Does Imane Khelif even have a DSD?

[BeLemonNow]

Giving the widespread reporting of a previous test showing Imane Khelif is biologically male / XY is there actually any evidence as to whether or not they even have a Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD). Or is this straightforward fraud? I know there was speculation before...

By DSD, going by NHS information, in this case I mean XY chromosomes with an abnormality causing a baby's genitals to look female (but not a DSD where there's XY and some sort of penis even if smaller than normal). To be clear, I am aware that these differences are usually apparent by puberty. It looks likely Imane went through male puberty.

Apologies if this has been covered in a different thread, but I cannot see it anywhere. I am aware that the only IOC criteria to compete at the Olympics was a female passport - ridiculous really - but that Imane has been claiming to be living as a woman since birth.

I don't think we know for sure. The fact that Imane refused to have a test sure suggests that Imane knows Imane has a Y chromosome hanging about but we don't know if that's a straightforward XY or some kind of DSD. It does seem more likely it's a DSD. Assuming Imane always had a female passport and didn't have it changed somehow just to get to the olympics - it feels like that would have been exposed already if that were the case.

One thing I am sure of is that he hasn’t even been living as a woman. The way he was paraded around the boxing ring on the shoulders of his male coaches shows that.

I put my hat in the ring for circumcision gone wrong and noone wants to tell him!
And for those hard of comprehension- it's pure speculation.

One of the reports from last year said that a leaked medical report stated he had 5-ARD, same as Semenya.

That would make sense - a relatively common condition that scouts know to look for that causes only mis-sexing at birth, with no loss of male competitive advantage, and normal male appearance otherwise.

As noted here - found Jon Pike retweeting this while looking for the latest report about the lab report (which didn't mention DSDs).

x.com/zaelefty/status/1929371512567402774

There were photos of him as a child being raised as a girl so I think a DSD is the most likely explanation.

Timeline is not totally clear for either Semenya or Khelif, but it seems in both cases they were "raised as female" up to some age, but in both cases it seems like they had been discovered to be male, and assumed a male identity, prior to the scouting.

Indeed - that probably is necessary for the scouting - scouts would be asking around for "boys who used to be girls". Not just "girls", or "boys".

Thanks Necessary, yes the consensus at the time was 5-ARD (SRY?)

The sex testing conducted for sports events gives a very simplistic result it looks for the SRY gene which is only present on Y chromosome, so if found it shows that the person being tested has a Y chromosome which if they expected the result to be ‘female’ would show a discrepancy.

Based on that there would then be follow up testing to get to the bottom of any discrepancy. So the test here shows that Imane has male chromosomes, obviously if Imane believes themselves to be female that would be a discrepancy and should lead to more in depth testing that would start looking at Karotypes which would diagnose the specific DSD.

If that happened they would remove the testicles, I think. He's fully virilized so clearly still has testes. The absence of breasts rules out PAIS, CAIS, or post-gonadectomy exogenous œstrogen treatment.

The very strong likelihood is for DSD , because of the female passport.

The podcast The Real Science of Sport posits that one DSD is where pubertal masculinisation happens (my phrasing) except for the development of the male genitalia.

Therefore, in my opinion, what may have been an observation made by a midwife or doctor in rural Algeria at birth may continue to consciously be a ruse not corrected. I don’t think that’s a viable route these days and well done the IBF for standing firm.

I suspect it must be the same as the guavedocs where a penis grows at puberty.

Given that there are photos of Khelif wearing a groin protector of the shape used by male boxers...

Those used by female boxers are a different shape, for obvious anatomical reasons.

R.e. likelihood of it being DSD versus fraud, I don't know. You need to consider the rates in the population. So it's relevant that DSDs are extremely rare. Ones that have normal looking female genitalia at birth (not a micro penis and later go through male puberty) are extremely, extremely rare.

It's a bit like medical tests. A test with a false positive of 1% doesn't mean that if you test positive you have 99% chance of the disease. It depends on the disease - the rarer the disease the less likely you are to have it despite the positive result.

That's versus the likelihood of fraud, given the known £ million rewards. I don't know which is objectively more likely. R.e. fraud I include XY DSD that have been known since birth, like a micro penis and parents have chosen to bring them up as girl.

Who knows how hard it is to get a female passport in Algeria, or at what age Imane did, or if gender is verified or you just tick a box. Photos of a boy in a dress are pretty meaningless. You think there would be some publicly accessible birth record at least (which again wouldn't rule out family fraud as above).

As a related question: should Imane Khelif be investigated for fraud / assault against women? If Imane suddenly drops out after requiring biology tests, that is....genuinely not sure where I stand on that.

Although DSDs are extremely rare, affecting around 0.018% of the population, they are more prevalent in areas where consanguineous marriage is common.

And we know for a fact that corrupt talent scouts go out looking for boys with girl's names in these areas.

In the Rio Olympics, all three medal winners in the women's 800m were men with DSDs. We know for a fact that Semenya's DSD is 46 XY 5ARD. But it's highly probable that the other two medal winners had the same DSD because they were mistaken for female at birth but are phenotypically and karyotypically male.

The letter shared by Alan Abrahamson says 46XY karyotype.

I saw Sharron Davies being interviewed very recently and she said that Imane had been shown to be biologically male with a DSD that occurs exclusively in males.

The leaked report from the the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital in Paris in 2023 - which is quoted so often as the proof that 'everybody knew' - stated that IK had a disorder called 5-alpha reductase deficiency.
It also recorded that he does not have normal male genitalia, which never developed, even at puberty.

So if the 2023 medical report is accepted as proof of his maleness, it is also proof of IK having a DSD.

In the absence of more expert knowledge, males and females have often been distinguished on the simplistic but obvious basis of 'if they have a penis and testicles, they are male, if they don't, they are female'.

If a boy develops external male genitalia when they reach puberty, there'll obviously have to be a bit of a re-think.

If they go through puberty but don't develop external male genitalia, like IK, there won't be the same re-think, and these days there may well be a sports scout sniffing around with a chequebook and promises of glory.

I hate that we are discussing this in such detail, it goes against the grain, but if if if....
if many things had been done differently, and correctly, we wouldn't be in the position of having to argue in intimate detail about why a man should not be hitting a woman in a boxing ring😠

https://lecorrespondant.net/imane-khelif-au-dela-du-xy-un-dossier-medical-explosif/

Full medical report being released later this month by Djaffar Ait Aoudia of Le Correspondant, hopefully we'll be finding out for sure then.

There were photos of a girl. Was it identifiably him?

There’s no real proof either way, as far as I’m concerned. With the rules as they were, it was only a matter of time before a country decided it was worth a punt to get gold medals.

Don't men with 5-ard have less body hair? Khelif is always smooth faced.

I think most people who don’t think he should be competing in the women’s competition believe there is some DSD involved, which probably caused confusion at an early age. Hence the passport eligibility as you generally need a birth cert for that.

Bit of a weird thread given that the objections to him competing are predicated on the assumption that he has a male DSD.

I have no idea but either way he's a man and shouldn't be hitting women for sport.

I’m happy enough knowing that he is no longer able to compete in women’s sports. And fair play to him if he goes on to box in the men’s category in future (unlikely…).

They really are setting us up for a shock-horror-hold-the-front-page, aren't they?
But it's interesting that they say that their original revelation of the tests were taken up as meaning
“C’est un homme.”
XY = game over.
Sauf que ce n’est pas aussi simple.

I don't know what they mean by 'it's not that simple' - previously Le Correspondant seemed to be clear that it WAS that simple.
Maybe they are just introducing some new angles to attract readers.
We'll have to wait and see.