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.

Men with 5 ARD are born with ambiguous genitalia, but usually go through a normal male puberty. It's at this point their sex becomes obvious, hence the colloquial name for the condition 'balls at 11'.

While some extremely rare DSDs may mean sex is ambiguous, for a 5ARD condition, it isnt.

and culturally probably told she was ugly as let’s be honest she looks manly.

"She" looks manly as he's a man. Not an in between. A man with a disorder but a man nonetheless.

He's not ugly either. His cheating and woman beating is ugly but he's a handsome man physically.

'Some' differences of sex development are very complicated. And those DSDs are generally the ones where someone's body doesn't process the testosterone that the body is producing from their testes or their genetic coding is male but they don't have testes at all.

Khelif does not have one of those DSDs. You speak about 'lumping' people together when it is unfair, what is it about a person potentially living with 5ARD where they do process the testosterone their own body produces that is directly comparative with a person with a condition where their cells are genetically coded as male yet their body doesn't have testes to produce testosterone at all?

Are you also assuming that Khelif had unambiguous female genitalia at birth and that medical doctors in that part of Algeria had no understanding of the condition and that Khelif's parents didn't understand that there was a possibility that their little girl was in fact a little boy?

Yes it must be difficult. But not so difficult that some men spy an opportunity to exploit it to their own personal advancement and to the detriment of women. So anyone who is confirmed to be a man should be treated as such, in name and in practice. No fear or favour, no stratification of who “deserves” female pronouns and who doesn’t, because that’s a subjective matter. Keep it objective, treat them all the same, then there’s never any doubt. Huge swathes of the population still think Khelif and Semenya are women due to the simple fact everything written about them uses “she” and “her”. It’s deceptive.

I disagree tbh @NotBadConsidering, not about what happened in the boxing which was completely unfair and unsafe, but in general terms. DSDs can sometimes be very complex, and also they may not be recognised early (depending on the condition, the time, the place). Complex medical conditions need a individualised, nuanced approach.

I think I’ve been clear on this thread that all DSDs should be considered at the level of the individual.
ETA I’m not making any assumptions about IK’s upbringing.

ThatBlackCat He doesn't wear a hijab - all the women in his country do.

No they don't. Algeria isn't like Iran where you'll be arrested by the Modesty Police if you don't wear your hijab, or don't wear it in the right way. And then possibly beaten up or killed. Some Algerian women wear the hijab, some don't; some were traditional clothes, some wear jeans and t-shirts.
Algerian sportswomen wear whatever gear is appropriate to their sport.
Here is a photo of the Algerian women's gymnastic team wearing gym gear; not a hijab in sight. They are the official, national team of Algerian.

IK not wearing a hijab is irrelevant. The proof that he is a man is the results of the medical tests that show that IK has a DSD which is specific to males.

I tend to agree with some of what Obeseandashamed says - I'm prepared to believe that IK was wrongly identified as female at birth because of his DSD, and brought up as a girl. Having a strong girl in the family is no bad thing in tradition rural communities, as I remember from my childhood when women did a lot of hard work around the farms. So the little oddball tomboy who played football with the boys was possibly tolerated as just that, a little oddball.
I have some sympathy, having been a little oddball tomboy myself

I don't know at what point IK learnt he was male not female. There was a huge concerted effort, involving everybody from the government down to his coaches, to maintain the fiction that he was female, because he was a national sporting hero[ine] who was going to bring Olympic Gold to his country.

Outside of the ring IK is a national figure, and appears as a woman, and an example to Algerian girls to become involved in sport. He was also made a UNICEF ambassador 'ambassadrice', woman ambassador, alongside a male ambassador.

Whatever his backstory is, it is multifaceted and probably more complicated than some people think. Just as Algerian society is multifaceted and more complicated than some people obviously think..

But the bottom line is that he, and everybody else, know now that he is male and should not take part in women's sports, full stop.

Complex medical conditions need a individualised, nuanced approach.

And people who deal with them personally as a medical patient can do that.

