On August 1, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif competed against Italian boxer Angela Carini in the first round of the women’s welterweight boxing tournament at the Paris Olympics. The match lasted just 46 seconds, with Khelif emerging as the victor when Carini abruptly withdrew from the match.
You’d think that the sports world would immediately rally around the Algerian Olympian, celebrating her win and her stunning show of strength and athleticism. Instead, conservatives like J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk began tearing her down, claiming, falsely, on social media that Khelif is biologically male—as though a secret trans identity was the only way to have taken her opponent down so swiftly.
These accusations, which have been parroted by a number of conspiracy theorists online, are part of the strange and terrifying rise of “transvestigators,” or people who target a woman they deem to have “manly” characteristics, and work backwards in search of “clues” that that person is transgender. In other words, if you don’t fit inside conservatives’ narrow stereotype of what a woman looks like, or how she behaves, you must not really be a woman. It’s just another form of the same misogyny that has plagued women athletes since the beginning of time, just with a rebrand.
According to GLAAD, the hate-fueled concept of “transvestigations” emerged in early 2017 and has seen a recent resurgence since 2023. Many transvestigators employ the ideology of trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who do not recognize trans women as women, and who see them as a threat to cisgender women. The implication of a transvestigation is, of course, that being a trans woman is the ultimate sin, and that cisgender women need to be saved from them. The hateful rhetoric is rooted in both misogyny and transphobia, and its use in this case is especially ironic, because Khelif is a cisgender woman. She was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time she has been subject to these kinds of attacks. In 2023, the International Boxing Association (IBA) disqualified her from the world championships, citing high levels of testosterone in her system, per the Associated Press. However, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has stated that the IBA’s tests were “flawed” and “illegitimate,” and has since discredited the organization. Per Reuters, the IOC claimed that the IBA was “mired in financial opaqueness and compromised by ties to Russian leadership.”
