Boxing fiasco sparks question: Do future Olympics become hunt for those who are different?

PARIS – There’s a term we use a lot in sports for people who have a natural gift so unique, and so far above what we expect to see even from the best athletes in their field, that they immediately stand out as different.

We call them freaks.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot ever since the usual bad-faith actors began to attack a young woman – yes, woman – from Algeria, needing little more than a short video clip, a vague piece of propaganda from a discredited and Russian-backed sports organization and their own biases about what a female body is supposed to look like.

It’s the story that has, at least for a little while, taken over the Olympics. And it was probably a predictable one in these times when culture warriors and grifters have managed to elevate an agenda against transgender people into a political issue, saying over and over that men will take over women’s sports – even though there is no actual evidence that this is happening anywhere in the world beyond some isolated, outlier incidents.

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But this is what they do. They search for these things, blow them up on social media without any context and exploit them for outrage, clicks and political talking points to distract from actual issues that impact people’s lives.

Imane Khelif was a perfect target. Even among female boxers, she stands out for her musculature and jawline. She undoubtedly landed a big punch against Italy’s Angela Carini, who abandoned the fight in less than a minute, and it is jarring on video even though any competent world-class boxer could have dealt a blow to an opponent who dropped their hands and exposed their chin the way Carini did.

No matter, it only took seconds for corners of the internet and the press with loud megaphones to conclude that a man had knocked out a woman at the Olympics. And they had a vague claim from a boxing organization called the IBA that Khelif failed a gender test last year to back them up.

So off we went. The British tabloid press, in particular, and right-wing blogs in America had their story: Shoot first, ask questions later.

Of course, it only took a handful of hours for that narrative to fall apart.

Khelif is and has always been a woman from Algeria, a Muslim country where there are no LGBTQ rights, and sex-reassignment procedures and medications aren’t a thing. The IBA is a puppet organization for the Kremlin that disqualified Khelif from a tournament in 2023 with no due process, a few days after she beat a promising Russian boxer, claiming that she had failed a gender test despite competing in the sport for years without any controversy. The IBA, having been stripped of any role in Olympics boxing because of ethical issues, has every reason to sow chaos and discord at these Olympics – a typical Russian move.

If anything, Khelif’s story is remarkable, coming from a rural village and selling scrap metal to afford bus fare so she could train to be a boxer, even though her father disapproved. Now, a misguided global outcry and harassment from bigots could very well force her to withdraw from the Olympic boxing tournament just so this will all go away.

Nobody in the sport wants to touch this now. On Friday, the other boxer banned by the IBA for a supposed gender test, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, won her featherweight match by unanimous decision in the round of 16 and sped past the media without doing interviews. One of her coaches said a few words about the fight in Chinese but generally shrugged at other questions. Lin's opponent from Uzbekistan was crying and left the building quickly. A few other boxers said they would only talk about their bouts.

So that’s where things are. But what we need to talk about is where they’re going

Is this what every Olympics is going to be now? A hunt for people who might have relatively obscure conditions that make them look a certain way or help them perform a certain way lest they be accused of being transgender, spark international hysteria and potentially ruin lives? What kind of Olympics would that be?

That’s why the idea of “freaks” in sports seems so relevant in a way that I’d never quite thought about before this controversy.

We don’t question why someone grows to 7-foot tall with unnatural agility for their size. We don’t give a second thought to someone having naturally greater lung capacity than their competitors to get them to the finish line first in a marathon. We don’t say that someone has an unfair advantage in the swimming pool because they have abnormally massive feet to propel them or because their body makes far below the average amount of lactic acid.

What we say is that they hit the genetic lottery. We call them freaks, and we mean it as a compliment.

But that doesn’t seem to apply when it comes to women whose bodies might make more testosterone than their competitors, or whose chromosome structure might look like a man’s even though they have women’s body parts and are considered women in every other possible way.

This stuff, by the way, isn’t particularly uncommon when you’re talking about elite athletes, and it’s definitely not new. In a recent podcast from Scientific American, reporter Rose Eveleth talked about how as soon as women were allowed to run track in the Olympics in 1928, those who looked more masculine were eyed with suspicion.

According to Eveleth, newspapers even wrote at the time that Japan’s Hitomi Kinue “should be playing for the Chicago Bears.”

So this kind of thing eventually leads to women being made to have their naked bodies inspected before they were allowed to compete. When they figured out that wasn’t a good idea, chromosome tests became the standard.

But that led to other problems, including a decent number of women showing up to competitions with no idea their biology was different only to find out – surprise! – that they have male chromosomes. It could also work the other way: There are men with female chromosomes, so how do you keep them out of women’s competitions if that’s the standard?

That kind of testing ended in 1999, and the idea of a test to ensure that only an XX chromosome female can compete in women’s sports is not where this discussion is going to end up.

“I don’t think anyone wants to see a return to some of those scenes,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said. “This is a minefield. Everyone wants a black and white explanation. That explanation does not exist.”

Some sports have come to an agreement on how these so-called “differences in sex development” are regulated in their sports through testing, testosterone suppression drugs and other means. But where’s the line of what’s fair?

And, more broadly, do we really need one at all? If a woman’s natural biology helps her become great at sports, is that something we should be messing with? We certainly don’t do it with men.

These are the kinds of moral, scientific and intellectual questions we should be asking ourselves in the wake of this women’s boxing fiasco. Sadly, the anti-trans crusaders are more focused on issues that don’t really matter on any significant scale and making pariahs out of women who have done absolutely nothing wrong.

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