The rest of us can call men men. Otherwise the veil of deceit will continue if everyone keeps calling Khelif “she”. It’s not true is it? You’re asking people to lie. To say “I know things must be hard for you, so I’ll lie for you.”

Thomas Bach, the IOC President, lied in a press conference. So did the rest of the IOC. Journalists have lied to the population.

You can do what you like. But no one can make the rest of us complicit in the lie.

In the unlikely event that Khelif is on here 👋 If the misgendering is too much, petal, try Netmums 😊

The only misgendering is those calling him her and she.

I like how the be kinders always skip over the part where the poor disrespected "woman" has made a living out of punching women in the face knowing full well they are male and have all the physical advantages over females that go along with it.

I keep thinking of how these sentences work to show why using preferred language that is not accurately based on a person's sex category causes harm.

She should not be competing in the female sports category, she is not a female athlete.

vs.

He should not be competing in the female sports category, he is not a female athlete.

Whenever people use these demanded pronouns, the confusion continues. The confusion around Semenya and Mboma and others continues even now.

"She is a woman with high levels of naturally produced testosterone."

How many times have we seen this sentence used on this site and even by a country's sports ministers? It is deceptive. Because 'she' is not a 'woman' in sentences when the person is referring to a male person.

Too often 'respect' is mentioned as a reason that we should use this 'preferred' language. Where is the respect for the female athletes that have been harmed by the male athletes in question? The respect really seems to only go one way. It is like the demand that women need to address their abusers in court using the abuser's preferred pronouns in that the respect is not extended to the female people who have been harmed, only towards the male person.

If you have a personal issue with using clear, precise and accurate language around male people who are competing in female sports categories, you have also acknowledge that other people will choose to use the language they feel accurately communicates the issue. You do, however, need to acknowledge that using 'preferred' language contributes to the continuation of confusion and misinformation.

He is a man. If you think clear, neutral, correct language is nasty, that's quite honestly your problem. He's a man, I'm a woman, my son is a boy, my daughter is a girl, my cat is a cat, my house is a house and my guitar is a guitar.

He was not born female, that's the point. This is the lying Newspeak we are no longer accepting. I don't think he could even have been socialised as a female given his entitlement and wish to force his lie on the world, to women's detriment and danger, to suit him.

You're trying crappy linguistic slight of hand to get in references to him as female and you're angry because it's not working. That's why you're now trying to tell us we are nasty and disrespectful for calling him a man, because you can't claim that it isn't accurate. And even if that were true, that it is morally wrong to call a man a man,which it isn't, it doesn't matter and we don't care. It is entirely factually accurate and it matters.You don't care about the nastiness and disrespect of forcing women to suffer for this lie, so why are you the moral arbiter?

Words mean things and to mean one thing, that must not mean other things. He's a man.

You've got to love the cognitive dissonance of "He shouldn't be in women's sports but it's so disrespectful and nasty to articulate why!"

Go on. Why shouldn't he be in women's sports? What disqualifies him? If he's a female woman, and it's so morally repugnant to say otherwise, why shouldn't he be there?

"She is a woman with high levels of naturally produced testosterone."

...Is a deceitful use of language. There care conditions affecting females that cause high levels of testosterone. These women are not men.

Hopefully I am also right in saying that the levels of T considered to be high in a female come nowhere close to the standard level of T a male would produce?

Here's a graph showing testosterone levels by sex

Individuals with 5-ARD can be born with unambiguously female-looking genitals, and only a sub-group develop external male genitals at puberty. My guess is that Khelif (still) has female-looking genitals, because no promoter would otherwise take on the constant risk of being rumbled by a genital inspection.

In the UK she would be legally biologically female unless she chose to correct her birth registration with retroactive effect (not the same as a GRC), but she could still legally be excluded from Schedule 3 women's services for looking male, as explained in the SC ruling.

And obviously anyone who is gonadally male and T-sensitive should not compete with women.

