Don’t fall for ‘gender McCarthyism’ about a female Olympian

Russian disinformation is catnip in the world of Donald Trump’s supporters.

The latest example are falsehoods spread by a discredited Russian-run boxing association that were seized on by conservatives to wrongly accuse a woman boxer in the Paris Olympics of being a man.

In an opening bout of the women’s boxing competition, Imane Khelif, an Algerian welterweight boxer, did what she was supposed to do by landing solid hits on the Italian boxer Angela Carini. Carini quit in the first round, saying that she had never been dealt such blows.

Sensing a culture war opening, culture warriors from Elon Musk to J.K. Rowling to Trump — citing the punches and an alleged 2023 test by the Russian-run International Boxing Association (IBA) — expressed outrage that a man was competing against a woman. Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance nonsensically claimed that Kamala Harris was responsible for a “grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match.”

Khelif is neither transgender, nor identifies as intersex, nor is a man. She was assigned the female sex at birth and raised as a girl. Her passport identifies her as female, she spent her career boxing as a woman and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) certified her to compete in Paris as a woman. In her boxing career, Khelif has been beaten 10 times by other women boxers.

The so-called test originated with the Russian-run IBA, which has never disclosed the test itself, or even its methodology, but only claimed that it proved that Khelif had the XY chromosome found in men. Experts have pointed out that such results are inconclusive because it’s possible for a woman to have XY chromosomes. The IBA’s refusal to release the test, however, show that the attacks on Khelif are nothing more than gender McCarthyism.

Khelif’s sex was not challenged by the IBA until she had defeated a Russian boxer at its 2023 tournament. That was hardly coincidental, because a Russian associate of Vladimir Putin runs the IBA, whose main sponsor in 2023 was the Russian state energy firm Gazprom. Last year, the IOC withdrew its recognition of the IBA because of its reliance on money from Gazprom, its corrupt governance and concerns over the competitive integrity of IBA bouts.

Following the right-wing attacks on Khelif and on a Taiwanese boxer whom IBA also claimed has the XY chromosome, IOC president Thomas Bach justly condemned the “hate speech” against the women boxers and accused Russia of conducting a “culture war” and a “defamation campaign against France, against the Games, against the IOC.”

The episode also underscores how the right wing in the U.S. has replaced the old left as a propaganda mouthpiece for Russia.

In 2018, rejecting the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies, then-President Trump endorsed Putin’s denial that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. In 2019, during impeachment proceedings, some House Republicans even parroted the baseless Russian claim that Ukraine was behind the election interference. In Moscow earlier this year, Tucker Carlson did a fawning interview with Putin, who told lie after lie, including that Ukraine is not a sovereign nation. “Of course,” replied Carlson.

No woman should ever have to prove that she is a woman when no reliable scientific evidence exists to the contrary, but that’s what Russia and its on-the-ground American propagandists, Donald Trump and JD Vance, tried to force Khelif to do.

But when Khelif won the women’s welterweight gold medal, she had the last word: “I am a woman like any other woman.”

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”