Imane Khelif was accused of not being a woman and she was an Olympic champion. Now she has been banned from fighting in the World Boxing Championships again.

The International Boxing Association, which the International Olympic Committee has stripped of its regulatory status for the sport, has barred the Algerian boxer from competing in the World Championships based on the results (never made public) of a genetic test carried out in 2023. This comes in the same week that Donald Trump signed an executive order to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s events in the US, citing Imane Khelif as an example.

There are adages for everything, ready to come out of your pocket depending on the occasion. If everything can change in the blink of an eye, six months may change nothing, and the case of Imane Khelif illustrates how certain things are. In the summer, when her strength was too much for Angela Carini, an Italian who gave up after 46 seconds of feeling her punches in the ring, a quagmire sank the Algerian into the mud. From her opponent’s complaint about the power of her punches to the genetic test carried out a year earlier by the International Boxing Association (IBA), it didn’t take long for the boxer, in a brief moment, to become the target of accusations that all boiled down to the same thing: she was not a woman.

They came from all over, always from people who were strangers to the case but eager to ride the narrative that suited them: from the then wannabe new president of the USA, from the most billionaire man on the planet who is now his advisor in the White House, from the Italian prime minister, from the writer of the most successful fantasy book series and even from Portuguese MPs. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Giorgia Meloni, JK Rowling and Paulo Núncio took advantage of the episode to suggest that Imane Khelif was a man, that men should not be allowed to compete against women, despite there being nothing factual about taking away the Algerian woman’s birth gender.

For two weeks in August, until the day Khelif cried in the middle of the ring at Roland-Garros with the gold medal around her neck, champion in the -66kg category, the whirlwind did not stop. There were reports of her visiting her family in Algeria, where her father showed her birth certificate and pointed to where her gender was stamped. The International Olympic Committee was seen defending the boxer, criticising the discredited IBA, which had already withdrawn its status as boxing’s world regulator, saying that the results of the supposed genetic test were never made public. Before becoming an Olympic champion, Imane Khelif was a pawn in a political dispute between two sporting institutions.

Half a year has passed and the International Boxing Association, stripped of its authority over the sport, is acting as if nothing had happened and has scheduled a new edition of the World Championships for Serbia in March, where it confirmed that it will repeat what it did in 2023: the Algerian will not be allowed to participate based on the results of the test carried out that year. “She is not eligible, she does not meet our eligibility criteria,” confirmed Chris Roberts, secretary general of the IBA, on Thursday, taking refuge “in the rules” of the entity that “clearly stipulate” what is necessary for athletes to compete.

The argument was similar to that used by the organization in the previous edition of the World Championships, when it disqualified Khelif shortly before competing in the final. Umar Kremlev, president of the IBA, said that the testosterone test “proved” that the Algerian “has XY chromosomes”, accusing her of trying to “deceive her colleagues” and “pretend to be a woman”. In addition to the Olympic champion, Taiwanese Li Yu Ting would also be disqualified – they were the only two athletes tested in the competition. Like the African, the Asian competed in the last Games.

It was during the height of the sport in Paris that the Russian leader, known as a close friend of Vladimir Putin and a benefactor, called a press conference to explain the case of Imane Khelif. He ended up gathering journalists to watch him criticize the Olympic Committee, criticize its president, Thomas Bach, and disparage the opening ceremony of the Games. Five days later, the boxer won her gold medal and wrapped herself in an Algerian flag in the ring. “I am a woman like any other. I am a strong woman. Given the attacks they made on me, this was my way of reacting,” said the 25-year-old fighter.

Already an Olympic triumphant, she had another way of fighting back by filing a criminal complaint in French courts against the inventor of Harry Potter and the founder of Tesla, accusing both of acts of aggravated cyberharassment. Still in Paris, the Algerian responded to the hate speech and anti-trans rhetoric fueled against her, especially on Twitter, renamed X by Elon Musk: “There are enemies who cannot digest my success.”

The Olympic champion will not compete in the World Boxing Championships, and the news comes in the same week that Donald Trump signed an executive order, entitled “Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports”, to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s events at the school level. Having welcomed Musk under his wing on the grounds that he is an advisor tasked with streamlining the US federal government, the US president recalled Imane Khelif to, in his own style, release a statement that does not exactly correspond to the facts.

“Who could forget last year’s Paris Games, where a male boxer stole the gold medal after brutalizing his female opponent so viciously that she had to give up after just 46 seconds?” Trump said in Washington, never identifying Imane Khelif by name but saying that she had “swapped” her gender. When presenting the document, the president who called the Algerian a man when he was still just a candidate was happy that “the war on women’s sports is over”. A conflict created in their perceptions that ended in an instant, with a woman being dragged, once again, through the mud.