Some nuance on intersex Olympic athletes
There should probably be a line, but there’s no reason to think Imane Khelif is beyond it.
On Tuesday, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif won her semifinal match in Paris, advancing to the gold medal bout on Friday. Already guaranteed a medal, it should be one of the happiest moments of her life. Instead, her experience in Paris has been marred by horrible bullying about her sex from strangers around the world.
Khelif’s rapid victory over a lesser opponent last week revived misleading rumors that she’d “failed a gender test” last year. A long list of conservative pundits and politicians—including Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, and many others—pounced on the story to call her a man and whip up an outcry over gender politics. The controversy reanimated long-running debates about when and whether intersex athletes should be eligible to compete in women’s athletics.
These debates involve profound questions of fairness, merit, human biology, and the purpose of gendered categories in sports. I’d love to explore these questions in greater depth some other time. For today, I just want say three things that seem underappreciated in the current conversation.
1. The uproar surrounding Khelif is probably the result of Russia making shit up.
This backstory here is genuinely confusing, so here’s a brief recap.
Like many Olympic athletes, Olympic boxers are required to be amateurs.1 For a long time, world amateur boxing was governed by something called the International Boxing Association (IBA). But in recent decades, the IBA was deeply corrupt and incompetent, suffering “judging scandals, bizarre leadership decisions and innumerable financial misdeeds while it presided over Olympic boxing tournaments.”
In 2019, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) finally suspended all ties with the IBA after the latter elected a literal Uzbek mobster and heroin trafficker to be its president. Soon after, the IBA replaced the mob boss with a crony of Russian President Vladimir Putin, named Umar Kremlev. Kremlev moved the IBA’s operations to Russia and announced the state-owned Russian energy company Gazprom as the IBA’s sole sponsor.
In a move that surely made Putin proud, Kremlev then barred a Dutch rival from running against him in future IBA elections, and eventually scrapped the elections altogether.2 The IOC was not impressed, and banned the IBA from the Olympics (making its suspension permanent) in 2023. All to say: the IBA is a thoroughly discredited mouthpiece of Russian state interests, something most early reports on this controversy omitted.
Imane Khelif was born in Algeria, a country which is 99% Muslim and hardly known for woke politics. She was assigned female at birth and has lived her whole life as female. She is not transgender! She became an elite amateur boxer in 2018 and competed in the Tokyo games in 2021, where she did not medal. In 2022, she won a silver medal at the IBA World Championships. Until last year, there were zero questions raised about her sex.
In 2023, Khelif returned to the IBA World Championships and fought a Russian boxer named Azalia Amineva. Prior to the fight, Amineva was undefeated – but Khelif beat her.
Three days later, the IBA announced that Khelif and another woman, Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, had failed a test for gender eligibility and were being disqualified. They initially refused to specify (and later contradicted themselves regarding) what kind of test it was, when it was performed, whether everyone at the tournament was subject to this test, and why they were announcing this in the middle of the tournament.3 The decision meant the Russian fighter Amineva had a perfect record once again.
Do the math.
Like Khelif, Lin Yu-ting has been an elite amateur boxer for years, and competed in Tokyo without incident. She does look kind of masculine, though, which makes her a nice scapegoat for a socially conservative, authoritarian tyrant in the business of weaponizing lies to fan the flames of Western culture wars.
Appearance is not enough reason to believe either Khelif or Yu-ting are intersex. Because the IBA provided few and contradictory details, is run by a habitually dishonest regime, and has obvious conflicts of interest, there is excellent reason to believe that the IBA simply made it up.
And even if they didn’t make it up—even Khelif and Yu-ting are somehow intersex—that does not make them men, and nor does it necessarily mean they have men’s biological advantages over women. In several ways at once, the conservatives who called Khelif a man and used her victory to whip up outcry about gender politics are being shamelessly dishonest jerks.
2. We can’t know whether these boxers have physiological advantages, because Olympic boxing currently conducts no gender eligibility testing.
Gender eligibility testing in elite women’s athletics has a long, controversial history. For most of this history, the Olympics has gotten it wrong, relying on invasive and irrelevant genital inspections or chromosome tests.4 In recent years, it’s done a better (though still controversial) job of catching up with the science, in part by shifting to testosterone tests and event-specific standards. But due to its recent disassociation with the IBA, Olympic boxing in particular conducts no gender eligibility testing whatsoever. Thus, it sidesteps the issue to say Khelif and Yu-ting qualified by IOC standards.
