A German male kickboxer who identifies as a woman seeks to compete in the women’s boxing division at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, according to a report from Reduxx.
Alice Linn, formerly Sebastian Linn, reportedly began training in Muay Thai kickboxing at 29 in Mannheim, Germany, in 2018. A year later, Reduxx reports that Linn started identifying as a woman.
During a 2021 interview with Rheinpfalz, Linn and the chairman of Muay That Vikings, Marc Wagner, said their sights set on Linn fighting in the women’s division at the 2028 Olympics.
Wagner has busied himself finding females for Linn to fight. Reduxx reports that most female fighters withdraw after learning that Linn is a male. One notable exception occurred in 2021 when Linn kneed an opponent in the stomach so hard that she forfeited.
Despite the vicious punishment his fighter dished out, Wagner claims Linn has no physical advantages over his female opponents. Instead, he argues that Linn is only “psychologically” stronger.
The growing interest in male fighters seeking to compete in Olympic women’s boxing should be no surprise. In the 2024 Paris Olympics, boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting competed in the women’s division despite being disqualified by the International Boxing Association (IBA) in 2023 from an international women’s boxing championship. IBA President Umar Kremlev told the Russian news agency Tass at the time that Lin and Khelif “have XY chromosomes,” the genetic makeup of a human male.
Both Khelif and Yu-Ting won gold at the Paris Olympics.
Some hope could loom on the horizon, while former Olympic President Thomas Bach frustrated many at the 2024 Games by saying there was no reliable scientific method for determining who is a man and who is a woman, Sebastian Coe, Bach’s potential replacement, said during the height of the Khelif controversy that women’s sports must be protected.
“If you don’t do that, no woman will ever win a sporting event again,” he said, adding: “[we must] preserve the women’s category.”
