Non è Giusto
THE DESTRUCTION OF WOMEN’S BOXING AT THE PARIS OLYMPICS 2024
BY DUSTY MASTERSON
I have been covering the farce of two men being allowed to take part in the women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics despite being banned from the World Boxing Championships last year, since Update 411. I thought it might help readers if I did a compilation of all the posts so that they are all in one place , so here you go. This is in two parts. Here is the second part from Update 416 onwards.
And don’t forget:
#XX
#SaveWomensSport
Ok, here we go.
With regard to quoted pieces from substacks, for the full pieces please refer back to the links in the original update.
Update 416
The Mess featured this today:
I love the double X sign protest from Svetlana Stalena!
Tom Morgan and Thomas Jeffreys in The Telegraph ( Opponent of gender-row boxer Lin Yu-ting protests after suffering defeat 04 August) report:
Another beaten opponent of one of the two boxers who failed sex tests performed a double X-sign protest in the ring after being denied an Olympic medal.
Controversy-engulfed Lin Yu-ting and Imane Khelif are now guaranteed at least bronze in Paris after winning their bouts on consecutive days.
As Lin swept into her semi-final just as easily as Khelif had done the night before, losing Bulgarian opponent Svetlana Staneva pulled off her gloves, pointed to herself and made a double-tap X symbol with her fingers. It was an apparent reference to her female chromosomes and she also appeared to be shouting “no, no” after the fight. No explanation or further context was offered as she then, clearly upset, swept past journalists afterwards without answering a single question.
Before the gesture, this morning’s bout at a three-quarters-full Paris Nord Arena had been nothing like the tinderbox scenes of Khelif’s fight the night before. There had been raucous scenes as 600 French-Algerians showed up to rally behind Khelif, who was left crying “I am a woman”.
Lin, the runaway favourite to claim gold, does not speak any English and instead spoke to Taiwanese media, who did not ask about the furore. She [HE!] is understood to have told them she [HE!] deleted her [HIS!] social-media accounts before even setting off for Paris.
Lin Yu-ting (left) beat Svetlana Staneva following the unanimous points decision - AP/John Locher
Instead, Staneva’s coach was the only figure willing to address the controversy of these Games, questioning with some nuance whether the system was fit for purpose after the Taiwanese easily won her bout. “I am not a medical person so I shouldn’t say if Lin should or should not compete,” Borislav Georgiev told the BBC. “But when the test shows that he or she has the Y chromosome she should not be here.”
The full article is here:
Here is the XX sign:
https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/1820056192426602860
For what I think is the definitive explanation ( just in case you need it!!!!) of why the inclusion of these two men in women’s boxing at the Olympic is wrong, here is Doriane Lambelet Coleman in Quillette:
XY Athletes in Women’s Olympic Boxing: The Paris 2024 Controversy Explained
The historical, political, and medical context of the Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting cases.
3 Aug 2024
With the return of the Olympics, it’s time for another predictable global uproar about XY athletes competing in the female category. This is now a century-old problem in elite sport that we’ve somehow not yet managed to solve in a uniform way. The Paris 2024 iteration of this debate is arguably the most explosive ever due to a confluence of at least three factors:
This time around, the athletes are boxers not runners, which means they’re going to be punching their competitors. Physical safety and gender norms, not just competitive fairness, are front-and-centre in people’s minds.
After the debates about Lia Thomas and Caster Semenya (which I discussed in an essay for Quillette in 2019), the public knows a lot more—though still not enough—about the two categories of XY athletes who might be included in female competition: transwomen like Thomas and people like Semenya with disorders or differences of sex development (DSD). DSD are also sometimes called intersex conditions or sex variations by those who prefer non-medical terms.
The domestic culture wars around sex and gender have since heated up significantly to become a global battle, with LGBTQI-rights organisations and their allies in the international human-rights community arguing that sex isn’t real or doesn’t matter—either at all or as much as gender identity. Authoritarian regimes led by the Kremlin, meanwhile, describe gender diversity as a harbinger of the end of Western civilisation.
Social media has amplified all of this to the point that the story of the moment, about a boxer from Algeria and another from Taiwan, is top of the news worldwide. Provocative visuals—ubiquitous in boxing—elicit highly emotional responses from some, while others sell their misleading or uninformed political wares (“There’s no evidence these fighters are not cis women!”).
In what follows, I offer a primer on the underlying facts so that readers can follow the story as it unfolds and understand its historical, medical, and political context.
Who are the boxers at the heart of the current storm?
Imane Khelif is a 25-year-old welterweight from Algeria. Lin Yu-ting is a 28-year-old featherweight from Taiwan. Both have medalled at previous world championships in the female category, and both are participating in their second Olympic Games having already competed in Tokyo.
Why is their eligibility for the female category in question?
The International Boxing Association (IBA) issued a statement on 31 July explaining that a “recognized” test had established that Khelif and Lin do not meet the eligibility standards for female competition. The IBA says this was not a testosterone test, which means it’s referring to a genetic test.
