The Paris Olympics have provided an opportunity for Americans to come together and root for our most gifted athletes against the world’s best. It’s been inspiring to watch talented young competitors for the first time and to witness all-time greats such as Simone Biles or Katie Ledecky add to their caches of Olympic gold. Or, if you’re Ted Cruz, these Olympics have provided an occasion to opine about the gender identity of a previously little-known Algerian boxer named Imane Khelif.
You’ve probably heard of Khelif by now. The fighter, a 25-year-old welterweight, forced Italian opponent Angela Carini to concede in their round-of-sixteen match on Thursday of last week, within just 46 seconds. (Khelif won the gold medal on Friday.) After the bout, Carini refused to shake Khelif’s hand and said she “had never been hit like that in [her] life.” This led some right-wing politicians and influencers to say Khelif is actually a man, even though no one has presented credible evidence for that claim.
The flimsy basis cited for questioning her gender stems from the 2023 World Boxing Championship in Uzbekistan, when the International Boxing Association (IBA) barred Khelif and one other athlete from competition. The sanctioning body claimed that both athletes failed chromosomal tests related to their gender, although the organization has not specified exactly what tests the boxers took or their exact results, citing “privacy.” The IBA’s stature has fallen in recent years; the group is led by president Umar Kremlev, a Russian sports official with close ties to the Kremlin. The International Olympic Committee suspended the IBA as an official governing body for the sport in 2019 over concerns relating to financial and ethical corruption, and in 2023 the IOC banned the group altogether. At last year’s World Championship, the IBA decided to test Khelif only after the Algerian fighter defeated a star Russian boxer. Khelif’s subsequent disqualification restored her Russian opponent’s previously undefeated record.
There is no proof of Khelif’s chromosomal makeup besides the word of the IBA. Furthermore, the Olympics ceased using chromosomal tests decades ago, as doctors and other sports science researchers have found that only elevated testosterone levels, rather than an individual’s chromosomal makeup, provide a competitive advantage. The last Olympics to use chromosomal tests to determine eligibility were the 1996 Atlanta Games, and the IOC formally ended the practice in 1999. Khelif first competed in the women’s world championships in 2018, she continued to fight in subsequent editions of the tournament, and she represented Algeria in women’s boxing at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
Myron Genel, a professor emeritus of pediatrics from Yale University who consulted with the IOC on the decision to abandon chromosomal testing, called the idea that a woman with XY chromosomes possesses a competitive advantage malarkey. That view has been reaffirmed by subsequent research.
It’s unclear whether Cruz is referencing the IBA’s supposed test as the basis for his claim that Khelif is “a man” or whether he decided that she’s not a woman based on her appearance. Whichever it is, he’s decidedly worked up: he has published multiple posts on social media that misidentify Khelif as a man, denounced the fighter on his podcast, and challenged Congressman Colin Allred, his Democratic opponent in this year’s Senate race, to join him in condemning Khelif’s participation in the Olympics.
Someone unfamiliar with the junior senator from Texas might wonder why, amid all the economic and foreign-policy issues facing the United States, he is fixated on a boxing match in France between an Algerian and an Italian. But his interest in transgender issues is long-standing.
Cruz has for years condemned, mocked, and legislatively targeted transgender individuals, who comprise roughly .5 percent of the U.S. population. Last year he introduced a bill that would have prohibited federal agencies from enacting any rules forcing its employees to use others’ preferred names or pronouns. (Like most of the legislation Cruz has introduced during his time in the Senate, it went nowhere.) The senator has attacked trans rights in social media posts and podcasts and during Senate proceedings. He was also one of several right-wing figures to make a cameo appearance in the 2023 sports comedy Lady Ballers, a feature-length film about cisgender men posing as transgender women to gain a competitive advantage in women’s sports. During the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Cruz declared that she was “the only Supreme Court nominee in history who has been unable to answer the question ‘What is a woman?’” No one from Cruz’s office responded to a message from Texas Monthly asking for the junior senator’s definition of “woman.”
Cruz has long avoided describing transgender individuals as such; rather, he’s insisted that a transgender woman is simply “a man.” His implication, as is evident in his questioning of Jackson, is that gender is quite simple to determine; a matter of pure common sense. That view runs counter to the evolving research in recent decades regarding the fluidity of gender identity. That’s true in terms of genetics, where scientists have found that as many as 267,000 women around the world have XY chromosomes, and most don’t become aware of it until puberty, if at all. And even then, at least according to some experts, the athletes among them don’t develop the musculature typically associated with men. It’s also true in human psychology, where the American Psychology Association removed “gender identity disorder” from the DSM-5, the association’s diagnostic manual, in 2013, and researchers have found that gender is heavily influenced by social factors. But Cruz seems less interested in the science of this issue than in the politics.
Two years ago, Dave Carney, top political adviser to Governor Greg Abbott, boasted to reporters that Abbott’s demonization of transgender Texans and their families was a “75 percent to 80 percent winner” for the party. Cruz is no doubt aware of such polling and eager to use any tool that he can, in his increasingly close campaign for reelection. Imane Khelif is simply caught in the splash zone for this particular ride.
