B186. Imane Khelif and Binary Thinking

Imane Khelif, Algerian Olympic boxer. If your social media rhythms perceived you as politically right, you have probably seen the anger-generating memes about her being a biological man competing as a woman. The truth, it seems, is more complicated than that. According to fact-checker Snopes, USA Today, and numerous other reliable media sources, she has been female from birth, Yet, last year she was allegedly DNA tested and found to have XY chromosomes. (This too is questionably Russian propaganda, but I’ll let you look that up.)

This is a teachable moment for us all, if we allow it to be. Science has long known that gender is not clearly binary. Binary means either one or the other. Like there are many grays between white and black, and many heights between tall and short, and many variations even within “tall.”  

I remember in my General Psychology class in 1983 learning that some babies are born with ambiguous genitalia. In more advanced classes we learned that it’s not as unusual as we might guess, and that parents might be asked which gender they want the hospital to surgically assign them, ignoring that one’s gender affects us mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically, not just physically.

Why do we not talk about this? Well, let’s consider. If you were that parent and thought that this was some kind of freak occurrence (because no one talks about it), you would probably keep the secret forever, probably even from the child. Fortunately, now with the internet, people are able to learn that they are not alone. 

If we can come to accept one shade of gray, it becomes easier to see that there are an infinite number of grays between the binary extremes of black and white, of female and male, of heterosexual and homosexual, of conservative and liberal, etc. We will begin to see the many aspects of life as the continuums they are, rather than the binaries we have assumed.

I do not know Imane, and I do not know her physical story. Nor am I in any position to judge whether she should or should not be allowed to compete. I do hope those in such positions, and you and I before we form our opinions, will look to science, reason, and humanity, not to politics.