If you want to know why Reem Alsalem is so resolute in upholding women’s rights to their own sports and their own spaces, the answer lies deep in her past. It long predates her appointment in 2021 as the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, or her use of this role to highlight the manifest injustice of biologically male boxers winning Olympic gold medals against women. It can be found instead in what happened to her once in hospital.

“As a woman, I appreciate – and I very much feel this on an intrinsic, core level – the need for female-only spaces in certain circumstances,” she explains. “The fact is that we are constantly put in situations where male predators want to abuse access to our spaces. When I underwent surgery once in a country, I woke up from anaesthesia to find a male nurse groping my breasts.”

It is a shocking revelation, although Alsalem relates it with equanimity. The assault was not the only horror of her personal experience: she also discloses that she was twice sexually harassed as a child. Three separate incidents, in three different countries that she chooses not to name, constitute a cumulative trauma that she has needed time to absorb.

“It does mark you,” she reflects. “And it occurs because you’re a woman in a vulnerable situation. I feel very lucky that I haven’t been raped. In the case of the hospital, I didn’t report the incident, I wanted to move on. It’s a regret. I wish I had reported it, because I’m sure this male nurse has done the same to others. But it speaks to how many other victims feel. Shame’s not quite the right word. I just didn’t want to draw attention to it.”

Alsalem is, by any measure, one of the most important and influential figures in pushing back against the scandal of athletes born male being allowed into women’s sport by gutless governing bodies.

Covering the chaos of this summer’s Olympic boxing in Paris – where two fighters, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, won gold medals as women despite their earlier sex tests revealing the presence of male chromosomes – I remember being struck by both the speed and clarity of her intervention.

No sooner had Angela Carini withdrawn from her bout against Khelif after just 46 seconds, tearfully describing how she had never been punched so hard, than Alsalem sent a message to me on X, decrying the International Olympic Committee for exposing the Italian and other female boxers to “physical and psychological violence based on their sex”.

Two months on, her anger at the spectacle has scarcely relented, as she castigates the IOC for putting women in a position where they were not even sure of the sex of their opponents. And all this in a lethal sport where men have been shown to punch, on average, 2.6 times harder than women.

“It’s the anxiety that it creates,” she says, during an hour over coffee in London. “It’s the impact of coming into a sport not knowing who you are engaging with. Is it male? Is it female? Am I at an inherent disadvantage? It throws women off, in addition to everything else we know can happen.”

‘If we do away with categories, female sport becomes meaningless’

Now, at least, her position as a direct adviser to the UN enables her to put her acute frustration to productive use. This week, she has delivered a 24-page report to the UN General Assembly in New York, calling for the return of mandatory sex testing to ensure that women’s sport is accessible exclusively to those born female. “There are circumstances in which sex screenings are necessary, legitimate and proportional to ensure fairness and safety in sports,” she writes.

The Olympic titles for Khelif and Lin substantiate this argument. And yet the scale of the problem that needs to be addressed extends much further than boxing. Alsalem’s report illustrates how a pattern of institutional spinelessness has led to more than 600 female athletes around the world losing 890 medals in 29 different sports.

“We have categories for a reason,” she says. “And if we do away with them, then potentially female sport becomes meaningless. The impact that biology has on performance is the best illustration that sex is real. It’s not some lofty idea. It is very real in international law, too: all the major treaties that bind states together oblige you not to discriminate based on sex.”

Not that the IOC appear to care, with president Thomas Bach blithely declaring that womanhood can be determined by having an ‘F’ in your passport. Fortunately, Alsalem has few qualms about leading the pushback. Slight of stature but stout of temperament, she is prepared to weather even the fiercest resistance to raise the alarm at the highest levels of global diplomacy.

A Jordanian national born in Egypt, she holds a master’s from Oxford in human rights law and speaks five languages, even if she admits her Arabic has suffered from living in Europe so long.

Her passion for sport is profound, rooted in a fascination as a young woman with karate. I ask how it ever reached the point where sports organisations appear more interested in placating the gender lobby than in observing the law. Take football, for example: while the 2010 Equality Act is perfectly clear that women are entitled to organise female-only sport for reasons of safety and fairness, over 50 male players have been approved to play in women’s leagues in England.

‘I don’t see enough men speaking out’

“It’s a good question,” she says. “Especially in a country where this is the law. The law has to be respected by everybody, including sports associations. To be frank, I think men in sport have a role to play. They have spent their entire careers competing to win, and they understand it is so grossly unfair to be denied that. But I don’t see enough men speaking out, rallying to support their colleagues. I find that such a pity.”

Alsalem does not temper her words on other maelstroms raging across sport. She is unequivocal in denouncing the sight of Afghanistan’s men still playing cricket at a time when the Taliban is barring women from singing or even speaking in public. “It should not be allowed. The Afghan team and government should know that there are consequences for banning their women from participating. This should not be treated as business as usual.”

It is in the fight for a level playing field that Alsalem displays the most indefatigable commitment. The path has rarely been smooth: indeed, she shows me correspondence from trans activists hell-bent on disrupting her latest UN appearance. But the barbs, for the most part, bounce right off her.

“I’m independent,” she says. “I’m not bound by the views of any entity. I deliberately choose to engage on the complex issues of our times. Inevitably, you will not please everyone. That’s not my job, though. That’s not what’s required.”

Women in sport, she acknowledges, risk an “astonishing” barrage of abuse merely for asserting the immutable truths of biology. And yet with a resolve forged in her own harrowing ordeals, Alsalem continues undeterred, an often lone voice at the UN but dauntless in her determination to bring about the change she seeks.