Here’s the relevant detail:
On 24 March 2023, IBA disqualified athletes Lin Yu-ting and Imane Khelif from the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships New Delhi 2023. This disqualification was a result of their failure to meet the eligibility criteria for participating in the women’s competition, as set and laid out in the IBA Regulations. This decision, made after a meticulous review, was extremely important and necessary to uphold the level of fairness and utmost integrity of the competition.
Point to note, the athletes did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential. This test conclusively indicated that both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.
The decision made by IBA on 24 March 2023 was subsequently ratified by the IBA Board of Directors on 25 March 2023. The official record of this decision can be accessed on the IBA website here.
The disqualification was based on two tests conducted on both athletes as follows:
• Test performed during the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships in Istanbul 2022.
• Test performed during the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi 2023.
For clarification Lin Yu-ting did not appeal the IBA’s decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), thus rendering the decision legally binding. Imane Khelif initially appealed the decision to CAS but withdrew the appeal during the process, also making the IBA decision legally binding.
Officials from the IBA have separately added that both fighters have XY chromosomes and high testosterone (“high T”) levels.
“High T” is one of the ways that testosterone levels outside of the female range tend to be described when one is speaking about an athlete in the female category. As you can see from Figure 1, immediately below, male and female T levels diverge at about the age of thirteen. Both Figure 1 and Figure 2 below make clear there’s no overlap in male and female T levels after early adolescence. Doping and being male are two ways that an adult athlete might have “high T.”
It’s important to note that the IBA’s statements about Khelif and Lin are doubted by the IOC and others because the IBA has a reputation for being less than reliable, and because the IOC says it hasn’t seen the results of the tests that were the basis for the IBA’s decision to declare them ineligible. Alan Abrahamson reports, however, that the IBA sent them Khelif’s results back in June 2023.
Are Khelif and Lin transgender?
Like Caster Semenya, there’s no indication that either Khelif or Lin identifies as transgender. This makes sense given that they were apparently assigned female at birth—meaning that this is what was written on their birth certificates—and because being transgender is generally a matter of self-identification.
It is understandable that people are confused, however, because the word transgender is also sometimes used to mean a male who identifies as female. Khelif and Lin both identify as female based on their identity documents and their sex of rearing.
In any event, in sport at least, it seems their cases are being treated by everyone concerned as DSD cases.
What are DSD and why does elite sport care about them?
There are many different disorders or differences of sex development (DSD).
Depending on which you’re talking about, they can affect only males, only females, or both. As shown in Figure 2, immediately below, the only DSD of concern to sport affect genetic males who are also androgen sensitive—either fully, e.g. in the case of athletes with 5 alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), or substantially, e.g. in the case of athletes with partial androgen insensitivity (PAIS).
This makes policy sense. The point of the female category is to ensure that females only compete against each other and not against those with male biological advantage, and androgens are the primary driver of sex differences in athletic performance. As rough and insensitive as sex testing has been historically, the basic goal has remained constant.
Athletes with 5-ARD and PAIS have an XY chromosomal complement; they have testes; their testes produce testosterone well outside of the normal female range; their androgen receptors read and process their “high T”; and as a result, their bodies masculinise through childhood and puberty in the ways that matter for sport. Thereafter, their circulating T levels continue to have their usual performance-enhancing effects.
In other words—as shown in Figure 3 below, which compares athletes with 5-ARD to transwomen and sex-typical males and females—their variations from the male norm (such as underdeveloped external genitalia) are irrelevant to athletic performance. When they enter female competition, they carry male advantage.
Do Khelif and Lin have DSD that should make them ineligible for the female category?
As I write, there are currently three running versions of the answer to this question.
The first is the one from the—reputedly unreliable IBA—that Khelif and Lin do have DSD that should make them ineligible. That is, the IBA or its representatives have said they’re genetic males with male advantage. The latter generally means their T is bioavailable—they’re not androgen insensitive—and they’ve otherwise masculinised in the ways that matter in the arena.
The second is the one that’s trending on social media and in some press commentary saying—without evidence—that Khelif and Lin are entirely female, XX chromosomes, ovaries, and all. Some concede the point that the athletes’ phenotypes are masculine, but they say that lots of women—a status they tend to read broadly to include transwomen—have masculine phenotypes and so this is just a matter of accepting that premise.
The third seems to be the IOC’s present position if we carefully parse its highly coded pronouncements—that Khelif and Lin may well have XY DSD with male advantage, but because they were identified at birth as female and continue to identify as such, they’re women.
The IOC has spent a lot of time over the last few days lamenting the attacks on Khelif and Lin. We should all be lamenting them—they’re truly awful. Still, this volatile situation is almost entirely of the IOC’s own making. It’s sending impossibly mixed messages that were to be expected given its complicated relationship to sex and gender in sport.
