Algerian pugilist Imane Khelif and Taiwan's double world champion Lin Yu-ting are in the eye of a gender storm raging over women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics 2024, but this is not a new phenomenon. Indian athletes including Santhi Soundarajan, Dutee Chand and Pinki Pramanik have weathered this before.

Even Serena Williams was once accused of being a man. It's a slur many women who don't "look feminine enough" have faced.

Some who have faced such allegations, like Santhi, have had their careers destroyed. All of them, including Bengal’s own Pinki, have had to endure public humiliation.

“...A man beating up a woman in public for your entertainment. This isn't a sport.” That’s how J.K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, described the round of 16 welterweight bout between Imane and Italy’s Angela Carini at Paris Olympics 2024.

Rowling, who created a delightful world of magic in the Harry Potter books in which the subliminal message was of inclusion, is known for her exclusionary anti-trans stand.

She is wrong, as are the many others frothing at the keyboard over Imane and Lin.

World Boxing president Boris Van Der Vorst told The Associated Press: “I have not seen one single test that is proving that [the boxers are] transgender. That's the reason why it's [the controversy] not very respectful for the boxers who are competing here ... to speak about them in these terms. That's what I'm trying to stress. When there is proof, yeah, that's a different situation. But I haven't seen anything that proves it.”

Instagram/boxing_ting

If there is no evidence that either Imane or Lin are men or trans, why are they in the eye of this storm?

Both fighters had been disqualified at the 2023 World Championships held in New Delhi after failing International Boxing Association (IBA) eligibility rules that prevent athletes with male XY chromosomes competing in women's events.

But the Russia-led IBA was stripped of its recognition by the International Olympic Committee last year over governance and finance issues.

The IOC said the IBA decision to disqualify the boxers last year was arbitrary and the main cause for the furore that has seen people like Rowling and billionaire Elon Musk voice their opposition to them competing in the Games.

"These two athletes were the victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA," the IOC said in a statement. "Towards the end of the IBA World Championships in 2023, they were suddenly disqualified without any due process.

"According to the IBA minutes available on their website, this decision was initially taken solely by the IBA Secretary General and CEO."

Gender tests and sports

Some sports have limited the levels of testosterone allowed for athletes competing in women's competitions, while others ban everyone who has been through male puberty.

Gender testing in sports began in the 1930s. The first rules were made to ensure only biological women competed in women's events. These tests were often invasive and humiliating, requiring athletes to prove their womanhood by stripping before a doctor. Over time, these methods changed to hormone testing and genetic analysis.

“The term gender test is incorrect and harmful,” wrote Sohini Chattopadhyay in her non-fiction book ‘The Day I Became a Runner’. “The 1968 Mexico Olympics saw the first of two chromosome tests. This was based on clean binary differences between men and women that men would test XY for the 23rd (and final pair) of chromosomes, and women XX. The problem was that a whole lot of cases fell between XX and XY.”

In 2006, after winning a silver medal in the 800-metres sprint at the Asian Games in Doha, India’s Santhi Soundarajan had to take a gender test that led to her disqualification, public humiliation and ending of her running career.

“To this date, Santhi told me, neither the Indian government nor the Athletics Federation of India has given her the results of the examination in Doha, and the grounds on which she ‘failed’. It was like failing an exam where she did not know the syllabus, understand the questions or show the mistakes she had made. Or rather, the ‘mistakes’ she was made of,” Chattopadhyay wrote in her book, a delightful feminist tome which weaves the lives of India’s women athletes into its sensitive narrative.

Similarly, Indian sprinter Dutee Chand was barred from competing in 2014 because of naturally high testosterone levels. Her condition, called hyperandrogenism, was said to give her an unfair advantage.

Dutee challenged the ruling at the Court of Arbitration for Sport and won in 2015, setting an important example for other athletes with similar conditions. As Chattopadhyay points out in her book, Dutee was the first female athlete since South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya to push back against the international athletic federation’s rules. And win.

PTI

“We need to understand the gender spectrum more inclusively and not through unscientific pathological assumptions,” Gourab Ghosh, assistant professor of Cultural Studies, Gender & Sexuality and Performance Studies at Jyoti Dalal School of Liberal Arts, NMIMS, told The Telegraph Online. “Hoping Paris Olympic 2024 rectifies its mistakes and opens up avenues for more dialogues on medical, legal and cultural understanding of sex, gender, hormones and rights.”

If the Olympics’ governing body says Imane Khailf and Lin Yu-ting are women, the keyboard warriors on the internet have no business gaslighting the world or targeting the athletes. It can have terrible consequences on the lives of human beings,

Bengal’s Pinki Pramanik was accused of rape and put in the men’s ward in prison where she thought of killing herself and could not because her shoe laces were not long enough to hang herself, Chattopadhyay reports in her book.

Santhi Soundarajan’s career was finished by that one test in Doha. She later started working at a brick kiln before another newspaper report highlighted her plight.

As a BBC report had pointed out, Pinki was groped in full public view – there is even a photograph of it – by a male policeman when she was arrested.

If the controversy around Imane and Lin has been fuelled by the internet – although at least two Italian politicians have reportedly thrown themselves into the mix by questioning the Olympics – it is in the virtual world that we found the best snub.

As Dr Karthik Balachandran, whose bio on X says he is an endocrinologist, pointed out, Imane has been competing for years and has been beaten by women before.

And as World Boxing chief Van Der Vorst told AP, decisions about gender issues should be left to medical professionals and scientists, rather than being debated by those without a deep understanding of the complexities involved.

With inputs from Reuters and AP