Roberts also criticized the International Olympic Committee, which had chosen not to act on the information the IBA provided, instead assessing athletes’ eligibility to compete in female sports based on the legal sex designated on their passports.

Over the past two weeks, there has been a lot of confusion and misinformation in the public sphere when it comes to Khelif, Yu-ting, and what makes someone male or female. Media outlets have consistently referred to Khelif and Yu-ting as ‘female athletes’ and framed the debate over Khelif and Yu-ting’s eligibility to compete in female sports as a question of policing femininity among women of color. A USA Today ‘fact check’ elided the controversy altogether: ‘Fact check: Imane Khelif is a woman.’

It doesn’t help that the term ‘intersex’ itself is highly misleading; it implies that some people are neither male or female or both male and female or somewhere in between male and female. But intersex conditions are better understood as disorders of sexual development that affect typical male or female development. In other words, these conditions are sex-specific, not sex-defying.

All the evidence in the public domain indicates that Khelif and Yu-ting have a disorder of sexual development that affects males, such as 5-ARD. In the absence of investigation, a child born with 5-ARD may be ‘assigned female’ at birth and raised as a girl until puberty hits, at which point they undergo male pubertal changes.

LGBTQ organizations like Glaad have only added to the confusion by insisting that, for example, ‘Imane Khelif is a woman’ and ‘Imane Khelif is not transgender and does not identify as intersex.’ Trans activist efforts to enlist terms like ‘intersex’ and ‘assigned sex at birth’ in the fight for people with typical sexual development to claim opposite-sex identities has undermined public understanding of disorders of sexual development. Whether or not Khelif has a disorder of sexual development has nothing to do with whether Khelif ‘identifies’ as intersex.

When it comes to sex division in sports, there are some sports — like swimming and running — where fairness is what’s at stake. But when the International Olympic Committee puts male athletes in the ring with female athletes, much more than fairness is at stake. Punching power is one of the starkest sex differences between males and females — other than, you know, the whole ‘giving birth’ thing. This is why a female athlete who trained all her life to compete at the Olympics forfeited after just 46 seconds in the ring, saying she had ‘never felt a punch like this,’ then broke down sobbing because sporting officials made her choose her physical safety over her dream.

As the IBA points out, this ought to have been an administrative matter, dealt with sensitively and out of the public eye: fail a chromosome test and you’re not getting in the ring. The IOC chose to make this a global spectacle, exposing female athletes to great risk and Khelif and Yu-ting to scorching scrutiny. Angela Carini’s cry of ‘Non e giusto!’ is right.

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Eliza Mondegreen is graduate and researcher.

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