If Your Brain Doesn’t Hurt Sometimes, You’re Doing It Wrong

A point about Olympics Boxing Discourse

The Olympics is in the midst of a controversy involving two boxers competing as women, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting, who likely have disorders of sex development that (to oversimplify slightly) grant them the advantages of a male puberty. I find the psychological reaction this controversy has sparked in some quarters very interesting. 

But first: The medical and sociological and bureaucratic particulars are genuinely complicated, and are important to get right. The athletes were initially barred from competing as women in international boxing events as a result of tests conducted in 2022 and 2023, as laid out in this excellent explainer about the fracas by Doriane Lambelet Coleman published in Quillette. But “It’s important to note that the IBA’s statements about Khelif and Lin are doubted by the IOC and others because the IBA has a reputation for being less than reliable,” notes Coleman, “and because the IOC says it hasn’t seen the results of the tests that were the basis for the IBA’s decision to declare them ineligible. Alan Abrahamson reports, however, that the IBA sent them Khelif’s results back in June 2023.” On the other other hand, no one seems to be able to explain why we should distrust these sex tests in particular, other than by noting that IBA is a Russian organization and, you know, Russians, and the IBA doubled down on Khelif yesterday in a manner that would be exceptionally strange if these tests weren’t legitimate.

The International Olympics Committee, for its part, has had great difficulty answering basic questions about this situation, and over the weekend the body had to issue a correction after its president, Thomas Bach, said that the Khelif situation did not involve an intersex condition. He appears to have mixed up “intersex” and “transgender,” which, to be fair, a lot of people on all sides of this debate are doing. Just yesterday, in its daily briefing, the IOC appeared to say that the biological sex of Khelif and Lin doesn’t have “any bearing” on whether they should be allowed to compete as women(???). 

It’s important to note that this controversy is fundamentally different from, say, the firestorm surrounding Lia Thomas, the transgender UPenn swimmer (the relevant authorities ruled she could not compete in the Olympics). It does appear that both Khelif and Lin were — for once this term makes sense to use — “assigned female at birth” and raised as girls. The DSD they are believed (by some) to have doesn’t generally become apparent until at least puberty, at which point the individual develops in a generally male direction — the result of internal testes not visible to doctors, parents, or anyone else early in the individual’s life (and especially in less developed countries, individuals might not realize until well into their teens or even early twenties that they have this DSD, for reasons laid out in this excellent episode of The Real Science of Sport Podcast). The IOC has pointed out that both athletes have Fs on their passports. But of course none of this bears on the matter at hand, which is whether, if the IBA’s findings were accurate, the athletes have unfair advantages over biological females.