Imane Khelif of Algeria celebrates her victory against Anna Luca Hamori of Hungary in a women's 66kg quarterfinal Olympics bout Friday in Paris.

Once again, gender panic has reared its ugly head at the Olympics: This time, as a baseless “controversy” dogging Algerian female boxer Imane Khelif. While most people who don’t follow international boxing had never heard of her before her incredible August 1 match in Paris, in which her opponent withdrew after 46 seconds, the issue of Khelif’s gender identity quickly became a major talking point in mainstream media and even political campaign speeches here in the United States.

Let’s be clear, because even the Boston Globe got this basic fact wrong in a recent headline: Khelif isn’t transgender. She was born female and lives as a woman in a deeply conservative country where homosexuality is a crime, let alone gender transition. If she was indeed a trans woman, her life would be significantly and materially different from the one she enjoys now as a state-sponsored athlete. And despite claims by an ethically compromised and shunned boxing association that she and another boxer, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting, failed some unspecified gender test, no actual documentation has ever been produced to back them up.

Regardless of the truth, the anti-trans hate machine that rails against a massive woke conspiracy to turn young people transgender has, ironically, transformed Khelif into a........

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