UFC veteran follows up Tristan Tate in reacting to IBA's Paris press conference on Imane Khelif and Lin Yu Ting
Different sporting and social media personalities are getting behind the International Boxing Association (IBA) and their recent statement on the gender debate regarding Olympic boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu Ting.
The IBA recently conducted a press conference in Paris, setting the record straight that neither Khelif nor Lin are biological females. This assessment was backed by their former Medical Committee Chair Dr. Ioannis Filippatos, who has been a specialist in obstetrics-gynecology, general surgery, and IVF (in vitro fertilization) for three decades.
Various personalities jumped the gun in support of the IBA, including polarizing social media personality Tristan Tate, brother of Andrew Tate. He was then followed by former UFC welterweight Jake Shields, who shared the video of the presser on X, with the caption:
"As I’ve been saying those two boxers in the Olympics are men"
IBA's Dr. Filippatos on Imane Khelif and Lin Yu Ting: "These boxers are male"
To understand the context of what Jake Shields said about the IBA's statement, it pays to learn what Dr. Filippatos said in the presser. The former IBA chair of the Medical Committee disagreed with Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, on the science that proves Imane Khelif and Lin Yu Ting's genders.
Dr. Filippatos said:
"For me, [the] science is not poor. Medicine is knowledge, it is not opinion ... I know who is woman and man...One passport can give to us the opportunity to be men, and, tomorrow when I go back to Athens, I can go to my government and change my name from Ioannis to Ionnia. That means I am a woman tomorrow? Please. The nature and the biological world do not change."
When pressed by members of the media to be more clear on his assessment of Khelif and Yu Ting's gender, Dr. Filippatos said:
"I [tried] to say that the medical results, the blood result looks and says, the laboratories, that these boxers [are] male."