictions on certain athletes – including, during one of his first acts in office, when he signed the executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”
Nearly 12 months on, his smear campaign continues. In a January speech to Republican lawmakers, Trump again incorrectly referred to Khelif as a “male boxer,” appearing to cement his support of the Supreme Court’s expected ruling to uphold state-level bans on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports…
“I’m not transgender. I’m a woman. I want to live my life… Please do not exploit me in your political agendas,” she said, speaking to CNN in her most wide-ranging interview to date.
In the Paris gym where she trains, Khelif is simply treated as what she is: an Olympic champion.
Khelif has male chromosomes and male testosterone levels. He has no business competing against women in the Olympics. But CNN is happy to see him beat up a few more actual women athletes if that’s what it takes to win the political argument against President Trump. The article goes on to suggest that Khelif has a DSD all while insisting we shouldn’t be bound by narrow definitions of “womanhood.”
While campaigns against trans rights escalate globally, athletes like Khelif who are not transgender – but whose bodies challenge narrow definitions of womanhood – are increasingly scrutinized, including athletes with differences of sex development, or DSD, other women perceived to be outside the mainstream.
DSD is a medical term used to describe variations in sex traits, including hormones, chromosomes and reproductive anatomy that occur before birth. Medical experts say these variations, often referred to as “intersex conditions” are a normal part of human biology, and that sex is not always as clear-cut as male or female.
Khelif has never said she is a DSD athlete.
“Boxing does not rely on the level of testosterone. Boxing relies on intelligence, on experience and on discipline,” she added.
Boxing doesn’t rely on strength and speed? That will be news to a lot of boxers who spend endless hours in the gym doing strength and speed training. Just to be clear, Khelif didn’t win that 2024 competition by being smarter. He hit his woman opponent so hard she burst into tears in the first round and said she’d never been hit so hard. CNN is living in a political fantasy world that, thankfully, no longer exists. The real story here is that a man competed as a woman and won and journalists around the world are still covering for him.
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