No sooner had Angela Carini withdrawn from her bout against Khelif after just 46 seconds, tearfully describing how she had never been punched so hard, than Alsalem sent a message to me on X, decrying the International Olympic Committee for exposing the Italian and other female boxers to “physical and psychological violence based on their sex”.
Two months on, her anger at the spectacle has scarcely relented, as she castigates the IOC for putting women in a position where they were not even sure of the sex of their opponents. And all this in a lethal sport where men have been shown to punch, on average, 2.6 times harder than women.
“It’s the anxiety that it creates,” she says, during an hour over coffee in London. “It’s the impact of coming into a sport not knowing who you are engaging with. Is it male? Is it female? Am I at an inherent disadvantage? It throws women off, in addition to everything else we know can happen.”
‘If we do away with categories female sport becomes meaningless’
Now, at least, her position as a direct adviser to the UN enables her to put her acute frustration to productive use. This week, she has delivered a 24-page report to the UN General Assembly in New York, calling for the return of mandatory sex testing to ensure that women’s sport is accessible exclusively to those born female. “There are circumstances in which sex screenings are necessary, legitimate and proportional to ensure fairness and safety in sports,” she writes.
The Olympic titles for Khelif and Lin substantiate this argument. And yet the scale of the problem that needs to be addressed extends much further than boxing. Alsalem’s report illustrates how a pattern of institutional spinelessness has led to more than 600 female athletes around the world losing 890 medals in 29 different sports.
“We have categories for a reason,” she says. “And if we do away with them, then potentially female sport becomes meaningless. The impact that biology has on performance is the best illustration that sex is real. It’s not some lofty idea. It is very real in international law, too: all the major treaties that bind states together oblige you not to discriminate based on sex.”
Not that the IOC appear to care, with president Thomas Bach blithely declaring that womanhood can be determined by having an ‘F’ in your passport. Fortunately, Alsalem has few qualms about leading the pushback. Slight of stature but stout of temperament, she is prepared to weather even the fiercest resistance to raise the alarm at the highest levels of global diplomacy.