Friday, August 02, 2024

Should Algerian Boxer Imane Khalif Compete in an Intersex Olympics?

 At the Paris Olympics, there has been an intense controversy over the women's boxing match in which the Algerian boxer Imane Khalif easily defeated Italy's Angela Carini in only 46 seconds.  Khalif looks and fights like a man.  So, it appeared that male violence against women has become an Olympic sport!

It's hard to judge this, however, because the news reports have not clearly identified Khalif's sexual biology.  It is said that she is not a transgender woman--someone born male who decided later in life decided to take on a female gender identity.  Instead, it is said that she was born as a girl but with a genetic condition that gives her an abnormally high level of testosterone.

I have written a series of posts on the Olympic runner Caster Semenya.  I suspect that Khalife is like Semenya:  she's an XY male born with 5-alpha reductase deficiency, so that she is a chromosomal male who was born with sexually ambiguous sex organs who was raised as a girl.  She identifies her gender identity as female, but she is biologically male, with testes producing testosterone, which gives her an unfair athletic advantage in athletic competition with women.  If that is so, then she is not a transgender woman but an intersex woman, who falls somewhere between normal males and normal females.

I have proposed that intersex people like this should compete in an Intersex Olympics, similar to the Paralympics.  Some intersex athletes have agreed that this would be the best solution to the problem, although Semenya does not.

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