Imane Khelif’s latest propaganda campaign should fool nobody

That’s Oliver Brown in The Telegraph.

Protests against the athlete’s gold medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics were never about the transgender issue in the first place, but about a disqualification from the previous year’s world championships over sex test results indicating the presence of male chromosomes. Khelif has still not furnished any evidence to the contrary.

Instead, there has been only a cynical PR campaign, soft-soaping the Paris travesty by portraying Khelif – rather than the women smashed in the face by an opponent they could not even be sure was biologically female – as the victim. Worse, credulous news giants are still falling for it. Take this Mills & Boon aside in CNN’s write-up, seeking to confirm Khelif as unambiguously female: “She touches up her make-up (fashion and beauty are passions of hers, and she is the face of an Algerian beauty brand).”

Is this what we have come to? An interview giving greater credence to Khelif’s interest in eyeliner than to a document leaked last year that explicitly stated: “Chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype”?

This is very much what we have come to. It has been all along. “Look! Look at her! She’s wearing lipstick! She has long hair! What more do you want?!”

…it is the IOC who bear heavy responsibility for this entire scandal, having decided in Paris that womanhood was dictated not by biology but by having an “F” in your passport.

It is my prediction that Khelif will be a long way from LA in 2½ years’ time. World Boxing, the governing body instituted in the wake of the Paris debacle, have belatedly limited female boxing events to biological women. How absurd that this should even have needed spelling out, in a sport fraught with mortal danger and where a man punches, on average, 2.6 times harder than a woman. Under the revised rules, there is no scope for boxers to enter bouts as female when there are tests asserting that they are genetically male.

I still think it’s odd and gruesome that there’s such a thing as a sport that’s fraught with mortal danger.

Khelif was supposed to lace up the gloves in Eindhoven last May, but pulled out as soon as World Boxing toughened their stance. There was also no sign of the 26-year-old at last autumn’s world championships in Liverpool. If Khelif can demonstrate something other than XY chromosomes, the male pattern, why not do so immediately?

Unfortunately, the Algerian’s team prefer to use a different tactic, using pliant sections of the media to amplify a false narrative. The end result is CNN’s panegyric, which deserves to be demolished piece by piece. Is Khelif genuinely an “unwitting lightning rod in the culture wars”? No. Khelif has a chromosomal abnormality that renders participation in women’s boxing not just unfair but fundamentally unsafe. Can Khelif be considered a woman purely on the basis of growing up in Algeria “as a girl”? No.

Is it ok for Khelif to keep bashing women? No.