Imane Khelif wins Olympic gold medal after all the controversy & transphobic hate

After battling through hate and discrimination throughout the entirety of the Summer Olympic Games, Imane Khelif has won her first Olympic medal — a gold.

Khelif has been one of the biggest names of the Paris Olympics and fought against two-time world champion Yang Liu of China in a hotly contested gold medal match that saw the two fighters matched in size, technique, and strength.

Khelif won the gold medal bout after winning all three rounds in a unanimous decision, fighting a great defensive fight and landing some impressive punches. Yang Liu was respectful and a great sport in losing.

Khelif is a cis woman boxer from Algeria who became the victim of racist and transphobic attacks when Umar Kremlev, the Russian president of the International Boxing Association, a discredited sporting body that was banned from the Olympics for corruption and fraud, said that she had failed an unspecified gender eligibility test at a tournament in 2023.

This led to TERFs attacking her online, calling her a man, a transgender woman, biologically male, and even a monster.

Characters like J.K. Rowling, JD Vance, and Logan and Jake Paul took to Twitter to attack Khelif, saying that her competing in women's boxing summed "up our new men's rights movement" and was "sickening, "a travesty," and "wrong and dangerous."

The International Olympic Committee has stood strong behind Khelif through the entire games, saying "the Algerian boxer was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport. This is not a transgender case. There has been some confusion that somehow it's a man fighting a woman. This is just not the case, scientifically. On that, there is consensus. Scientifically, this is not a man fighting a woman. I think we need to kind of get that out."

The IOC also said that Khelif, and another boxer, Lin Yu Ting of Taiwan, "were the victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA" without any due process and that "the current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure."

To be clear, Khelif has never identifed as trans or intersex. Even some of Khelif's opponents got in on the hate against her, however, none of them could beat her.

Congrats to Khelif for rising above the hate and taking home gold!