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As a woman, I celebrated the Paris Games’ commitment to gender equality with pride but also with unease.

It is encouraging that female athletes are equally represented at the Games. Even better is that the schedule alternates between women’s and men’s competitions, rather than restricting the majority of women’s competitions to the morning hours. Women are elite athletes, and not just in beach volleyball.

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But if the witch hunt in boxing has made one thing clear, it is that there is still a long way to go on the road to equality.

Much has been said, much of it uninformed, about the controversy that engulfed Algerian welterweight Imane Khelif after she won her first Olympic fight in 46 seconds, about how long anti-trans activists waited before baselessly calling her a man.

Khelif is not trans. But that didn’t stop Elon Musk from taking a swipe, amplifying a post by swimmer and right-wing podcaster Riley Gaines, who tweeted, “Men don’t belong in women’s sports.” Gaines went on to air her grievances on Fox News, where a number of commentators, who were not subjected to any kind of fact-checking, continued the attack. JK Rowling – a novelist with a vivid imagination – characterized Khelif as a smug man “who takes pleasure in the plight of a woman he just punched in the head.”

This smear campaign is completely baseless. No credible evidence has been provided to support these claims. The only source of these allegations is the completely discredited International Boxing Federation (IBA), an institution so blatantly corrupt that it has been permanently banned from the Olympic Games.

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Last year, in the middle of the World Cup, the IBA claimed that Algeria’s Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting had failed undisclosed aptitude tests, nullifying Khelif’s victory over a Russian competitor. Skepticism about the timing and motive from an organization with links to the Kremlin was compounded by a complete lack of transparency about what kind of tests the IBA conducted.

The IOC has categorically confirmed the eligibility of both competitors, confirming that they were born female, are travelling on women’s passports and have competed their entire careers as women. The organisation abandoned blanket gender testing in 1999 after a checkered history of invasive and unreliable testing, largely based on the prejudice that some sports were simply unfeminine. Over the years, female Olympic athletes have been required to undergo gynecological examinations, stripped in front of a panel of doctors and undergo chromosome testing to prove they were “real” women.

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Today, the IOC relies on the international athletics federations that govern each sport to determine eligibility. The result is a patchwork of inclusion that allows Olympic organizers to distance themselves from those who are left out.

The fact is that there is a strict binary in the Olympic competition categories for men and women, which simply does not apply to sex and gender.

There are obviously good reasons to separate competition between male and female elite athletes. Male puberty has a direct impact on muscle mass and aerobic capacity and brings advantages in terms of strength, speed and endurance. Without this advantage, women have no chance in almost any sport.

However, when we want to create a fair playing field for cisgender women, we often leave no room for athletes who don’t fit neatly into the binary. Elite athletes with differential sex development (DSD), like long-distance runner Caster Semenya, may naturally have high testosterone or XY chromosomes. Trans and nonbinary athletes also deserve a place to excel without being pilloried for their identities.

In a place of sporting excellence without prejudice, there is no place for bullying.

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