In August 2024 the world watched Imane Khelif, a male boxer hit the female boxer Angela Carini, until she cried, her team ending the bout after just 46 seconds in the ring with him. As Carini had entered the ring she had shouted at her coach, “Non e giusto, non e giusto” meaning “it’s not fair, it’s not fair”.
It was not, and still isn’t, fair. Khelif hit women all the way to the gold medal he really didn’t deserve. It was intended for a woman.
Reasonable people expected that the situation would be rectified beyond the Olympics, so outrageously unfair was the spectacle. Women’s organisations have looked to the IOC and World Boxing to eliminate this unfairness in women’s boxing, calling for policy change and the implementation of a cheek swab test, a simple and non-invasive way of establishing that male and female boxers are placed in the correct bouts according to their sex.
In a surprising move last night World Boxing announced that they would be introducing “sex testing” across all of their events and pointed to the “reactions” to his inclusion in the programme of the Eindhoven Box Cup. The statement said:
World Boxing will introduce mandatory sex testing, to determine the eligibility of male and female athletes that want to take part in its competitions.
In light of plans to introduce this policy and the particular circumstances surrounding some of the boxers that competed at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, world Boxing has written to the Algerian Boxing Federation to inform it that Imane Khelif will not be allowed to participate in the female category at the Eindhoven Box Cup or any World Boxing event until Imane Khelif undergoes sex testing.
This decision reflects concerns over the safety and wellbeing of all boxers, including Imane Khelif, and aims to protect the mental and physical health of all participants in light of some of the reactions that have been expressed in relation to the boxer’s potential participation at the Eindhoven Box Cup.
The Eindhoven Box Cup, which few outside boxing circles had heard of, is an Olympic event for 150 elite boxers with male and female categories. Khelif would have been, if it had gone unnoticed, hitting women again. However, women did indeed notice and it seems that the pressure they put World Boxing under to exclude Imane Khelif from the female competition has finally shamed them into action.
Caroline Franssen of “Dutch Coalition for Women’s Rights” who had planned a protest at the event told me,
We were protesting because Imane Khelif is a man, and it was dangerous and unfair to let him participate in the women’s category. As amateur boxers aren’t allowed to refuse when they are invited to a match, this would have been forced upon women. The women who were boxing against him, must have feared for their health and even for their lives. Men punch 163% harder than women, and women have softer skulls and suffer more injuries than men. Simple sex testing will end this abomination.
Most of us know, even if some will not admit it, that if Khelif takes a cheek swab the result will be that he is male, because he is male.
Khelif refused to take such a test after the Olympic furore against him, where the blatant lack of fairness and safety for women was on full display.
Post-Olympics Khelif’s team were eventually forced to discuss the possibility that Khelif had produced tests to the IBA which confirmed a Y chromosome but their explanation was fuzzy at best saying tests had confirmed in an interview with French magazine Le Point that Khelif had “a problem with hormones” and “with chromosomes”, and attempted to generate sympathy for him, continuing, “This poor young girl was devastated, devastated to suddenly discover that she might not be a girl.”
No further test has been conducted to anyone’s knowledge and whilst many speculated this could mean that Khelif had a disorder of sexual development, this has never been confirmed. Khelif, it has been suggested, may have 5 Alpha-Reductase deficiency, which means a biological male does not respond to a crucial hormone in the womb leading to indeterminate genital presentation at birth. However, the individual remains male and will eventually undergo a male puberty. Whatever Khelif was led to believe about himself is irrelevant.
In February, when legal action was announced by the International Boxing Association against the IOC’s inclusion of two men in Olympics women’s boxing, Khelif declared his defiance saying,
But silence is no longer an option. I am not going anywhere. I will fight in the ring; I will fight in the courts and I will fight in the public eye until the truth is undeniable.
Khelif comes from the world of boxing, and such blustering rhetoric is the norm at pre-fight weigh-ins. It is all part of the performance and Imane Khelif is a high-octane pretender to the female crown. Regardless of this fighting talk — and I expect we will see more of it in the coming days — Khelif and his team have not offered any reliable proof of his “truth”. Now they must or he will no longer be allowed to hit women under the cover of sport.
Many women have already suffered at the fists of Imane Khelif and I would hope formal apologies to those women will follow. Brianda Tamara Cruz, a Mexican boxer who fought Khelif in 2022 in a world series final in order to qualify for the Olympics, said,
It was a traumatic experience, I felt like she is beyond my reach, and I never felt that before, my team decided to stop the fight for my health, I never had any fights stopped before, never.
Brianda’s mental health suffered as a result of her having to surrender the fight, and she was subject to online bullying with some saying they wished Khelif had killed her. She said:
I never felt a punch like that before, and the people …were.. they turned against me really, they said that I was a sore loser. They were like ‘you’re transphobic’ and how they “wished Khelif would have killed you”.
Speaking of his male advantage, she said:
It’s a huge difference. You can feel it. It’s a big difference between the strength of a man and a woman but imagine in a boxing ring, because there’s punches and you’re cutting weight, it actually feels very different.
Brianda almost gave up boxing, she was so broken by the experience and the resulting bullying. Angela Carini subsequently tried to smooth over refusing to shake Khelif’s hand after her Olympic battering at his fists. Women learn to go silent when men hit them.
Mike Tyson, notorious for his violence against women as well as his boxing prowess, once said, “When I fight someone, I want to break his will. I want to take his manhood.” Imane Khelif has been breaking the will of women, and when he was allowed into the women’s competition, he was, quite literally, taking their womanhood. The brave and strong resistance of women has ensured such hideous injustice has been ground into the dust.
Initially, Eindhoven Box Cup used pictures of Khelif on X (formerly Twitter) to promote the event accompanied by the provocative words, “Proud that Imane Khelif will defend her title”. The image showed Khelif frowning, tight-lipped, his arm raised in a gesture of defiant salute. Adding to the insult was the fact that Khelif had moved up a weight class. Perhaps his team decided that hitting slightly bigger and heavier women would decrease public outrage. It was a sly move which did nothing to assuage women’s anger.
No repetition of the assurances that Khelif is a woman obscured the fact that women know that a man is hitting them, and so would every spectator.
Allowing a male boxer into the Eindhoven Box Cup, was the latest example of the boxing world’s endorsement and embodiment of male violence against women. Imane Khelif represented every man who ever hit a woman. When he smashed his fist into female boxers, we all felt the heavy weight of the punch.
Female boxers might have been forced into silence, but other women took the fight to the doors of World Boxing on their behalf. Roisin Michaux who organised the Paris protests which brought the attention of the world’s media to the issue said last night:
I feel dizzy. If this is true, if women forced this change, it means that grassroots organising matters – it means every single warm body that shows up to a protest matters. It makes me hopeful that we can have an influence on all the other crazy policy and legal challenges ahead of us. It’s a glimmer of hope for a return to sanity.
As Mike Tyson also said, “Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth”. It seems the best laid plan of boxing’s organising bodies, to stay quiet, just took a punch to the mouth.