In June, the IOC issued a language guide that disallows the use of sex-based language to describe athletes at the Games and that requires the treatment of gender diverse XY athletes who identify as women to be unequivocal: they are women.
This language guide follows from the positions the IOC took in 2021 that gender diverse XY athletes should not be considered to have male advantage in the arena simply because they’re male, and that male T levels shouldn’t be disqualifying—despite their scientifically well-understood role as the primary driver of the performance gap between the best males and the best females.
The idea was to make the controversy about XY athletes like Caster Semenya and Lia Thomas in the female category disappear by disappearing the relevant biology and the language we use to talk about it.
The IOC wasn’t going to get away with this, of course, once the IBA called it out on its inclusion of Khelif and Lin in the female category. But it had tied its own hands in advance, and because of this—in my opinion—much of what has come out of its spokesperson’s mouth is a combination of “inside baseball” and sleights of hand.
Still, an excellent piece on 2 August by Alex Oller of Inside the Games tells us that knowledgeable reporters who are going with one of the two XY DSD versions of the answer to the question likely aren’t wrong. I recommend you read Oller’s reporting in full (and Inside the Games in general), but in sum:
Formally, the IOC is going with the gender that’s listed in Khelif and Lin’s passports, which undoubtedly say that their legal gender is female. You can think of this as the IOC’s current sex test—it’s using legal gender as a proxy for sex and/or eligibility for the female category.
The IOC has also said it has not seen anything to indicate that what’s in Khelif and Lin’s passports isn’t consistent with their sex. The IBA’s statements say otherwise, of course, but the IOC says it can’t trust the IBA’s statements on this because of the “arbitrary” procedure that yielded them.
At the same time, on the substance, the IOC has acknowledged that after Khelif’s first win on Thursday, it scrubbed from its own website the notation that at least Khelif—if not also Lin—has high T. To explain this, it said in part that T levels don’t matter, that lots of females also have high T. This is intentionally misleading.
Female athletes with high T—including those with polycystic ovaries—have T levels towards the top of the female range, not outside of the female range or inside the male range. Their sex is not in doubt. As I explained above, “high T” in an athlete who seeks to compete in the female category is code in international sports for either doping with exogenous androgens or being biologically male with bioavailable endogenous androgens. There’s no indication that either Khelif or Lin is doping.
As an aside, the reason many federations and the IOC itself for years used T as a proxy for sex is that it’s an excellent one: neither ovaries nor adrenal glands produce T in the male range, only testes do. If you’re looking for biological sex rather than legal gender, it’s certainly more accurate than a passport.
The IOC has also said that it has given up sex testing because there’s no way to get it right practically and in a nondiscriminatory fashion and because scientifically there’s consensus Khelif and Lin are women.
It is impossible to reconcile the IOC’s statements here, even if you’re an insider. Either they had experts look at the files on the athletes or they didn’t. If they didn’t, there can’t be scientific consensus about anything.
By contrast, the rest is internally consistent. For political reasons in general, not with respect to Khelif and Lin in particular, the IOC doesn’t want to test athletes for sex because, in its view, it’s “impractical”—meaning expensive in the multiple ways it cares about—and “discriminatory” against XY athletes who identify as women.
Why were Khelif and Lin able to compete for years before being barred last year?
Khelif and Lin have been competing internationally in the sport of boxing for several years. They were only barred from global competition in 2023.
Prior to 2022, the International Boxing Association didn’t evaluate biological sex or male advantage with a chromosome or testosterone test. Instead, as the IOC is doing now, it relied on the athletes’ passports as a proxy for sex and/or eligibility for the female category. If an athlete was entered into international competition by their domestic federation in the female category and their identity document said they were female, the IBA accepted that as proof of their eligibility.
According to the IOC, the IBA “suddenly” and “arbitrarily” changed its approach in 2023. The IBA says it started conducting at least some biological tests after the Tokyo Games—at its world championships in 2022—but that it only began excluding ineligible athletes beginning in 2023.
Why is the IOC not the IBA in charge of whether Khelif and Lin compete in Paris?
The Olympic Charter normally leaves it to the international federations to set the eligibility standard for their sports. But as a result of governance failures and corruption scandals, the IOC hasn’t recognised the IBA’s authority to regulate the sport at the Olympic Games since 2019. Instead, competition in Tokyo and Paris has been run by an ad hoc group appointed by the IOC for this purpose. This group rejected the IBA’s biologically-based determination of Khelif and Lin’s sex in favour of the old passport test, which the IOC describes as “the rule in place in 2016.” As noted above, this happens to be consistent with the IOC’s own policy preferences.
How do Olympic Movement politics play into their story?
Olympic Movement politics are a huge factor in this story in at least two ways, both of which I’ve mentioned already.
The first of these is the IOC’s fight with the IBA. The IBA happens to be aligned with the Kremlin, which is separately hostile to the IOC for its stances on doping and the war in Ukraine.
