Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu‑ting of Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), who were both removed or stripped of medals from last year’s World Championships after allegedly failing gender-eligibility tests for the female category, have been cleared to fight at the Paris Olympics.
The two women have been at the center of the continuing controversy regarding the inclusion in the female sports category of women who have naturally elevated levels of testosterone. To be clear, these two women are not reportedly transgender, though anti-trans activists like Riley Gaines are making the claim they are men. These athletes may be intersex.
Either way, IOC spokesman Mark Adams has seemingly opened the possibility that one or both of these athletes has experienced male puberty.
“As for the question about testosterone and going through male puberty, we issued a framework document to all the federations,” he said, according to The Guardian. “And everyone would love to have a single answer: yes, no, yes, no. But it’s incredibly complex.
“And actually it boils down to not just sport by sport, but discipline by discipline. So people may have an advantage in this discipline and not in this discipline if they have been through male puberty or not.”
Last year at the World Championships, governed by the International Boxing Association, IBA president Umar Kremlev claimed the two women had taken chromosome tests that came back as male, XY.
He also claimed at the time that countries were recruiting men to be women to win in sports. This is a refrain we’ve hear growing in recent years amongst people opposing trans women in the female category. There’s never been any substantiation to it whatsoever.
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Khelif protested, claiming there were ulterior motives.
“People have conspired against Algeria so that its flag doesn’t get raised and it doesn’t win the gold medal,” Khelif said at the time.
Since then, the IBA has been stripped of governance over the Olympic boxing competitions (allegedly for other reasons), replaced by a Paris-based boxing group.
That group has now said it’s ignoring the gender tests of 2023 and going back to the rules enforced for the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2021.
Dizzy yet?
Related
Caster Semenya is taking her fight against World Athletics to the European Court of Human Rights
Olympic champion Caster Semenya is appealing against World Athletics’ rule restricting testosterone levels in female runners.
By Karleigh Webb | November 18, 2020
The gender tests that led to these women’s disqualification have seemed to disproportionately affect women from Africa and Asia. Middle-distance runner Caster Semenya battled allegations about her sex while winning two Olympic gold medals in the 800-meter in 2012 and 2016. The latest version of these tests would mandate she take testosterone blockers, which she refuses to do.
Other women barred from competing over these gender tests have included sprinter Dutee Chand of India, as well as Beatrice Masilingi and Christine Mboma of Nimibia, who were both barred from competing in the 400-meter dash at the Tokyo Olympics. Mboma was allowed to compete in the 200-meter in Tokyo, in which she won a silver medal.
While Khelif and Yu-tin are women, some in the sports world have been pushing to redefine the female category based on testosterone levels. On the one side, some trans advocates are pushing to include transgender women in the female category as long as they get their T levels to a certain place for a certain period of time. At the same time, advocates pushing to ban trans women would also ban cisgender women whose testosterone levels are elevated.
Either way, Khelif and Yu-tin will be boxing at the Paris Olympics.
