The Olympic Olympic Boxing Khelif boxing must undergo genetic sexual screening to participate in upcoming events with the new director of sport.
World boxing announced compulsory sex tests for all athletes on Friday. The Director Body specifically mentioned Khelif when the policy was announced, claiming that the winner of the Algerian gold medal must be projected before it is approved to combat upcoming events, including the Eindhoven box cup next month in the Netherlands.
“The introduction of compulsory tests will be part of a new policy on” sex, age and weight “to ensure the safety of all participants and offer a competitive playground for men and women,” World Boxing wrote in a press release. The national federations of combatants will be responsible for the test administration and the supply of results to world boxing.
Khelif won a gold medal at the Paris Olympic Games last summer in the middle of an international examination on her and Yu-te Lin of Taiwan, another winner of the gold medal. The former director of Olympic boxing, the International Boxing Association dominated by Russia, disqualified the two fighters of its 2023 world championships after affirming that they had failed an unrecognized eligibility test.
The IOC has run the last two Olympic boxing tournaments after the banishment of IBA for decades of harm and controversy, and it applied the rules of sexual eligibility used at the previous Olympic Games. Khelif and Lin were eligible to compete according to these standards.
Khelif intends to return to international competition next month in Eindhoven as part of his plan to defend his gold medal at the Los Angeles Olympic Games, but some boxers and their federations had already spoken to protest against his inclusion.
Chromosomal tests were common in Olympic sports during the 20th century, but were largely abandoned in the 1990s due to many ambiguities that could not be easily resolved by tests, collectively called differences in sexual development (DSD). Many sports have passed to hormonal tests to determine sex admissibility, but these tests require guiding bodies to make difficult decisions on the eligibility of women with naturally high levels of testosterone.
Three months ago, world athletics – the director of athletics – became the first Olympic sport to reintroduce chromosomal tests, demanding athletes that participate in female events to submit to the test once in their careers.
World boxing has been temporarily approved to replace IBA as a Los Angeles Games Director, but it has faced a significant pressure from boxers and their federations to create sexual eligibility standards.
World Boxing has announced that all athletes over the age of 18 in his competitions were to undergo a genetic chain reaction test by polymerase (PCR) to determine their sex at birth. The PCR test detects chromosomal equipment through swabs in the mouth, saliva or blood.
If an athlete intends to compete in female categories is determined as having male chromosomal equipment, “initial screenings will be referred to independent clinical specialists for genetic screening, hormonal profiles, anatomical examination or other evaluations of endocrine profiles by specialist doctors”, “World Boxing has also written.
The decision of the boxing organization is the last development of a tumultuous period of the Olympic sex eligibility policy. The question of transgender participation in sports has become an international flash point, President Donald Trump and other conservative world leaders weighing several times.
Earlier this year, World Athletics also offered recommendations that would apply strict transgender rules to born athletes, but had what the organization describes as natural testosterone levels in the typical male range. In 2023, World Athletics prohibited transgender athletes who had transferred men to women and crossed male puberty.
The president of world athletics, Sebastian Coe, said that he was convinced that the new rules of the body would resist legal challenges.
Khelif, 26, had participated in women’s boxing events under the auspices of IBA without controversy until the 2023 world championships. She had never won a major international competition before her dominant performance in the female Welters weight division in Paris.
