Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer, is a woman. So what's the problem?

The Olympics are reeling after Khelif's foe, Angela Carini, quit after 46 seconds in the ring with the cisgender fighter. It's complicated, nuanced, layered. Here's my view:

So I woke up Thursday morning, made a cup of coffee, perused X and prepared to go on a radio show with host Jim Coyle. And like a lot of observers, I saw the story of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, the competitor who forced an Italian foe to quit after 46 seconds, saying she’d never been punched so hard in her life.

But as is true in most cases, what I saw on the internet was both inaccurate and lacking context. What I saw was a bunch of right wing culture warriors try to insist Khelif was, in fact, a man, a transgender man who had transitioned to the male side and was now in the business of beating the hell out of biological females. Some called it domestic abuse. Others called for a boycott. The usual nonsense.

But, armed with partial information, I stupidly got out over my skis and insisted it was wrong for a transgender athlete to be competing in women’s sports, especially a combat sport like boxing. And I still feel that way. (I am not a transphobe; I just believe in protecting women and the sanctity of women’s sports.) But at that point, I didn’t know all the facts.

Again, she is cisgender, a person who deals with DSD (differences in sex development, a rare condition meaning a person’s sex development is different from most people). A woman with DSD has female body parts but has higher levels of testosterone and an XY (male) chromosome, in certain cases. If you want to get upset about transgender athletes, here’s the number of them competing in this year’s Olympics:

Zero.

So, should Khelif be allowed out there to fight in the women’s division?