Opinion | Attacks on an Algerian female boxer were disgusting. Not apologizing is worse

Imane Khelif doesn’t deserve this. 

The Algerian female boxer has done absolutely nothing wrong. Never did do anything wrong. Never wanted to enter into any stupid political debate or take any stand or do anything other than get out of poverty and out of her small village. 

That’s why she rode a bus every day to a training facility several dozen miles away from her home. That’s why she gathered scrap metal, like some real life Rey Skywalker, in order to afford bus fare. That’s why she fought, after fighting her entire life to just survive. 

In fact, it was Khelif who was fighting against males – the boys in her village who bullied her – which is how she learned to fight in the first place. 

And now she’s in a whole other fight – tossed against her will into an international debate over gender and biology, in which the utter morons who giggled through frog dissection on their way to failing middle school science are leading a misguided, misinformed crusade against facts and basic human anatomy. 

Because Khelif punched another woman during a fight and that woman, an Italian fighter who had previously injured her nose, bowed out with a nose injury, because “the pain was too much.” 

From there, a whole bunch of assumptions were made about Khelif – that she was once a man, that she has male genitalia, that she was banned by another boxing organization because she’s a transgender female – and almost every single one of them was wrong. 

Bad wrong. Stupid wrong. Embarrassingly wrong. 

And Alabama lawmakers, never ones to miss an Idiocy Fest, were right in the middle of it. 

Our U.S. Senators, Tommy Tuberville and Katie Britt, condemned the Olympic Committee for allowing Khelif to fight, with Tuberville referring to her as “a man.” Our U.S. reps were equally caught up in the phony outrage show. Barry Moore tweeted out a photo of Khelif with a caption reading “only women belong in women’s sports.” Gary Palmer simply retweeted another rep’s comments about biological men in women’s sports being a disgrace. 

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And wrong. 

Khelif is not a man. Was never a man. Did not transition. Did not undergo any sort of therapy to transition from male to female. Did not do anything other than live her life with a slightly altered amount of testosterone. 

That’s the big crime committed by this poor girl who has literally fought her way out of poverty. 

It’s likely, according to reporting by various media outlets citing medical experts, that Khelif has dealt with a condition since birth known as differences of sexual development (DSD). It is a wide-ranging condition that has various effects on genes, hormones and reproductive organs, and it may cause women to produce more testosterone. 

To hear Olympic athletes talk about it, it’s not much different than, say, a decorated American swimmer whose body, because of some biological anomaly, doesn’t produce the normal amount of lactic acid, allowing him to fly through the water without tiring at the same rate as other swimmers. 

But there was this difference: last year, the International Boxing Association disqualified Khelif and another boxer, claiming the pair failed some unidentified tests and claimed they had advantages over other female boxers.  

Couple of things: The Russian-run IBA is known for its corruption, and in particular its corruption when other Russian boxers are involved. And Khelif, at the time of the ruling, had just beaten a Russian boxer to move into the quarterfinals of the IBA’s world championships. The IBA never published the results of the supposed tests, nor did it even reveal which tests were used. 

Let’s also keep in mind that Khelif isn’t exactly a newcomer on the international boxing stage or with the IBA – she has competed in the IBA since 2022, when she won silver – and she isn’t exactly a dominating presence in the ring. She has been beaten NINE times over the last three years, including losing in the 2020 Olympics in the quarterfinals. She first started her amateur career in 2018, losing in the first round of the international women’s competition that year and the following year. 

She also has never been known as a particularly powerful puncher or a boxer that other women feared. 

None of that matters, though. The conservatives have a narrative and they will not let facts stand in the way. 

Or the peace of another human. 

Let’s be absolutely clear here: What has happened to Imane Khelif is disgusting. And every single one of you, especially those of you with children, should be ashamed and embarrassed of yourselves. 

In your zeal to castigate those who are different and create your newest phony boogeyman, you absolutely buried an innocent, good person in feces. Because you don’t understand basic biology. Because you don’t care about the complicated and nuanced issues surrounding gender, or the very real struggle some people go through. 

All you care about is the spectacle. 

At this point, the good and decent people – like her opponent did a day later – would circle back, admit the awful mistake and vow to learn more about the issue. To be better informed. To be more careful when dealing with other humans. To be more sensitive to the very real people trying to live behind those villainous labels. 

But none of the people who have bashed Khelif will do that. Because the truth is, they don’t have a tiny fraction of Imane Khelif’s courage.