Former UFC champion Israel Adesanya has apologized to Olympian Imane Khelif for calling her a biological man.
25-year-old Algerian boxer Imane Khelif has stirred up controversy at the Olympics, with some people claiming she’s a man or a transgender athlete competing against women. However, both Imane’s team and the International Olympics Committee have provided clear evidence showing that she is indeed a woman, who has a rare genetic condition called Swyer syndrome, where a person has one X and one Y chromosome (usually found in males) but develops female reproductive structures.
Adesanya was among the many UFC fighters who mistakenly identified Khelif as transgender, tweeting, “Men should not be boxing women. LOL, he couldn’t even finish her. Anyway, People > politics.”
Although the tweet remains up, Adesanya has since admitted that he was wrong to make such public accusations.
In a recent interview with The Rock Radio Station, the former UFC middleweight champ formally apologized to Khelif.
“From now on, I will leave women’s fights to women,” Adesanya said. “I tried to speak up about it and apparently, I got it wrong, a lot of people got it wrong, there was misinformation. I spoke up about it because I don’t like to get triggered, but when something triggers me, I’m a fighter and I saw that I’m like, ‘What?’ And I saw the news or the articles speaking on it, ‘Why they letting a trans person [in]?’ Then I find out later, okay, she wasn’t actually trans…
“So, to the lady, my bad. I got that wrong. But for me, still is that — all this grey area, even now, they let some pedo guy compete. Wait, so what? He served his time, cool, but you’re still going to let him compete in the Olympics and that goes against the guidelines of the Olympics’ rules … anyway, to the lady, the boxer, I am sorry. I didn’t understand what was going on.”
What do you make of Israel Adesanya’s remarks?
