Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s recent Olympic victory has been overshadowed by the cries of an enraged conservative media machine. Khelif won the women’s welterweight division at the 2024 Paris Olympics. But in the process, a number of public figures with enormous social media followings questioned her gender, including J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, and several others in the conservative media space.
Now Khelif is filing a cyberbullying lawsuit against them all.
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The uproar began when Khelif’s first Olympic opponent, Angela Carini, from Italy, withdrew from their fight, leading to baseless accusations that Khelif had an unfair advantage since she is transgender—which she is not. Despite Khelif’s identification as female and Algeria’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws that likely would not have allowed a transgender person to compete in the first place, conservative media figures insisted on spreading misinformation that she was a man.
The lawsuit was filed against an unspecified “X” rather than against a particular defendant (and not the company formerly known as Twitter), in order to allow for a broad, flexible investigation under French law. According to Khelif’s lawyer, the lawsuit does specifically name Rowling and Musk, though. French authorities are investigating the case. Exactly how substantial the repercussions will be remains to be seen, if any. The case faces an uphill battle, as anyone who has seen 2023’s Anatomy of a Fall already has a pretty good primer on how odd the French legal system can be.
Khelif and another Olympic fighter, Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, were previously barred from the 2023 world championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA) following gender eligibility testing that Olympics officials called” “so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with it.” The International Olympic Committee (IOC) strongly supported both boxers’ participation in the Paris Olympics, explicitly stating that they are women and not transgender.
The case is shaping up to be a catchall of hot-button culture war issues revolving around trans and cisgender identities in sports, and public figures using their immense power and influence on social media platforms to amplify misinformation and transphobia. Despite the uproar, Khelif still won a gold medal. Now she’ll try to score an even bigger victory against the conservative media outrage machine.
