I t was the full hero’s welcome for Imane Khelif on her return home from Paris to Algiers. An open-topped bus parade on a humid evening that had followed a meeting with president Abdelmadjid Tebboune in the El Mouradia Palace where she was granted the honorary title of major in the Algerian army. The celebrations were only a little more muted on the other side of the world, where Lin Yu-ting, lauded as the “daughter of Taiwan” by its president, was the honoured guest at a sumptuous banquet put on by her sponsors Yumark Enterprises.
The two athletes had emerged from the Olympic Games as stars at home despite an international furore over their gold medal-winning performances; Khelif in the women’s 66kg boxing event and Lin in the women’s 57kg . The trigger for the outcry had been their disqualification from the previous year’s world championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA) after it said they had failed “gender tests”. The Y chromosome had been identified in two blood samples.
Both women had been registered as female at birth but they had not met the female category eligibility criteria. There was much noise and little clarity but differences of sex development (DSD) describes a group of conditions that occur early in pregnancy in which sex development is not typical. Some people with DSDs are raised as female but have XY sex chromosomes and blood testosterone levels in the male range.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC), at odds with the.