I’ll move the crash course on Olympic gender testing history to a footnote.5 For our purposes, the relevant history begins in 2009 with the famous case of track star Caster Semenya. Medically speaking, Semenya is intersex and hyperandrogenic—she was assigned female at birth based on outer genitalia, has no uterus or fallopian tubes, and has internal gonads producing typically male levels of testosterone.
In 2009, at age 18, Semenya began dominating the world in her preferred event of the 800 meters. In a single year, she reduced her own best time by an astonishing eight seconds, something typically only possible with doping. The body governing world track and field (then called the IAAF, now called World Athletics) took notice and subjected Semenya to unspecified gender eligibility tests, which we later learned were based on testosterone.
Eventually, Semenya was allowed to compete, but only if she medically reduced her natural testosterone to levels beneath the typical male range—which slowed her times considerably. By 2011, the IOC adopted a similar standard.
The normal range of testosterone for young men is between about 10 and 40 nanomoles per liter of blood (nmol/L). For women, the normal range is between about 0.5 and 3 nmol/L. A study of elite female athletes at the 2011 and 2013 Track and Field World Championships found that 99% had levels below 3.08 nmol/L. From 2011-2021,6 the IOC policy was that to compete in women’s athletics, you needed to have testosterone levels lower than 10 nmol/L— more than three times the 99th percentile level of elite female athletes.7 As rules of thumb go, that seems generous.
Intersex athletes like Semenya and Indian runner Dutee Chand did not think it was generous. A series of legal challenges briefly threw out the rule, and progressive groups pressured the IOC to drop it. In 2021, they did, releasing a new framework with lots of progressive-coded language. Instead of a “one-size-fits-all” approach, today the IOC allows each sport’s governing body to determine policies appropriate for that particular sport.
Again, this makes sense in theory. Different sports require different skills, so the particular factors that give men an advantage (as well as the size, or even existence of that advantage) will vary.
But because the IOC had to disassociate with the IBA, there is currently no credible body able to set rules for amateur boxing. And in the absence of a recognized authority determining eligibility, the IOC’s practice at present is to just trust the gender of the person’s passport. If you think that’s insufficient, you can understand the spirit of the conservative objection here, even if that’s no reason to criticize Khelif or Yu-ting in particular.
3. Reasonable people can disagree about the science and ethics of gender eligibility testing. But if women’s sports are to serve their intended purpose, there has to be a line somewhere.
Whether Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are intersex is almost incidental to the broader question everyone wants to discuss: what if they were intersex? What if they were transgender?
Sadly, the reason conservatives lie about these issues is because that it starts conversations they benefit from. For some time after Khelif defeated Meloni, it wasn’t clear to most people that the tests these women “failed” were so dubious. During that time, we had the visceral image of a tall, strong person who “failed a gender test” literally beating a woman until she bled, quit, and cried. You don’t need to be a shameless dishonest jerk to be bothered by that, nor to think it contrary to the spirit of women’s athletics.
The prospect of intersex or MTF athletes competing as women creates a tension between two values: inclusivity/empathy for marginalized demographics, vs. the perceived injustice of women being made to compete against people with the very advantages women’s athletics are meant to control for. Violent sports like boxing add additional concerns about safety.
Because progressives place especially high values on empathy and inclusion, especially on gender issues, a lot of them respond to this tension exactly how conservatives hope they will: by prioritizing the first thing 100%, and denying the need for any gender eligibility testing whatsoever. Some of these arguments are thoughtful and scientifically rooted and I respect them. Maybe a future post will try to steelman them.
But I think they are wrong. Inclusivity is important, but needs to be balanced against other values if women’s athletics are to serve their intended purpose. This purpose is the same reason we separate weight classes in boxing, or age groups in Little League, or the Paralympics from the regular Olympics: to allow those facing a biological disadvantage the opportunity to compete without being dominated.8
If inclusivity were all that mattered, the easy solution would be to just stop separating sports by sex. Everyone’s welcome if there’s only one league. But most people sense that would be bad, because it would deny roughly half the population lacking the biological advantages of maleness the realistic opportunity to win. The whole reason we need to divide sports by gender in the first place—the whole reason feminists are so passionate about Title IX—is to control for those advantages.