The second is the IOC’s policy choice to align itself with trans-rights advocates and against advocates for a sex-based female category. Here, the IOC is not just at odds with the IBA but also with some of the Olympic Movement’s most important federations like World Athletics and World Aquatics. Unlike the IOC, these federations are determined to prioritise fairness and the preservation of the female category for female athletes.
Where do we go from here?
The Khelif and Lin cases demonstrate that everyone loses out when the eligibility rules are not firmly set in a way that’s consistent with the goals of the competition category. The firestorm this issue regularly and predictably causes, and the consequent damage to the organisations and athletes involved, should catalyse change. Continuing to push the matter away—as the IBA and other federations, including most prominently FIFA, have done over the years—only means that further ugly controversies will arise in the future.
I will close by reiterating the three basic points that I and other experts in girls’ and women’s sport have been making for a long time.
First, the female category in elite sport has no raison d’être apart from the biological sex differences that lead to sex differences in performance and the gap between the top male and female athletes. The suggestion that we could choose to rationalise the category differently—for instance, on the basis of self-declared gender identity—or that we could make increasingly numerous exceptions in the interests of inclusion (as the IOC seems to have done to allow Khelif and Lin to compete in Paris) has no legs outside of certain progressive enclaves.
Second, any eligibility standard—like the IOC’s framework—that denies or disregards sex-linked biology is necessarily category-defeating.
Finally, federations that are committed to the female category and to one-for-one equality for their female athletes must step up and do two things. They must craft evidence-based rules and then stick to them consistently. And they must seriously embrace other opportunities to welcome gender diversity within their sports. [ Dusty - not sure about the latter point!?].
Update 417
Imane Khelif has this evening proceeded to the final ( on Friday) in his category after a unanimous decision against Thailand's Janjaem Suwannapheng :
On a site called Woman: Adult Human Female, Georgia O’Keefe gives a very useful chronology of what has happened but also reveals that there are, apparently, two larping men in the women’s football as well. This seems to have gone a bit below the radar!!
https://wahf.substack.com/p/july-26-august-1-part-i-olympics
On Unherd, Flo Reed interviews sports scientist, Tommy Lundberg.
On GB News, Andrew Doyle interviews Fiona McAnena of Fair Play for Women.
https://substack.com/@andrewdoyle/p-147361507
On Reality’s Last Stand, Linda Blade ( aka Coach Blade) provides a definitive history of sex testing. This was published earlier this year but, of course, remains completely relevant.
The Dystopian History of Sex Testing in Women’s Sports
How the International Olympic Committee (IOC) failed women by undermining sex-based eligibility in sports.
Jan 01, 2024
About the Author
Linda Blade is a former NCAA All American and National Champion of Canada in track & field (heptathlon) with a PhD in Kinesiology. She is president of Athletics Alberta and co-author (with Barbara Kay) of the book, UNSPORTING: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport (2021).
Standing on the podium at the 1984 NCAA Championships in Track and Field, accepting a medal in the Heptathlon for the University of Maryland Terrapins, was one of my life’s proudest moments. This achievement was just one of many significant events in my athletic career. Over a span of ten years, I had the unique honor of becoming the national champion in two different countries on two continents: in Bolivia in 1977, where I was born, and in Canada in 1986, owing to my parents’ citizenship.
I was also privileged to compete alongside some of the greatest female athletes, including the USA’s Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who still holds the world record in the heptathlon nearly 40 years later. Looking back, if someone had told me then that I would spend my post-menopausal years trying to convince people that men should not be competing in women’s sports, I would never have believed them. Yet, even after years of public advocacy, there are mornings when I wake up questioning my sanity and whether this is truly happening.
But, sure enough, it is real.
For at least the past decade, we have witnessed surreal instances where male athletes have brazenly competed in women’s sports, claiming prizes in high school track and cycling, and even causing serious injuries to women in full-contact combat sports. The scandal involving swimmer Lia Thomas during the 2022 NCAA season brought this phenomenon into the mainstream public discourse, raising questions about how this happened and who is responsible.
I’ll not mince words: The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is the most culpable organization for undermining sex-based eligibility in sports. By “sex-based eligibility,” I refer to rules that govern participation in women’s categories based on biological reality.
There are four key moments when the IOC failed women in this regard.
MOMENT 1: The Decision to Stop Sex Verification (1999)
The descent into chaos began in 1999 when the IOC discontinued the practice of verifying the biological sex of female Olympians. A quick history lesson is in order at this point.
From the moment the IOC reluctantly allowed women to compete in the Olympics back in the early 20th century, situations arose where male athletes were discovered competing in the women’s category, highlighting the need for sex verification. Throughout the 1900s, various methods were used to ensure that competitors in women’s Olympic sports were, indeed, female. Some of these methods, being invasive and humiliating, were quickly abandoned.
