In the boxing ring, where corruption and distrust are for ever undefeated, the saddest story of the Paris Olympics snakes down a deranged path. Two women are accused of being men. The murky evidence amounts to Russian hearsay. Yet despite an untrustworthy source, the Games have been in a frenzy, igniting a culture war that has ruined the experience for two boxers whose abnormal size and power make them the perfect scary villains in a ghost story.

This is what those fearful of a transgender or intersex invasion in women’s sport have been screaming warnings about, right? A male posing as female pummelling a poor victim. It doesn’t matter whether Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu Ting truly failed legitimate gender-eligibility tests during the world championships last year. The hint of dishonesty was enough for the gender police to work themselves into a rage after Khelif forced Italian boxer Angela Carini to quit 46 seconds into a fight on Thursday. Before anyone could unpack the truth, complexities and conflicts of interest involved, the story had become a social-media firestorm.

On Friday, Lin stepped into the ring for a preliminary-round bout and won a unanimous decision over Sitora Turdibekova, of Uzbekistan. It was a depressing sight, seeing a throng of reporters on hand to chase after misinformation, trying to adjudicate a whisper. Between interviews in the mixed zone, I heard a media member talk aloud about Lin’s tall, 5ft 9in frame and “bulging muscles”, the latter of which was ridiculous because she is as lean as a basketball player.

“See?” the media member said. “That looks like a man to me.”

I walked away. The day had turned into a witch-hunt.

This all started because the International Boxing Association, an organisation that the International Olympic Committee decertified last year because of serial malfeasance, disqualified Khelif and Lin because they didn’t “meet eligibility rules” during the 2023 world championships. At the time, IBA president Umar Kremlev told a Russian news agency that the federation had “proven they have XY chromosomes”.

But three days before the disqualifications, Khelif had defeated a Russian boxer, Azalia Amineva, during the competition in New Delhi. The IBA, led by a Russian president, is as suspicious a source as it gets. When the IOC decided to cut ties with the boxing federation in June 2023, members approved the decision with a 69-1 vote. Allegations of bribes, match-fixing and election manipulation plague the IBA. The IOC now oversees boxing during the Olympics.

On Friday, IOC spokesman Mark Adams made a plea for the madness to stop.

“What I would urge is that we try to take the culture war out of this and actually address the issues and think about the individuals and the people concerned,” Adams said. “Real damage is being done by misinformation.”

When scrutinised, the IBA’s accusation is rickety. The organisation has yet to clarify what type of test it administered to the boxers. In a statement this week, it said the women weren’t given a testosterone examination. It referred to it as “a separate and recognised test”, but declared the results confidential.

History has taught us to trust the IOC at our own peril, but it is a beacon of truth compared with the IBA. Although its answers also weren’t specific, the IOC made a passionate defence of the boxers’ right to compete.

Adams addressed Khelif the morning after discussion of her fight went viral.

“The Algerian boxer was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female and has a female passport,” Adams said. “This is not a transgender case. There has been some confusion that this is a man fighting a woman. This is just not the case. On that, there is consensus. Scientifically, this is not a man fighting a woman.”

Later, he continued: “Are these athletes women? Yes, according to eligibility, according to their passports, according to their history.”

But in a society struggling to accept gender pluralism — let alone contemplate how to include athletes who don’t fit into our tidy male-female sports structure — it doesn’t take much to make people panic. When Khelif made quick work of Carini, the disingenuous were ready to pounce. The usual instigators chimed in: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, author J.K. Rowling. The boxers’ gender identity wasn’t as important to them as their appearance. If it simply looks unfair, that’s plenty effective.

Such a thought is chilling because, in the United States and throughout our supposedly sophisticated world, there is an embrace of potentially abusive policies that allow the gender of athletes to be challenged on mere assumption. In sport, extraordinary physical traits have been always considered a blessing, but what happens when others are permitted to discriminate openly against young girls and women who have done nothing wrong except have the nerve to be dominant?

For those who think transphobia is a myth, look at this latest boxing scandal of wicked imagination, where trans hate now extends to boxers who aren’t even trans. Evidently, it’s time to protect women’s boxers from … well, getting hit?

“All this controversy makes me sad,” Carini told Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport, according to BBC.

Many speculated Carini stopped fighting to protest Khelif. They took her decision not to shake hands with Khelif as evidence of disgust. When Carini spoke for herself, the real story was nothing like the pot-stirrers theorised.

“It wasn’t something I intended to do,” Carini said of not shaking hands. “Actually, I want to apologise to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke.”

If Carini gets to share space with Khelif again, she already knows how she would react. She would “embrace her”.

Yet some people want to protect this woman from another woman. It would be better if they ended the paternalistic charade and listened to Carini. Her moral compass is way more reliable.

• Jerry Brewer is a sports columnist at The Washington Post. He joined the Post in 2015 after more than eight years as a columnist with the Seattle Times