We can't know what really happened, or who knew what when. But even in the UK baby 'girls' are sometimes born who don't get diagnosed with 5-ARD until puberty. If diagnosed early they are (re)registered and raised as boys, which will presumably become commoner now that there is an increase in routine perinatal genetic testing.

We can't know what really happened, or who knew what when.

Well we can, because the article linked earlier recounts it all: how Khelif noted male puberty changes around the age of 15-16 when he gave his medical history. So he knew then, and everyone else knew since. Everyone knew for sure with the tests done in 2023.

If you’re referring to me as one of the bekinders, I don’t think it’s okay to simply ignore that I said repeatedly I was speaking about DSDs in general and that no-one with a male puberty should take part in women’s sport. And that taking part in boxing in particular is dangerous as well as unfair.

I posted this already unthread but it was a while ago so I’ll say it again:
Medical guidance currently looks something like this.
Expert opinion has shifted [from being guided by external genitalia in the past] to understanding that chromosomal, neural, hormonal, psychological, and behavioral factors can all have an influence on an individual.
Many experts now urge delaying definitive surgery for as long as is healthy, and ideally involve the child in the decision (Medlineplus).
It is…likely that the practice of assigning sex, especially in those cases where sex assignment is unclear on expert assessment, will continue to show temporal, social and geographical variations. It is imperative that clinical data for rare conditions such as these are collected in a standardized format and shared through a common registry so that any evidence that is used for future shifts in practice has a stronger foundation than that which is currently available
(J Clin Res Pediatr Endocrinol 2017, my bold)

Note the use of the word assign, a word pps declared impossible.

Assumptions help nobody. People are assuming they know enough about these conditions to judge and make definitive decisions about a person with a DSD’s sex when, in reality, medical experts say otherwise.

(Again, I am not speaking of IK’s case specifically. IK should not have been boxing with women.)

I hate discussing another human being's personal details like this, but it has been forced upon us, and it is relevant:

The leaked medical details about IK state that he does not have normal external male genitalia, but does have internal testes. So he did not become obviously male at puberty, as can sometimes happen.
It is entirely likely that in the absence of male genitalia, he was assume to be a girl at birth, and brought up as such.

Earlier footage of him shows him to have been soft-spoken and retiring in manner - not the blokey cool dude posturing we've seen from Semenya.

As his boxing career progressed he [a] got older and [b] bulked up to make higher weight categories, both of which emphasised his male physique, but I've seen earlier photos and video of him where he could have been seen as female, when he was younger and slighter.

It was this 'female-presenting' persona that became the national sporting hero, UNICEF 'ambassadrice' for children etc.

At what point he knew he was male, and it became blatant cheating, I do not know.

None of this in any way detracts from the fact that IK is male, and should not compete in women's sports.

I think if someone with male chromosomes has been raised as a girl because of a DSD it should be up to them and no-one else as to how they identify and what pronouns they use.

However, if they have gone through male puberty they should not be competing in women’s sports.

I don’t think that’s a very unclear position to have.

@Obeseandashamed please read this:

fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/

That is also my position (and that of UK law). We don't need to know the medical history, only that this person is gonadally male and T-sensitive.

should be up to them and no-one else as to how they identify and what pronouns they use.

They can identify however they want and use whatever pronouns they want, but why does that mean the rest of us have to accept the falsehood of their identity or use wrong sex pronouns when we talk about them?

I don’t think it’s a false identity when they were raised as female.

Expert opinion has shifted…to understanding that chromosomal, neural, hormonal, psychological, and behavioral factors can all have an influence on an individual.

But it doesn’t matter how he was raised. It doesn’t matter

that chromosomal, neural, hormonal, psychological, and behavioral factors can all have an influence on an individual.

because we know now he has 5-ARD and is a man. So he can claim that other factors have had an influence on him, but the fact remains he is a biological male, a man with underdeveloped external genitalia. No amount of interpretation of other influencing factors changes that fact. It was raising him as female in the first place that was false.

Again, why do the rest of us have to comply with perpetuating something that isn’t true?