Olympic boxing: Misleading controversy surrounding Iman Khalif vs Angela Carini

An Olympic women’s boxing match — and misinformation about one of the athletes — is now being used by conservatives to promote their anti-trans agenda.

Thursday, Algerian boxer Iman Khelif faced Italian boxer Angela Carini, winning the fight in just 46 seconds after Carini abruptly withdrew from the fight. After the fight, Carini broke down in tears and refused to shake Khelif’s hand, telling reporters that she withdrew from the fight because her opponent’s initial punches were too powerful. “I ended the fight because after the second blow,” Carini said, “I felt a sharp pain in my nose.”

The reaction has sparked scrutiny of Khelif, who was assigned female at birth and identifies as female, amid reports that she is transgender or that she is a man posing as a woman, and those rumors have spread quickly. Disqualified from 2023 AIBA competition and Repost Comment The group’s president said she was eliminated because she failed a hormone test.

Inaccurate statements about her identity have been promoted by prominent anti-trans people like Harry Potter By JK Rowling, and American politicians Republican Vice Presidential Candidate JD Vance and conservative Italian Prime Minister Giorgia MeroniTheir remarks caused A storm of right-wing anger This is despite Khalif being a cisgender woman.

As Alex Abad-Santos of Vox explains,No Transgender athletes Athletes at this year’s Olympics will be of a gender independent of the sex they were assigned at birth, but the International Olympic Committee has ruled that they can compete as long as they meet certain qualifying criteria. “Some people think this is a competition between men and women, which is a bit confusing.” Mark Adams, spokesman for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) “The question you have to ask yourself is, are these athletes women? The answer is yes,” she told reporters.

In this week’s fight, Carini and Hleiffe each fought their first fight at the Olympics. Olympic boxing is divided into weight classes and uses a knockout system, meaning the winner of the fight advances and the loser is eliminated. Both have also competed in the Tokyo Olympics before, with Carini being knocked out in his first fight at that Olympics and Hleiffe being knocked out in his second fight.

The two fighters attacked each other at the start of the round; after Carini paused to adjust his helmet, Khalif began to fight back, punching his opponent hard in the face. Instead of continuing the fight, Carini pulled his nose and gave up the fight completely. This is unusual for a boxing match that usually consists of three rounds of fighting.

As the referee prepared to announce the result, Carini told her players, “That’s not fair.” Carini then knelt down and refused to shake Hurriff’s hand or perform other conventional gestures of sportsmanship.

The match may not have attracted much attention, but it sparked controversy after the match, and the controversy was caused by an incident that happened more than a year before the match.

In 2023, Kelliff and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yuting hope to compete in the International Boxing Association (IBA) World Boxing Championships in New Delhi, India. Kelliff and Lin Yuting were disqualified by the IBA. News reports said Because they failed some kind of test and had elevated testosterone levels. The IBA president reportedly told a Russian media outlet At the time, both Khelif and Lin had “XY chromosomes” – the chromosome makeup most common in people assigned male at birth.

It is unclear what exactly led to the announcement. The International Boxing Federation did not disclose documents at the time or say what tests were conducted. Questions were also raised because the organization, led by Russian official Umar Kremlev, did not disqualify Khleev until she defeated a Russian boxer.

The last few days, IBA releases statement It claimed that in 2023, Khalif and Lin “did not undergo testosterone screening, but instead underwent separate and recognized testing, the details of which remain confidential.” The statement also said the testing “conclusively showed that both athletes…had a competitive advantage over other female competitors.” Khalif and Lin both competed in the 2022 World Championships, which was also hosted by the IBA the year before.

The AIBA’s 2023 decision was heavily criticized by the IOC, which called it “arbitrary” and opaque. Both athletes competed without controversy in the 2021 Olympics. At that time, neither won a medal and both lost to multiple female opponents. Adding to the confusion, the IOC declared the AIBA an unreliable steward of the global sport of boxing: Officials banned the organization from governing the sport at the Olympic level due to concerns about its financial dealings, leadership and allegations of match-fixing.

The lack of clarity about what will happen in 2023 has led to a proliferation of misinformation and disinformation about Khalif. However, the IOC has made it clear that Khalif and Lin are eligible to compete under the rules.

These do not include gender testing, The International Olympic Committee abandoned the and has long been subject to scrutiny. Problematic and flawed scienceThe committee will still disqualify some athletes with differences of sex development (DSD), a group of rare conditions involving genes, hormones and reproductive organs. According to ReutersFor DSD, the IOC’s qualification regulations will use factors such as safety and fairness to determine who can compete.

In addition to gender issues, racial dynamics also affect how the game is viewed. Female athletes of color — particularly African and African American — have long been blamed for being male because they beat white women in competition. This is most evident when it comes to tennis prodigies. Serena Williams and track and field star Caster Semenyathey have all experienced such metaphors Perceive black women as more masculine and threatening.

Given the attention this week’s competition has received, Carini said she wanted to apologise to Khalif: “If the IOC agrees that she can compete, I respect that decision.”

Other boxers said they were not worried about fighting Khalif. “I don’t care about media coverage and social media,” said Hungarian boxer Anna Luca Hamori, who will fight Khalif next. Jeremy Lin’s first game goes on as planned — Like Khalif, she won.

The fact that Khalif had an Olympic journey did not stop the false narrative that followed her victory, which provided an opportunity for those who hold transphobic views to score rhetorical and political points.

Rowling and other prominent anti-trans figures, such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, quickly spread the lie and used the boxing match as an example of why they think it is important to support a stark gender binary. “We object because we see a man beating a woman,” she said. Rowling wrote in an article for X.

American conservatives misjudged and questioned Khalif’s gender identity and used the fight to weaponize the anti-trans rhetoric they have used in the past to energize their voter base. Vance quickly linked incorrectly Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris published a meaningless post on X criticizing an international boxing match, “This is what Kamala Harris’s gender ideology leads to: a grown man beating a woman in a boxing match.”

Former President Donald Trump made similar remarks on Truth Social He would “ban men from participating in women’s sports.”

As Nicole Narea and Fabiola Cineas of Vox explain, Such rhetoric from Republican leaders coincides with a surge in anti-transgender legislation in states across the U.S. that focuses on bathroom access, women’s sports and gender-affirming care for minors. Overall, the bills seek to frame transgender people as a threat and stoke fear among Republican voters.

Women’s sports is one area where Republicans are leaning toward this message because they believe it can activate religious Republicans, including evangelical voters, and potentially It also resonated with more moderate women..

“Transgender issues in particular challenge … biblical notions of gender,” said Sophie Bjork-James, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who studies the religious right. previously told Vox. “Evangelicals tend to believe that men and women have inherently distinct qualities. I think there’s a strong interest in maintaining the gender binary because it really provides a foundation for their theology and their daily lives.”

Republican state legislatures in states like Tennessee and Texas have successfully passed bills to restrict athletes to the sex they were assigned at birth. The attack on Khalif is just the latest manifestation of that thinking.