‘5 Minutes of Nonsense’: Pat McAfee Under Fire for Falsely Claiming Women’s Boxer Was ‘Deemed a Male’ Amid Olympic Controversy

Ahmad Austin Jr.Aug 2nd, 2024, 12:07 pm
 

Pat McAfee faced harsh criticism online Thursday for falsely stating a women’s boxer was “deemed a male” following her controversial win in the Olympics.

At the 2024 games in Paris, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif found herself at the center of the transgender debate when she beat Italy’s Angela Carini in just 46 seconds. Carini quit after taking just a single punch from Khelif, later saying she’d never been hit with such force before.

Immediately after the match, multiple outlets and social media users framed it as if Khelif was a transgender woman who defeated someone who was born a woman. Khelif was previously ruled ineligible to compete by the International Boxing Association for having XY chromosomes. She was also found to have elevated levels of testosterone.

The International Olympic Committee, however, deemed her eligible. The test results stem from the fact that Khelif has a condition known as differences of sex development (DSD), which results in XY chromosomes and higher testosterone levels. Despite this condition, Khelif was born a female and has identified as one her entire life. At birth, she was observed to have female genitalia.

That research was something that McAfee admitted he hadn’t done before chiming in on the subject.

“I haven’t done enough research,” he said on The Pat McAfee Show. “I saw that the International Boxing Association deemed a couple of the boxers that are in the the Olympics — still in the Olympics — not eligible to box in the women’s boxing because they too much testosterone or they were deemed a male, I believe, from the XY chromosome, from the research that I’ve done.”

During the five-minute segment, McAfee said he didn’t understand “how we got to this point” and called it “unfair” that Carini had to face someone who, by all accounts, was born a woman and still identifies as a woman.

Many took to social media to call him out for the comments. Some even took it a step further by blaming ESPN for adding him to its lineup of daily programming.

Watch above via ESPN.

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