Taiwan's Olympic boxer Lin Yu-ting, one of two boxers at the center of a gender controversy at the Paris games this week, handily won a fight against Uzbekistan's Sitora Turdibekova Friday after being cleared to enter the women’s boxing competition, despite being stripped of a bronze medal in the World Championships last year for allegedly failing a gender eligibility test.
BREAKING: Lin Yu-ting beats female opponent Sitora Turdibekova at Olympics in Paris, France.
— The General (@GeneralMCNews) August 2, 2024
Lin-Yu-Ting was previously barred from the 2023 women’s boxing World Championship for having male XY chromosomes. pic.twitter.com/toZ7abK8h3
Yu-ting won the Olympic bout on Friday following a unanimous decision after fighting a full three rounds against Turdibekova, who refused to shake hands with Yu-ting after the event.
Related: Two Boxers Who Failed Gender Eligibility Tests Last Year Will Compete Against Women In Paris
But the win isn't without some serious controversy. Yu-ting was stripped of the bronze medal and barred from future competitions by the International Boxing Association in 2023 after the then-Russia-led global organization claimed a test had proven Yu-ting has XY chromosomes, marking the previously identified female boxer as a biological male. The IBA, which has long been mired in unrelated controversies, has since stood by their claim that both Yu-ting and Algeria’s Imane Khelif failed the gender test “following a comprehensive review and was intended to uphold the fairness and integrity of the competition,” but have so far declined to specify what criteria they used.
Since then, the IBA has been removed from running the Paris Olympics boxing events, a job that’s been passed over to the IOC’s Paris 2024 Boxing Unit, the governing body that cleared both Lin and Khelif to compete and which has more lax rules surrounding trans athletes being allowed to compete in categories that don't match their actual sex.
Khelif, who some have accused of being a male disguised as a woman, won a fight against Italy’s Angela Carini after the Italian boxer bowed out of the match just 46 seconds in, claiming Khelif’s punches were too painful to continue.
NBC News reports that “Khelif and Lin have both always competed as women, and there’s no indication that either identifies as transgender or intersex, the latter referring to those born with sex characteristics that don’t fit strictly into the male-female gender binary.”
However, despite clearing both Khelif and Lin for competition in the women’s category in Paris, the IOC has not explicitly stated that the boxers are actually biological females. Instead, an IOC spokesperson said simply, “I would just say that everyone competing in the women’s category is complying with the competition eligibility rules. They are women in their passports and it is stated that is the case.”
The vagueness and apparent lack of transparency surrounding the IBA’s test, the IOC’s decision, and these two boxers’ actual gender have led some to speculate that perhaps the competitors suffer from DSDs, an umbrella term for more than 40 conditions that can cause a range of chromosomal abnormalities and discrepancies between a person’s DNA and their physical sex characteristics, some of which may not be realized until puberty.
Regardless, the international community - and the women who're being asked to step into the ring with these opponents - deserve some clear, verified answers. And so far, we haven't gotten any.