In her preliminary fight for the 2024 Olympic Games, Algerian Imane Khelif delivered a painful blow to Italian Angela Carini’s face, causing her to give up the fight after 46 seconds.

“I have never been hit by such a powerful punch,” Carini told reporters after the fight.

The incident might have been relatively uncontroversial had something not happened during the 2023 International Boxing Association (IBA) Women’s World Championship.

During that tournament – two days before its conclusion – officials had disqualified Khelif, who competes in the 66-kilogram (146-pound) weight class, and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, who fights in the 57-kilogram (126-pound) class. The IBA issued an official statement claiming that the women “did not meet the required entry criteria and had competitive advantages compared to other female competitors.”

Some may wonder why Khelif and Lin were allowed to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games? What “necessary participation criteria” did the IBA base its decision on? And do these criteria give Khelif and Lin a competitive advantage?

A painful history of gender testing

In my book Regulating Bodies I examine what I call “protective measures” in elite sport.

These rules are designed to protect the spirit of fair play, ensure the health and well-being of athletes and safeguard the image and interests of the sport. They include guidelines that regulate doping and genetic enhancement, establish age limits and weight categories and, in the case of parasports, establish competition classes.

Protections may also regulate whether athletes compete in male or female competitions. But history shows that there are no conclusive methods for determining gender—nor consensus on how important this difference is.

In the 1940s, sports associations began requiring women to provide medical certificates confirming that they were actually women.

In the 1960s, some sports organizations briefly required gynecological examinations and visual inspections of unclothed women before switching to sex chromatin testing in 1967, which specifically looked for female-typical XX sex chromosomes.

When it finally became clear in the 1980s that women could have the XY sex chromosome pair typical of men without gaining any athletic advantage, there was a brief dabble with genetic analysis before moving on to “suspicion-based testing.” Under this system, if someone questioned their gender, the suspected athlete could be asked to undergo a multi-layered gender verification process.

From around 2010, the discussion in international sport revolved around natural testosterone levels, the way the female body responds to this testosterone and the specific diagnosis of intersex variations.

But any form of gender determination fails upon closer inspection. This is because most sports are organized strictly according to the principle of male-female difference. This is not the case in nature.

A ban “contradicts good governance”

Each Olympic sport is administered by its own international federation, and the International Olympic Committee allows each federation to set its own participation criteria regarding aspects such as age, nationality and gender.

The 2021 IOC Framework for Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Gender Variation offers a number of recommendations for federations to consider, but also recognizes that “it must be the competence of each sport and its governing body to determine how” eligibility for women’s competitions is determined. In other words, the IBA can decide how it defines “woman” for the purposes of boxing.

However, there were two major issues surrounding the IBA’s decision to disqualify Khelif and Lin – both have been playing the sport for years and their passports confirm that they are women.

First, the boxing federation did not act in accordance with its official regulations. The IOC has since stated that the IBA disqualified the women from the 2023 World Championships “suddenly” and “without due process” and that the decision was “contrary to good governance”.

Second, the IOC no longer considers the IBA to be an international boxing federation. Following a series of concerns about the IBA’s finances, governance and ethics, the IOC withdrew official recognition from the IBA in 2023 and instead appointed the Paris 2024 Boxing Unit to organize the Olympic tournament.

The Paris 2024 Boxing Unit relied on the IBA’s established eligibility requirements, created after the 2016 Rio Games, which had allowed Khelif and Lin to compete. The same requirements also allowed the two women to compete at the 2020 Olympic Games, where Khelif finished fifth and Lin ninth.

Cutting through the noise

Khelif’s victory over Carini in the second round of the Olympics sparked a predictable, if disheartening, outcry from ultra-conservative politicians and transphobic influencers.

Khelif must be “male.” (She’s not.) Or she’s “transgender.” (She’s not that either. In fact, it’s illegal to identify that way in Algeria.)

Others claimed that Khelif’s “biological advantages” were “unfair.”

But aren’t the Olympics all about demonstrating biological advantage? Whether it’s Simone Biles’ ability to jump 12 feet in the air on her floor exercise or swimmer Katie Ledecky’s ability to set all 20 fastest times of all time in the women’s 1,500-meter freestyle, no one gets to the top without outstanding athletic ability.

Left out of the discussion was the fact that Khelif did what boxers are supposed to do: hit their opponents so hard that they can’t fight back. Lin’s fights, which ended with decisions in her favor, were less controversial. But they have nonetheless sparked further debate about who should be allowed to compete in women’s sports.

At the Olympic Games in Paris, gender parity has never been as high as at any other: 49 percent of all Olympic athletes this year are women.

Boxing is one of the sports in which women have been given the least opportunities. At the 2012 Olympic Games in London, women competed in Olympic boxing for the first time, and in just three weight classes. In comparison, men competed in 10 different weight classes. At the 2016 Games in Rio, the same inequality was present. At the 2020 Games, there were five categories for women and eight for men. At this year’s Games, there are six weight classes for women and seven for men.

What and who is protected?

The binary organization of sport is not perfect, but it is important.

Research has shown that, on average, elite male athletes perform about 10 to 12% better than elite female athletes. The wonderful progress made in women’s sport would likely be undone by the removal of gender categories. At the same time, the way in which sports governing bodies define and police these categories not only disadvantages gender-diverse athletes, but also casts a bad light on any female athlete who might appear to someone to be “male” – in terms of performance, appearance or other aspects.

To return to the question of protection: Who or what do gender-specific regulations protect? Do they protect a playing field that is never equal? ​​The indefinable category of “woman”? Or the safety of women in an unsafe sport? The sport itself?

We don’t really know what criteria the IBA used to disqualify Khelif and Lin, although there is a lot of speculation about it. But these are personal, intimate details that I think should be respected and kept private.

What we do know, however, is that the uproar will have far-reaching consequences. Khelif has asked for the hateful discourse to stop: “It can destroy people, it can kill people’s thoughts, spirit and mind. It can divide people.”

This is already the case.

At a Games where female Olympians have been so brilliantly showcased and celebrated, I find the debate surrounding Khelif and Lin as distracting as it is heartbreaking. Above all, both boxers are human beings who do not deserve to be made political whipping boys.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.