The most widely accepted method (from the viewpoint of female athletes) was the cheek swab test, used from 1968 to 1992. This simple and discreet test involved scraping buccal cells from the inside of the cheek to detect the presence of a “Barr body”—an inactive X chromosome of the XX pair that could be detected as a little black dot and signalled that person was, indeed, female. Once her Barr Body was detected, the athlete received a “Female Certificate,” similar in size to a driver’s license, which could be presented at future competitions to confirm her eligibility in women’s events.
Stuart Ballard in GB News ( Lin Yu-ting's opponent sparks fresh Olympics controversy with protest in ring after defeat 04 August) reports:
The women's boxing row at the Paris Olympics isn't going away anytime soon after Svetlana Staneva made a protest in the ring following her defeat to Lin Yu-ting.
The Chinese Taipei athlete is one of two fighters competing in women's boxing at the Paris Olympics despite being disqualified from last year's world championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA).
The governing body's chief executive Chris Roberts has claimed that the male XY chromosome was found in tests conducted on both Yu-ting and Imane Khelif.
But the IOC has cast doubt on the reliability and legitimacy of the tests conducted by the IBA.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) suspended the IBA back in 2019 and stripped it of its status as boxing's world governing body last year.
In the midst of the ongoing row, both Khelif and Yu-ting have been continuing their charge to win a medal for their respective nation.
The full article is here:
JL on the Glinner Update has provided an extensive discussion of the controversy. You have to worry about the Labour Party - well, that’s not news is it!? - three MPs namely Zarah Sultana, Nadia Whittome and Kate Osborne have come out in support of these boxers who have ‘unconventional femininity’ - well, I think that you can’t get more unconventional than having XY chromosomes!!
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/a-week-in-the-war-on-women-monday-305
Róisín Michaux on her substack Peaked provides a great piece on this issue and well done to her and the other ladies involved for their ( almost) flash mob protest in Paris.
If this doesn't peak them, nothing will
At least the paedophile was booed, I guess.
Aug 06, 2024
Many previously-normal-seeming people are doing Simone Biles level of twists and spins to defend the inclusion of males (and thus the exclusion of females) from various Olympic events. The sports that we know for sure have been infiltrated are football and profesional face-punching, but there have been reports that there are other men in women’s female competitions - other contact sports, no less - that nobody has been able to get evidence of yet.
Not that the media has been looking for evidence. They’re behaving more like corporate partner influencers of the International Olympics Committee than actual reporters. The career-building copypastafarians who staff yer averge philanthropist-supported 2024 “news” operation are mostly just taking the minutes of the daily IOC pressers and Ctrl+Ving them onto the sports pages.
But it turns out that evidence wouldn’t matter, anyway. So if you’re an appalled citizen scouring the tracks, rings, pools, and beams for errant Adam’s Apples, give it up. Nobody will care. You could toss Imane Khelif’s and Lin Yu Ting’s small gametes into the laps of the BBC sports programmers and they would still marvel at how stunning and brave “she” is every time he lands a full-force fist on a woman’s jaw.
Their journalist would still use their slot at the much anticipated International Boxing Association press conference to growl and grandstand and then flounce out, rather than try to get to the truth about the suspicious jockstrap-wearing characters pretending to be butch lesbians for prize money.
Drip by drip, this will continue to be allowed to happen. Major institutions are all on board. Sport is for everyone!, they say, irrelevantly. Boys who can’t keep up in male divisions will join youth teams intended to encourage girls to participate in sports. The female category will end up an internal-testicle fest.
It might be slow, but the accelerationist character of the inclusion of males in fucking boxing in Paris this year will make it easier for the gradual dismantling of the female category in other less violent sports.
The Greek obgyn who spoke at the IBA’s news conference panel in Paris got it right when he said that the reason everyone is pretending not to know what a woman is is because they don’t want to lose their jobs and they don’t want to get bullied online. He’s right. That’s basically it.
Your elite institutions put garbage in (sex falsification) and now they are getting garbage out. But they’re all committed to the bit, and they won’t back down now. They signed the convention to de-binarise our sexed society. They funded and hosted the conference where the pact was signed. The IOC is on all the panels in all the global fora on development, business, climate, and so on. And they’re all completey gender-captured. LGBTIQ #inclusion in sport is the “key message”. They all hired token troons and enby loons and those freaks have all tantrumed their way to the top of the agenda in every board they joined.
Many people are going along with it, and a worrying number are cheerleading for it.
There was an obvious scramble after the first boxing preliminary rounds to figure out how to frame the male-female boxing matchup as DoublePlusGood, as opposed to the absolutely unjustifiable horseshit we all know it is. The first line-to-take was “this is not a trans issue so why are terfs talking about lol got you there haha”. But for people who care about women’s rights it was always about the folly of allowing people to choose their own sex identification. That was always the point. Sure, we spend a lot of time laughing at the Fishnet Freds who wash their hair with conditioner, but that’s just because it helps keep us sane.
