By Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times - Saturday, August 10, 2024

Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting won the Olympic women’s boxing championship Saturday in the featherweight class, becoming the second of two fighters whose biological sex has been called into question to capture gold medals in Paris.

Lin, 28, won the unanimous judge’s decision against 20-year-old Julia Szeremeta of Poland in the 126 pound (57 kg) weight category, a fight Lin dominated from the start, aided by greater height and a longer reach.

Lin waved to the crowd before kneeling and kissing the five-ring Olympic logo on the floor of the boxing ring after winning gold for Taiwan, which competes in the games as Chinese Taipei.

The victory came at a cost. Both Lin and Algeria’s Imane Khelif, who won the gold medal Friday in the women’s welterweight final, were disqualified at the 2023 Women’s World Championships after blood tests showed they were ineligible for the women’s category, according to the International Boxing Association.

Dr. Ioannis Filippatos, a sports-medicine specialist and president of the European Boxing Confederation, said at a Monday press conference held by the IBA in Paris that blood tests taken at bouts in 2022 and 203 showed the fighters have male chromosomes.

“Our problem is that we have two blood exams with [the] karyotype of male,” Filippatos said. “This is the answer from [the] laboratory. It’s not my answer.”

Fair Play for Women posted a photo of the Polish boxer Szeremeta with the caption: “This brave young woman should now be Olympic champion. Her gold medal was taken by a man. She knows it. You know it. The world knows it.”

Lin’s defenders in Taiwan have blasted the skepticism over the fighter’s biological sex as misinformation.

Hung Sun-han, a Taiwanese legislator, cheered Lin’s victory Saturday, calling the fighter “a true woman from birth” and threatening legal action against the boxing association, which was dropped by the IOC last year over governance and finance issues.

“The Taiwanese government will work with lawyers and the International Olympic Committee to discuss how to take further legal action against the IBA,” he wrote on X. “We won’t allow people to harm Taiwanese women’s rights to participate in international competitions under the false claim of protecting women.”

Khelif declared after Friday’s final that “I am a woman like any other woman,” telling reporters via a translator that “I was born a woman, I have lived as a woman, I competed as a woman. There’s no doubt about that.”

The fighter dismissed the skeptics as “enemies of success,” adding “that also gives my success a special taste.”

The International Olympic Committee has also defended the athletes’ eligibility, saying “they are women on their passports,” but such assurances have failed to satisfy advocates of single-sex female sports.

There is speculation that Khelif and Lin have Differences of Sexual Development 46, XY, meaning they were born with ambiguous genitalia and raised as girls, but they have internal testes that produce male-level testosterone and undergo male puberty.

Questions about the boxers’ biological sex became one of the biggest stories of the 2024 Paris Olympics, spurring calls for the IOC to resume sex-testing of athletes, a protocol abandoned in 1999 ahead of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Two of Lin’s previous Olympic opponents made the “XX” sign with their fingers after losing their matches, a protest against athletes with XY chromosomes competing in women’s events.

• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.

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