this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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Khelif identifies as a woman, and was determined to be male by sex testing. Khelif likely has the same condition as Caster Semenya (5αR2D), which often results in being incorrectly assigned female at birth due to ambiguous genitalia.
Khelif is male due to producing sperm, which is why I wanted to clarify how biologists define sex. It isn't based on chromosomes, testosterone, or anything other than gametes (slightly longer put, the gamete type one's body is organized around producing).
If you want to discuss the accuracy of the sex testing done that's fine too, but for the sake of answering your question I didn't go into that.
So gender is female and sex is male.
Where exactly do you get this informations from? I can't find any reputable reporting about 5αR2D in connection with Imane Khelif. The Wikipedia article about her links to quite a few sources and none of these discuss that.
The introduction has this sentence summarizing three sources:
The 2025 "sex verification testing" of the "World Boxing" would exclude her in many cases as not a woman, where she would be a "biological female" even under your definition (SRY gene, high testostrone etc.), where her body would still be "organized around producing a larger type of gamete".
I'm am positively suprised that we can agree that Imane Khelif is a woman. With my preconceptions, I almost expected you to say that she is a man (sorry about that).
This goes over the 5αR2D claim:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/11/20/imane-khelif-medical-records/
Note that it confuses gender and sex, and says that the reports are unverified, but that should be interpreted as "Nobody is willing to go on the record about leaked medical reports" which is a "no duh" because that's a good way to get sued. Here's a screenshot from the source:
There have been several leaks of medical records, and nobody has been willing to go on record saying "these are fake/edited/whatever". The IOC has directly implied it's a DSD case:
That's in addition to the sex tests that were requested by the IBA, but done by an independent accredited lab:
YMMV, but that along with other circumstantial evidence like Khelif avoiding any competitions that now require sex testing, is enough for me to conclude that the leaks are almost certainly correct. I'll gladly go back and edit my past comments if Khelif ever proves otherwise.
Well in this case my milage does indeed vary:
Some leaked Documents hardly prove anything in my opinion and even in your linked snopes article it says:
[assuming the above leak is true]
I can't find any concrete reporting about the IBA test in 2023 (here is the relevant section in the Wikipedia article). Only statements by the IBA itself that she has XY chromosomes (which does not,even if true, necessarily mean that she is male, female XY is possible.)