Another apalogia-analysis emerged a bit later: why were we so obsessed with the men boxing women, and not the paedo who once flew to England to have sex with a 12-year-old girl? Steven van de Velde competed in the volleyball. Whatboutthat? they said, convinced of an open goal. Gotcha!
But that guy was booed at every turn. The crowd heckled him from the moment he stepped foot on the sand. They cheered raucously when his team was eliminated. Everyone - in the crowd, online, and around the world - let that scumbag know exactly how we, as a society, feel about what he did.
As an aside, I’m not even sure you can ban someone from the Olympics for having a criminal record for which you served your (apparently very short) prison time. What I do know is that you can very easily make a policy that prevents biological males competing against women.
But unlike the paedo, rather than being booed or even questioned, the male boxers are being celebrated as heroines by many in the omni-cause activist sphere. As neither of the males has come out as intersex, never mind transgender, nobody in the other camp really knows which brainless slogan to shout. All they know is that if TERFs are against it, then there must be transphobia involved. Or, get ready for another annoying neologism, it could be the dreaded, just made up intersexophobia.
We don’t know if the athletes in question have disorders of sexual development like balls-in-my-belly Caster Semenya’s 46 XY 5 ARD, or if they were too girly for their cultures and “raised as girls”. For all we know they could be autogynephiles, or just chancers. We don’t even really know to what extent they are at fault for the cheating they are engaged in. What we know is that they took the place of women at the Olympics, and the IOC is extremely cranky that we all noticed and we won’t shut up about it.
This development is terrible news for girls. Women in North Africa, in particular, in Imane Khelif’s corner of the world, are not typically involved in sports beyond high school. Levels of diabetes and obesity in countries in the region are testament to this. How can you convince young girls to get into sport when there’s a very big possibility the changing room will have at least one Imane in a bollock-guard waiting to watch you strip?
It’s hard to tell to what extent the normies are okay with what’s happening. I’m quite honestly too afraid to ask. What I do know is that last Tuesday night, while I was sitting drinking a beer in my kitchen, I tapped out a tweet asking who wanted to go to Paris to be a noisy harpy bitch about it all for a couple of hours.
Reader, I got so many donations I was able to ship 10 TERFs to Paris three days later. The middle of summer, last minute, during the Olympics - the price of the flights and trains would make your eyes sting.
We rustled up banners, flyers, t-shirts, a megaphone. Someone printed out portraits of Angela Carini. Someone else printed out a shitload of leaflets from Sex Matters about DSDs and self-ID. Some random TERF on Twitter suggested a place to protest. No time for questions, no time to contact the police for authorisation. There was a fatal typo on the 500 postcards I’d had printed so I spent the enture Eurostar to Paris tipexxing it out. About five minutes before we went to the protest spot, we invented a chant and skulled a beer to calm our nerves.
Then we went out onto the Place de la Republique, climbed onto the plinth, and shouted obnoxiously about misogyny for about an hour. We got about as many middle fingers as we got whoop-whoops. We even gave some press interviews.
The police, to everyone’s shock, watched us for a bit and left us alone. A Parisienne lawyer TERF who had come along to protest told us she had seen a similar sized protest to ours shut down the day before - it was Christians protesting the sex clown show on the Seine. We didn’t expect to last 5 minutes.
We only disbanded when a ladyboy prostitute dressed in a hot pink tube dress barely covering his fauxgina - a man who works for one of the big pro-prostitution NGOs in France - rallied his transactivist buddies to come scream at us. They obliged, things got hairy, and we went back to our HQ, a pub run by friendly Kurdish men who couldn’t believe it when we told them why we were in Paris.
Later we hung the banner saying SAVE WOMEN’S SPORTS off the Pont Neuf bridge, with the very phallic Eiffel Tower standing erect in the background. The police, there too, were happy to let us do our thing. “People are claiming to be radiators, these days",” one moustachio’d gendarmerie told me disgustedly. I’m guessing that’s the French version of the attack helicopter meme.
Anyway, tout ca pour dire that I think there are more people against this than are for it. There are probably even more men in the women’s categories in the Games that we don’t know about. I have suspicions about who they are, because I have eyes, but without evidence, of the type heroically uncovered by Reduxx that alerted the world to the two male boxers, I’m keeping quiet. Without proof, you get accused of policing women’s bodies. But my sense of self-preservation has evolved over a million years and it cannot be fooled by a couple of bows in a bloke’s hair.
If you’re in doubt about the global nature of the gender takeover, consider the fact that the gaudy drag queen nonsense that dominated the opening ceremony is the most American export ever. A few years ago, the idea that the arrogant French would pollute a showcase of their own culture with some American trash TV ripoff is laughable. And yet here we are.
So many things that once seemed impossible are now not just possible, but likely. If watching men steal the medals of women who trained all their lives to make it to an Olympic podium doesn’t peak the world, then nothing will.
