Transgender boxer Imane Khelif has caused a lot of controversy by participating and winning the gold medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
2024 Paris Olympic champion Imane Khelif is not eligible to participate in the 2025 Women’s World Boxing Championships after failing the International Boxing Association (IBA) gender test.
The 2025 Women’s World Boxing Championships will take place from March 8-16 in Nis, Serbia, bringing together more than 200 boxers from 39 countries. However, 2024 Paris Olympic champion Imane Khelif is not on the list of competitors. According to the announcement from the IBA, the Algerian boxer failed the gender test in 2023, leading to her being disqualified from the tournament that year. IBA DNA testing has shown that Khelif has XY chromosomes, “giving her an advantage over other female boxers,” the organization said.
Imane Khelif has received a lot of attention for still being allowed to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics after the controversy over her gender. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) still recognized Khelif and Lin Yu-ting (Chinese Taipei) as female athletes at the Paris Olympics, determining gender based on passports and medical documents, similar to the process applied at Tokyo 2020 and many other international tournaments.
Here, Khelif competed convincingly when defeating Angela Carini (Italy), Anna Hamori (Hungary) and Janjaem Suwannapheng (Thailand) to win a ticket to the final. In the gold medal match for the women’s 66kg weight class, the boxer born in 1999 won convincingly against Yang Liu (China), bringing home the first Olympic gold medal in history for Algerian boxing.
After the resounding victory, Khelif called for an end to criticism on gender issues, emphasizing that the recent Paris 2024 Olympic gold medal was the strongest answer to the controversies surrounding her. Her coach – Mohamed Chaoua said that his student taught all critics a “moral lesson”.
