Imane Khelif: The female Olympic boxer who is a victim of those who want to police womanhood

Like many people, I have been shocked by the presence of one man competing in the Paris Olympics.

That the rules allow him to compete on the world stage makes it no less of a disgrace that he is.

Obviously, I’m talking about Steven Van De Velde, the Dutch volleyball player previously jailed for raping a 12-year-old girl, who was finally eliminated from Paris, not by common sense, but by a superior Brazilian side.

Van De Velde deserves the outrage that has instead targeted female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif after her bested Italian rival, Angela Carini, complained she’d never been hit so hard before. Going to the Olympics to fight the best boxers in the world, only to complain the other boxers are too good, might deserve a gold medal for chutzpah but not much else.

What happened after Khelif beat Carini (who has since, quite classily, apologised for being a sore loser) is depressing.

For one thing, it forced me to take an interest in boxing for the first time since Michael B Jordan took his shirt off in the 2015 film Creed.

For another, it demanded we all talk way too much about the genitals of Olympic athletes, when the only reason for doing so this Olympics is clearly that time French pole-vaulter Anthony Ammirati failed to clear the bar because his penis was in the way. (What Ammirati lost in Olympic hardware he has gained in fans).

The harassment of Khelif is the logical endgame for the so-called gender critical movement, whose anti-transwomen rhetoric has grown increasingly shrill since Harry Potter author JK Rowling decided harassing strangers on the internet sounded more fun than writing another good book.

Khelif isn’t trans — there are no transwomen competing at this year’s Olympics. She was born a woman, raised a woman and continues to be a woman. Changing your gender is illegal in Algeria so trust me when I say they’re not sending a transwoman to represent their country.

Khelif has competed in women’s boxing for years, including at the Tokyo Olympics, where she was beaten in the quarter-final. (Clearly, she’s an unstoppable menace. . . except to the nine other women who have beaten her in professional bouts before now.)

The real problem is that Khelif doesn’t look feminine enough for some people.

Poor love forgot to put on some lippy and a push-up bra for her big Punching People In The Head competition and that, apparently, will not do.

Critics, among them renowned physiology experts Donald Trump and Elon Musk, have called Khelif a man on two shaky pieces of evidence.

Firstly, she doesn’t fit a feminine stereotype. Khelif has a jawline that could beat me up and exactly the kind of muscular build you might covet if hitting people for a living was your whole deal.

Secondly, in 2023 Khelif — and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting — were banned from the world championships after supposedly failing unspecified tests by the Russian-controlled International Boxing Association. The assumption is that either Khelif’s testosterone levels were too high or she has XY chromosomes.

I don’t know if the IBA’s tests were legit but here are some things I do know.

I do know it’s entirely possible for a woman to be born with a vagina, a uterus and still have XY chromosomes.

I do know some women have comparatively high levels of testosterone and that some sports cap testosterone levels for female (but not male) competitors.

I do know that the IBA was banned from Olympic boxing because of governance and transparency concerns and that Khelif was only disqualified after beating a Russian boxer.

What is fascinating about the attacks on Khelif is how it has forced the gender-critical crowd to concede that sex is not as binary as they’ve been insisting it is.

If — that’s if — Khelif has female genitals and XY chromosomes, does that make her a woman, as per her birth certificate, passport and life experience, or does it make her a man, as per Rowling’s personal belief? And if XY chromosomes make someone a man, does that mean men can, in fact, have vaginas and get pregnant?

Our bodies are so much more complex than we think and, if we accept that with curiosity instead of fear, it’d be a great start.

What is alarming about the attacks on Khelif is that the message underpinning them is shockingly retrograde: if you don’t look the way we think a woman should look, we’re going to call you a man.

Muscular sportswomen have been putting up with this for years: tennis superstar Serena Williams and US swimming ace Katie Ledecky among them. No, neither of them has the body of a Disney princess and that’s probably because Elsa’s serve is crap and Cinderella can barely do 50m freestyle.

There’s even a name for accusing women you don’t know of being trans: it’s called transvestigating and it’s the favourite hobby of weirdos on the internet who use photo footage of supposed Adam’s apples, jawline gradients and underwear bulges to accuse everyone from Kamala Harris to Taylor Swift to Brigitte Macron of being secretly male.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so bleak to see womanhood reduced to appearance.

If the people going after Khelif truly cared about women’s safety, they’d have Van De Velde in their cross hairs, not the Algerian woman who was teased as a girl for being too good at soccer, took up boxing against her father’s wishes — he didn’t think it was a sport for girls — and became one of the best in the world at it.

But why pick on the male child rapist when the female boxer is such an easier target?