Eliza Mondegreen in Unherd deals with the IBA press conference yesterday.
I note that not only didn’t Khelif and Yu-Ting pursue appeals against the original decisions by the IBA but the IBA offered to pay the majority of the costs of any such appeals.
Additionally, the IBA can’t produce the actual chromosome tests without permission from the boxers - so why haven’t they given permission?
Boxing chief questions eligibility of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting at Olympics ( 05 August)
A press conference hosted by the International Boxing Association (IBA) today only broadened the unfolding spectacle around boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting. The chief executive officer of the IBA, Chris Roberts, disclosed that the two boxers had previously been found “ineligible” to compete in women’s boxing after undergoing a chromosome test.
As a result, Khelif and Yu-ting were not allowed to compete in the 2023 world championships. The athletes were “given the opportunity to appeal the findings to the Court of Arbitration for Sport,” with the IBA offering to pay the majority of the costs involved. Yu-ting did not appeal, and Khelif appealed and then withdrew.
Due to demands from the Algerian and Taiwanese boxing federations, Roberts was unable to reveal detailed information about the athletes’ test results, beyond “the chromosomes of both boxers were ineligible.” Listeners must read between the lines: the available information suggests that Khelif and Yu-ting are male athletes with disorders of sexual development.
Roberts also criticised the International Olympic Committee, which had chosen not to act on the information the IBA provided, instead assessing athletes’ eligibility to compete in female sports based on the legal sex designated on their passports.
Over the past two weeks, there has been a lot of confusion and misinformation in the public sphere when it comes to Khelif, Yu-ting, and what makes someone male or female. Media outlets have consistently referred to Khelif and Yu-ting as “female athletes” and framed the debate over Khelif and Yu-ting’s eligibility to compete in female sports as a question of policing femininity among women of colour. A USA Today “fact check” elided the controversy altogether: “Fact check: Imane Khelif is a woman.”
It doesn’t help that the term “intersex” itself is highly misleading; it implies that some people are neither male or female or both male and female or somewhere in between male and female. But intersex conditions are better understood as disorders of sexual development that affect typical male or female development. In other words, these conditions are sex-specific, not sex-defying.
All the evidence in the public domain indicates that Khelif and Yu-ting have a disorder of sexual development that affects males, such as 5-ARD. In the absence of investigation, a child born with 5-ARD may be “assigned female” at birth and raised as a girl until puberty hits, at which point they undergo male pubertal changes.
LGBTQ organisations like Glaad have only added to the confusion by insisting that, for example, “Imane Khelif is a woman” and “Imane Khelif is not transgender and does not identify as intersex.” Trans activist efforts to enlist terms like “intersex” and “assigned sex at birth” in the fight for people with typical sexual development to claim opposite-sex identities has undermined public understanding of disorders of sexual development. Whether or not Khelif has a disorder of sexual development has nothing to do with whether Khelif “identifies” as intersex.
When it comes to sex division in sports, there are some sports — like swimming and running — where fairness is what’s at stake. But when the International Olympic Committee puts male athletes in the ring with female athletes, much more than fairness is at stake. Punching power is one of the starkest sex differences between males and females — other than, you know, the whole “giving birth” thing. This is why a female athlete who trained all her life to compete at the Olympics forfeited after just 46 seconds in the ring, saying she had “never felt a punch like this,” then broke down sobbing because sporting officials made her choose her physical safety over her dream.
As the IBA points out, this ought to have been an administrative matter, dealt with sensitively and out of the public eye: fail a chromosome test and you’re not getting in the ring. The IOC chose to make this a global spectacle, exposing female athletes to great risk and Khelif and Yu-ting to scorching scrutiny. Angela Carini’s cry of “Non e giusto!” is right.
Thanks to Feminist Legal Clinic for drawing attention to an excellent website which is dedicated to archiving the achievements of female athletes who were displaced by males in women’s sporting events.
https://feministlegal.org/list-of-female-athletes-by-sport-she-won/
Update 418
The Double X symbol appears again!!
The Telegraph ( Turkish fighter in ‘X’ symbol protest after losing to Lin Yu-Ting 07 August) reports:
Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, one of two boxers at the centre of a gender dispute at the Paris Olympics, moved a step closer to the Olympic title as she [ HE!] beat Turkey’s Esra Yildiz by unanimous decision in the women’s featherweight semi-finals on Wednesday.
Lin, twice world champion, and Algerian boxer Imane Khelif have been in the spotlight at the Olympics over a gender row that has dominated headlines and been the subject of much discussion on social media platforms.
The 28-year-old Lin is looking to clinch Taiwan’s first Olympic title in boxing, the country having previously won only three bronze medals in the sport.
She [ HE!] faces Poland’s Julia Szeremeta in the final on Saturday.
The full article is here:
Alex Davies in GB News ( JK Rowling fumes 'frankly bonkers' in Imane Khelif rant as boxer bags Olympics final spot amid gender row 07 August) reports:
JK Rowling has returned to X to unleash further criticism of the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and its decision to allow Algerian boxer Imane Khelif to compete in the 66kg women's division.