That starts by defining those advantages, which is admittedly difficult. Men and women differ by height, hormone levels, bone structure, genitalia, muscle mass, etc, and no single difference is decisive across all sports. Whatever lines we draw should be holistic, data-based, sport-dependent, and relatively permissive, erring on the side of inclusiveness.
But for many sports, the most salient factor is probably testosterone. At elite levels, experts generally agree that testosterone is the primary driver of the male advantage, or at least its closest measurable proxy. Studies have shown higher testosterone “increases red blood cell count, muscle mass and strength, reduces fat, strengthens bones and helps the heart pump blood and oxygen around the body—obvious advantages in sport.” On average, men have about ten times as much testosterone as women, and there’s an obviously bimodal distribution of testosterone levels that makes it relatively easy to draw a line that only affects people with differences in sexual development.
I am not going to relitigate the full debate about testosterone tests here, which multiple courts have tried to sift through in recent years. There is complicated science involved, and while I am not a scientist, even the scientists disagree about it, so nobody gets to play “I am a scientist” as some kind of trump card. The fairest article I’ve read about it this one from Slate 2020, which shows that even transgender scientists disagree about it.
At its core, it’s not really a scientific argument. It’s a values argument, and there are important values on both sides. There are rival conceptions of fairness with no objectively right answer, because fairness is a mushy gushy concept we made up. And again, this is true of literally all sports categories.
Why do we divide weight classes in boxing, but not height classes in basketball? How do we divide age brackets at the local half marathon? How do we decide who’s disabled enough to compete in the Paralympic Games?
The answer is always “by some arbitrary judgment, rooted in relevant data, to balance inclusion against other important social functions.” My arbitrary but data-driven judgment is that including testosterone limits as part of a holistic, sport-dependent gender eligibility standard is the least unfair way to do this. I would love it if more people who disagreed, on both sides, could acknowledge the tradeoffs involved.
This was apparently not the case in the 2016 Olympics, due to yet another strange decision by the IBA.
To underscore how unserious Kremlev is: this week, according to AP, he “released a series of English-subtitled videos on social media packed with insults, saying the Olympics “burns from pure devilry” and calling IOC president Thomas Bach “evil,” a “sodomite,” and urging him to “resign urgently.” He ended one video by saying he’s sending Bach diapers so he doesn’t soil himself, then punching the camera.
After announcing the test, Kremlev told a Russian media source that the test was chromosomal, saying the two boxers had XY chromosomes. But this week the IBA held a chaotic 100-minute press conference about the issue in which its representatives alternated between saying the tests were chromosomal and saying they were testosterone tests. They also said they were conducted by laboratories accredited by WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency), which does not oversee gender tests and only regulates anti-doping tests.
Chromosomal abnormalities are fairly common, and do not actually overlap with the physical advantages men enjoy. Some men have XX chromosomes, and some women XY or something else, while remaining biologically men and women in every athletically relevant way.
Women first participated in the Olympics in 1928. By 1936, the IOC began conducting arbitrary genital inspections of any woman against whom suspicions were raised, which was predictably used to harass and discriminate against racial minorities. In 1966, they briefly decided to universalize these genital inspections with “nude parades” for all female Olympians, which many found degrading and problematic. By 1968 they realized genitalia were not the relevant factor in determining men’s sexual advantages, and instead began universal chromosome testing: only those with XX chromosomes were allowed to compete as women. This system remained in place until 1999, until the problems described in the footnote above were recognized. After decades of pleading from the scientific community (and unknown numbers of women wrongly and humiliatingly denied the ability to compete), the IOC abandoned gender eligibility testing altogether in 1999 – until Caster Semenya showed up in 2009.
Apart from brief periods of time when the courts struck down this rule, following challenges by Semenya and an Indian runner named Dutee Chand. When the rule was lifted, Semenya’s times once again became the fastest in the world. She won gold in both London in 2012 and Rio in 2016.
World Athletics eventually settled on a lower ceiling of 5 nmol/L, but only applies this to distances between the 400m and 1500m.
Feminists typically think that purpose is really important in other contexts, like Title IX.