Olympics competitions on Thursday The 2012 Winter Olympics saw two of America’s greatest female athletes ever cement their status as legends. Simone Biles won her sixth gold medal in women’s gymnastics, making her the most decorated gymnast in American history. Swimmer Katie Ledecky became the most decorated woman in American Olympic history after the United States finished second in the 4×200-meter freestyle relay—having won gold in the women’s 1,500-meter freestyle the night before.
But online, the conversation around the Olympics was not dominated by the triumphs of the athletes who worked most of their lives to represent their country — but by false claims that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was a transgender man who had snuck into the women’s category at the Games.
On Thursday, Khalif, a boxer with modest international success, won her second-round women’s middleweight bout after her Italian opponent, Angela Carini, was forced to withdraw less than a minute into the bout. Carini threw caution to the wind and took a powerful punch to the face from Khalif, the pain apparently unbearable. “I’ve never been hit so hard in my life,” Carini said after the bout.
The 46-second bout — and Carini’s tears in the aftermath — sparked a storm of criticism in conservative media. Politicians, influencers and prominent right-wing figures attacked Khalif, accusing her of being a transgender man who physically assaulted a helpless woman on the biggest stage in sports.
Fox News anchor Ainsley Earhardt referred to Khalif as “biologically male” and “identifies as a transgender woman.”
“The Olympics glorify men who punch women in the face to knock them unconscious,” claimed Riley Gaines, a former college athlete turned transphobic, in a post on X that showed the moment Khalif beat Karini. “Iman Khalif is one of two male boxers fighting women in the Olympics. A woman will die,” she wrote.
Right-wing billionaire Elon Musk posted several 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 attacked Khalif as “a cruel man who knows he’s protected by a misogynistic sports establishment,” and who was “enjoying the annoyance of a woman he just punched in the head, and her life’s ambitions shattered.”
“Everything she worked and trained for was taken away from a young boxer because she [the International Olympic Committee] “She let a man into the ring with her,” Rowling wrote in another post.
Even former President Donald Trump got in on the act, writing on Truth Social that he would “ban men from women’s sports!” Speaking on “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show,” Trump said that “what gets the most applause” at his rallies is saying, “We won’t let men play women’s sports.”
There’s just one problem: Khalif is not transgender and has never identified as a man. Khalif was born a woman and has identified as a man her entire life. She represents a nation where being gay and trying to change your gender is completely illegal.
The allegations stem from an incident in 2023, when Khalif and fellow boxer Lin Yu-ting were abruptly suspended from the AIBA Women’s World Boxing Championships. Both are competing in Paris. AIBA president Umar Kremlev claimed that genetic tests had shown Khalif “has XY chromosomes” and was therefore ineligible to compete. The specific tests conducted and their results have not been disclosed, and Khalif has disputed the claim. AIBA was stripped of its role in organising the Olympic Games in 2019 amid ongoing corruption allegations and evidence that the organisation rigged matches at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Certain genetic conditions can cause some women to have XY chromosomes with little indication of their physical appearance. The same is true for men, who may exhibit male physical traits with an XX genotype.
The Olympics and international sporting bodies have a long and complicated history of trying to police the presentation of female athletes’ gender, and “gender testing” them to confirm their biology, and while sports agencies continue to denigrate female athletes with so-called “disorders of sex development,” the IOC and the Paris 2024 boxing unit have sided with Khalifa.
“We have seen misleading information in the reports about two athletes who will compete at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games,” the IOC and Paris 2024 Boxing Unit wrote in a joint statement on Thursday. “These two athletes were victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the International Boxing Federation. Near the end of the 2023 AIBA World Championships, they were suddenly excluded without any due process.”
The organizations added in the statement that “the current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially since these two athletes have been competing in high-level competitions for many years.”
