The transphobia rocking Olympic boxing has a Kremlin connection

This article first appeared on Mother Jones. It has been republished with the publication’s permission.

By the time JK Rowling, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump were falsely referring to her as a man, the lies about Imane Khelif had already traveled halfway around the world. Last week, two Olympic boxers—Khelif, from Algeria, and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan—were subjected to brutal international scrutiny about their sex and gender, and whether they were entitled to compete in women’s events; the attention on Khelif became particularly acrid after her opponent, Italian Angela Carini, quit 46 seconds into their bout, declaring that she had “never been hit so hard in my life.” A photo of the two women exiting the ring, Carini in tears, Khelif casting a glance, was widely shared, with people like Rowling—who’s promoted transphobic views for years, but has denied being transphobic—offering heated and derogatory commentary about Khelif.  

Related:

Donald Trump bullies boxer Imane Khelif as she begs the world to stop

Transphobes have been falsely saying that she was assigned male at birth and Trump joined in.

“Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better?” Rowling tweeted. “The smirk of a male who’s [sic] knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.” 

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While the attacks on Khelif are of a piece with familiar recent Western controversies over who is allowed to participate in girls’ and women’s sports, many of the articles and individuals magnifying the debate relied on or relayed the claims of a discredited group with strong ties to the Russian government, a deep grudge against the International Olympic Committee, and a seemingly vested interest in proving that the IOC-run games are, as the group’s leader has claimed, a venue for “sodomy.”

In trying to unravel what led up to this moment, many individuals and news outlets cited a statement released by the official-sounding International Boxing Association, which stated that both Khelif and Yu-Ting had previously been disqualified from competing in the IBA-administered Women’s World Boxing Championships in March 2023. The women were barred from that competition, which took place in New Delhi, following tests the organization has not publicly clarified, citing privacy rules. At the time, IBA president Umar Kremlev told a Russian state news agency that the women had been found to have “XY chromosomes” and claimed the two had “pretended to be women” and “tried to deceive their colleagues.”

Even if the IBA’s findings were true, having XY chromosomes does not automatically make someone male—women with Swyer syndrome, a rare genetic condition, have XY for instance. Nor are XY chromosomes proven to constitute an “unfair advantage,” although that is exactly what an IBA official claimed in a press conference on Monday. One pediatrics expert told NBC in 2009—one of the innumerable times this issue has been raised in women’s sports—that such a claim was “malarkey.”

The IBA, previously known as the AIBA, oversaw Olympic boxing for decades. But it began an open feud with the IOC in 2018 after the AIBA elected Gafur Rakhimov as president, an Uzbek businessman who was placed on a 2012 U.S. treasury sanctions list over alleged ties to a criminal organization and heroin trafficking, charges he has denied. 

In 2019, despite Rahimov having stepped aside, the AIBA was barred from overseeing boxing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics after a widely-reported scandal surrounding the organization’s impartiality and leadership. The AIBA elected Kremlev in 2020 and changed its name to the IBA in December 2021, but its rift with the international sporting community grew as the organization announced Gazprom, the majority Russian government-owned energy company, as its main sponsor—a move the IOC would describe in a June 2023 report as raising questions about its “financial autonomy.” The IBA also forewent new leadership elections in 2022, a decision the IOC said left it “extremely concerned.”

Kremlev has established ties with Vladimir Putin: a 2022 Le Monde story outlined the two men’s shared ambition to use boxing to extend Russia’s international soft power. Kremlev is said to be “a member of the order of St. George, Russia’s highest military distinction,” as Le Monde put it, as well as a past member of the Night Wolves, a motorcycle club with nationalist views and Kremlin ties. He has variously been described in news stories as having made his money running a security firm, a jewelry business, in construction, and in a taxi business.

When Khelif and Yu-Ting were disqualified by the IBA back in New Delhi, skeptics questioned how it benefited Azalia Amineva, a Russian fighter. The women were not ruled ineligible until after they’d already competed and Khelif had won a bout against the previously undefeated Amineva. While IBA officials said the sequence of events was due to a week’s delay in being provided testing results, as the Associated Press has pointed out, the decision meant the Russian fighter’s perfect record was retroactively restored.

Kremlev isn’t shy about expressing a broad fixation on gender and sexuality, with him, as the sports website Defector has pointed out, decrying the IOC on YouTube for promoting “outright sodomy and the destruction of traditional values.” In the wake of the Paris games’ opening ceremony, he blasted the spectacle, which featured queer performers, as “pure sodomy,” while saying the IOC “burns from pure devilry” and that its president is a “chief sodomite.” He also claimed that “men with changed gender are allowed to fight with women in boxing at the Olympics.” (Videos with such remarks have been helpfully subtitled in English to draw a wider, Western audience.) Last week, Kremlev announced the IBA would give $50,000 in prize money to the defeated opponents of Khelif and Yu-Ting.

Following Khelif’s fight with Carini, the vitriol was taken up by Khelif’s next opponent, Hungarian Anna Luca Hamori. Khelif defeated her in a Saturday quarterfinal, but not before Hamori had posted and deleted a cartoon on Instagram of a slight woman in a boxing ring looking up at a monster with devil horns. She made another clear dig at Khelif, declaring, “If she or he is a man, it will be a bigger victory for me if I win.” 

The IOC, for its part, released a statement on Sunday defending both Khelif and Yu-Ting and their right to compete, with a spokesperson blasting what the women have gone through at the IBA’s hands since 2023: “The whole process is flawed. From the conception of the test, to how the test was shared with us, to how the tests have become public, is so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with it.” 

The Khelif affair captures English-speaking transphobes with rigid ideas about the nature of womanhood picking up on a politically motivated campaign from a discredited organization at open war with the IOC. Indeed, right-wing organizations in the United States, including the Independent Women’s Forum and CPAC, via its chair Matt Schlapp, have paid for sponsored posts on Musk’s X platform, calling her “a man“—posts that appear when users search for information on the controversy.

While the modern Olympics have often been a political tool, suffused with nationalist grudges and rivalries, this incident operated on both a grand scale and a frighteningly intimate one, with individual women placed under scrutiny clearly meant to humiliate. That’s seemingly just what Kremlev wanted, when, in an interview with Chinese state media in the run up to the games, he spoke about sports as an avenue to promote “traditional family values”—and offered warm words about their ability to “unite mankind.”

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