The five members of the French Boxing Federation’s women’s team have been banned from competing in the World Boxing Championships in Liverpool, England, this week after they missed the deadline to submit genetic sex testing results.

In June, World Boxing announced a new policy requiring all athletes to undergo mandatory testing to verify their sex at birth.

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But as sports news site Calf Kicker notes, such sex testing has been prohibited in France since 1994, making it impossible for the French women’s team to get tested before arriving in the U.K. According to Voz, athletes Romane Moulai, Wassila Lkhadiri, Melissa Bounoua, Sthélyne Grosy, and Maëlys Richol submitted to testing when they arrived in the U.K., but their results were not available in time to meet the World Boxing Championships deadline.

In a statement, the French Boxing Federation expressed outrage over the decision to ban the team and blamed World Boxing for recommending a lab that was unable to deliver test results in time.

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“It is with stupefaction and indignation that the French team learned on Wednesday evening the French women’s boxing team would not be able to compete in the first World Championships organized by World Boxing,” the French Boxing Federation’s statement read, according to Calf Kicker. “Despite guarantees given to us by World Boxing, the laboratory which they recommended to us was not up to the task of delivering the results on time. As a result, our athletes, as well as those from other countries, have been caught in this trap and excluded.”

“After an entire year of work, we find ourselves thrown out not for sporting reasons but because of disastrous and unfair management,” Richol said. “It is extremely tough to absorb.”

However, in its own statement, World Boxing said that it had clearly communicated its new policy of verifying athletes’ chromosomal sex and that testing was the responsibility of each country’s national federation.

“We are sorry some boxers did not meet the deadline for results of testing but the rules and deadlines were published,” a World Boxing official said, according to Calf Kicker.

The testing controversy is yet another example of how laws and policies meant to exclude transgender people from sex-segregated competitions and spaces hurt all women. In sports, experts say that women from the Global South are especially targeted for public scrutiny about their gender, with accusations that are rooted in racist notions of femininity.

In its June statement, World Boxing indicated that the new policy was a direct response to controversy over cisgender Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s gold medal victory in the 2024 Paris Olympic Summer Games. While Khelif is cisgender and has never identified as either trans or intersex, speculation about her gender identity erupted after International Boxing Association (IBA) president Umar Kremlev told a Russian state news agency that Khelif had been found to have “XY chromosomes” and was one of two Olympic boxers who had “pretended to be women” and “tried to deceive their colleagues.”

An International Olympic Committee (IOC) spokesperson refuted Kremlev’s claims, and Khelif’s father even showed her birth certificate to Reuters to prove that she was not assigned male at birth. But that didn’t stop anti-trans trolls like J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk from amplifying Kremlev’s claims on social media, resulting in widespread online harassment of Khelif, including from the 2024 GOP presidential candidate and Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). The following August, Khelif filed a criminal complaint for “acts of aggravated cyber harassment” against Musk and Rowling.

World Boxing noted in June that it had specifically notified the Algerian Boxing Federation that Khelif would not be allowed to compete in its female events until she submitted to sex testing.

Earlier this week, Khelif appealed the ban to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. On Monday, the court rejected her request to temporarily lift the ban while her case proceeds.

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