The Olympics are putting female athletes in danger

Last week, UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy made it plain that she had no objections to men competing in women’s competitions in this year’s Paris Olympics. The sporting bodies know best, she claimed, and should be allowed to make their own rules around sex and gender as they see fit.

We have just seen the catastrophic results of this indifference to biology in the Olympic boxing match between Angela Carini and Imane Khelif. Earlier today, Italy’s Carini was forced to abandon her fight against Algeria’s Khelif after just 46 seconds. Carini took only a couple of hits from Khelif before withdrawing from the match and falling to her knees in tears. She is believed to have suffered a broken nose.

Khelif was no ordinary opponent. Having failed a sex test at last year’s Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi, Khelif was subsequently banned from competing in a gold-medal bout. According to the International Boxing Association, Khelif has failed biochemical tests two years in a row. Khelif has never publicly identified as transgender or as intersex (having the characteristics of both sexes). But testing did reveal male XY chromosomes in the boxer’s DNA.

Despite all this, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) still allowed Khelif to fight. As of 2021, the IOC has done away with mandatory hormone testing and leaves it up to individual sporting bodies to decide who is allowed to compete in which sex category.

Incredibly, Khelif is not even the only boxer in Paris with a question mark over their gender. Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan was also thrown out of the women’s world championships last year, after testing revealed that the 28-year-old had XY chromosomes. Nevertheless, Yu-ting is set to fight Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova later this week.

It is astonishing – and frankly terrifying – that a woman was encouraged to step into the ring with an opponent whose biological sex she didn’t know. This would be bad enough in any sporting competition, but in a sport like boxing, it is reckless beyond belief. Studies show that men can punch 2.6 times harder than women. This goes beyond the usual concerns about fair competition between men and women – this is a matter of women’s safety. If Khelif’s testosterone levels are on par with those of a man, then Carini was in serious danger. She could have suffered much worse than a broken nose had the fight continued.

These sex tests clearly exist for a reason. Namely, to keep women out of danger and to keep competition fair. But according to the IOC, those who raise concerns about Khelif and Yu-ting being allowed to fight against female boxers are apparently engaging in a mean-spirited ‘witch-hunt’. ‘These boxers are entirely eligible’, said IOC spokesman Mark Adams earlier this week, ‘they are women on their passports, they have competed for many years’. ‘I actually think it is not helpful to start stigmatising people who take part in sport like this’, he smugly intoned.

Yes, it’s true that both Khelif and Yu-Ting have been ‘competing for many years’ as women. In fact, one of Khelif’s past opponents has spoken out about their fight in 2022. Mexico’s Brianda Tamara said that Khelif’s power and strength was unbelievable and that she had never ‘felt like that in my 13 years as a boxer, nor in my sparring with men’. She was grateful that she ‘got out of the ring safely’.

None of this matters to the gender ideologues, of course. While Khelif and Yu-ting may or may not be transgender, they certainly owe their places in women’s boxing to a relentless, decades-long campaign by trans activists to disregard the reality of biological sex. Sporting bodies like the IOC are now either fully captured by gender ideology, or are too scared to exclude certain athletes on the grounds of their biological sex, in case they cause offence. After all, in 2024, ‘transphobia’ is one of the most damaging accusations that can be levelled against someone.

The disastrous mismatch between Angela Carini and Imane Khelif is a horrifying reminder of what can happen when ‘inclusivity’ is prioritised over women’s dignity and safety.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.