Donald Trump bullies boxer Imane Khelif as she begs the world to stop

Donald Trump/Imane Khelif Photo: Joshua L. Jones – USA TODAY NETWORK///Katie Goodale-USA TODAY Sports

As Olympic boxer Imane Khelif moves on to the semi-final round of her division at the Olympics in Paris, she has a message for the world: bullying can destroy people. But Donald Trump wasn’t listening and attacked her at a rally this weekend.

Khelif, who is a cisgender woman, has been targeted by a massive campaign to discredit her wins at the Olympics. Several famous and powerful people – including author J.K. Rowling, conservative podcaster Joe Rogan, and Trump – said that she is either a trans woman or a cis man pretending to be a woman to win at the Olympics. There is no good evidence to support this claim, and her father even showed her birth certificate to Reuters to get people to stop saying she was assigned male at birth.

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“I send a message to all the people of the world to uphold the Olympic principles and the Olympic Charter, to refrain from bullying all athletes, because this has effects, massive effects,” Khelif told SNTV, a sports news service. “It can destroy people; it can kill people’s thoughts, spirit, and mind. It can divide people. And because of that, I ask them to refrain from bullying.”

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“I am in contact with my family two days a week. I hope that they weren’t affected deeply,” she continued. “They are worried about me. God willing, this crisis will culminate in a gold medal, and that would be the best response.”

Trump, though, decided not to listen to her or the facts and blithely said she had “transitioned” at a rally in Atlanta on Saturday.

“Now all you have to do is look at the boxers,” Trump told the crowd. “This young girl from Italy, a very- a champion boxer, she got hit so hard she didn’t know what the hell hit her.”

“It’s a person that transitioned,” he continued. “He was a good male boxer, yeah, he was a good male boxer. And she didn’t even go down. He hit her with two jabs and she said, ‘I’m out!’”

Trump was referring to Italian boxer Angela Carini, who quit her match with Khelif after 46 seconds. Video of her crying after quitting was used by anti-trans activists to attempt to show that Khelif was assigned male at birth, even though Carini later said that she was not making a political statement when quitting and that “this controversy makes me sad.”

Olympic officials have said that Khelif meets the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) eligibility requirements, the same requirements that led to no trans women participating in the 2024 Olympics at all.

Many on the right have latched on to a statement from International Boxing Association (IBA) president Umar Kremlev, who said that DNA tests had “proved they had XY chromosomes and were thus excluded” in a post on the social media platform Telegram this past March. He also said that countries were recruiting cis men to compete in women’s sports. There is no evidence of that.

Kremlev has long been criticized as an ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, using the IBA to extend Russian soft power. Putin has been using its anti-LGBTQ+ policies to differentiate Russia from Ukraine and the West, which he believes support LGBTQ+ rights because of U.S. brainwashing.

Khelif previously participated in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo without incident. Her disqualification at the 2023 IBA event came after she won against Azalia Amineva, a rising Russian star, and Khelif’s disqualification meant that Amineva went back to having an undefeated record.

The IBA didn’t say anything about Khelif’s chromosomes when she was disqualified, declining to specify what tests led to her disqualification. Kremlev made his statement about Khelif’s chromosomes nearly a year later on social media.

The IOC withdrew recognition of the IBA last year due to a lack of financial transparency. This means that the IBA—unlike other individual sports organizations—has “no involvement in either the qualification for or the organization of” boxing at the 2024 Olympics.

The IOC has gone further in more recent statements, saying that the IBA’s gender testing is not “legitimate.”

“Those tests are not legitimate tests. The tests themselves, the process of the tests, the ad hoc nature of the tests are not legitimate,” said IOC spokesperson Mark Adams. “The testing, the method of the testing, the idea of the testing which happened kind of overnight. None of it is legitimate and this does not deserve any response.”

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