On Tuesday night, Khelif secured a spot in the gold medal bout with China's Liu Yang after seeing off Thailand's Janjaem Suwannapheng during the semi-finals.
Khelif's participation has been the subject of global debate due to the fact she was banned from the world championships helmed by the IBA (International Boxing Association) last year for failing a gender eligibility test.
The Russian-backed boxing body refused to allow Khelif and Chinese Taipei's Lin Yu-ting to compete last year after claiming to find the XY chromosome in their tests - the strand typically found in males.[ Dusty - typically found in males?? 😂]
The IOC's eligibility tests [ Dusty - what are those? Are you a female? Do you like pink?] aren't the same as the IBA's and as the organisation is overseeing the boxing at the Paris Games, both boxers have been allowed to compete.
Caitlyn Jenner has been one vocal opponent to Khelif's involvement and Rowling has followed suit, continuing to do so after the Algerian sailed through the semis.
Imane Khelif© GB News
Rowling took to social media to hit back at critics who have accused her of being motivated by "transphobia" in her critique of Khelif.
But the Harry Potter author claimed: "Commentators pretending critics of the IOC’s reliance on documents rather than sex testing think Khelif is trans are straw-manning.
"I don’t claim Khelif is trans. My objection, and that of many others, is to male violence against women becoming an Olympic sport."
Rowling followed up her clarification with a second post, once again hitting back at her critics: "For the record, bombarding me with pictures of athletic women to ‘teach’ me that women don’t all look like Barbie is like spamming me with pics of differently-shaped potatoes to prove rocks are edible.
"I can still see the difference and you look frankly bonkers."
Both Rowling and Jenner are far from the only celebrities to have spoken out against Khelif's inclusion after she saw off Italian Angela Carini in her opening bout.
The full article is here:
On her substack Terf Report, Kara Dansky re-posts a piece by Madeleine Kearns.
'It's Not Fair! It's Not Fair!'
Female boxer quits fight after 46 seconds in shocking Olympic scene.
Aug 02, 2024
The article below was written by Madeleine Kearns and published on August 1 by The Free Press. I am sharing it here with the permission of the author and publisher.
Photo and caption: The Free Press
An unprecedented scene unfolded at the Paris Olympics today. In a boxing ring two contestants were announced: a woman from Italy and an opponent from Algeria who only last year failed a sex test and was barred from competing against women.
After just 46 seconds of fighting and two blows to the face, Italy’s Angela Carini immediately abandoned the bout against Algeria’s Imane Khelif. Carini broke down in tears, saying Non è giusto. Non è giusto!
Translation: “It’s not fair. It’s not fair!”
Later, in an interview, Carini said: “I have never been hit so hard in my life.” She wept as she described how she had to give up on her dream for gold, which she had pursued in the memory of her dead father. “Until the end, I fought with blood in my eyes because I wanted this victory at all costs. Just for my father.” Khelif will now advance to the quarter finals.[ Dusty - in fact, he has now advanced to the Final on Friday].
How did we get to this point?
For the first time in history, the International Olympics Committee this year has permitted two athletes whose sex is unclear to compete in the women’s boxing championships. In addition to Khelif, competing in the 66 kg category, there is Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan, competing in the 57 kg category.
This is happening even though Khelif and Lin were disqualified from the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships last year after the president of the International Boxing Association (IBA) said DNA tests “proved they had XY chromosomes.”
Photo and caption: The Free Press
But the International Olympics Committee has given the boxers the go-ahead because, according to the IOC spokesman, “everyone competing in the women’s category is complying with the competition eligibility rules.” Those eligibility rules are “incredibly complex,” he added.
What he didn’t say: the IOC’s rules appear to be colored by gender ideology. According to the body’s “Portrayal Guidelines” for members of the media, the terms biologically male and biologically female are “problematic,” and “a person’s sex category is not assigned based on genetics alone.”
In 2023, the president of the International Boxing Association announced that “a series of DNA tests” had “uncovered athletes who were trying to fool their colleagues and pretended to be women.” Speaking to an Algerian TV network, Khelif rejected the IBA disqualification as a “big conspiracy.” Despite speculation, neither Khelif nor Lin has claimed transgender status or a disorder of sex development (DSD)—medical conditions in which reproductive organs and genitals develop abnormally.
Regardless of their reasons for letting these particular athletes into the ring with women, critics say the IOC is putting female athletes in danger. “Males—however they identify—pack a punch that is 162 percent more powerful than women—THE biggest performance gap between men and women,” Nancy Hogshead, an American Olympic gold medalist, posted on X. “Gender ideology will get women KILLED.”
One female boxer, Brianda Tamara, recalls how difficult it was fighting with Khelif in a previous tournament. “Her blows hurt me a lot, I don’t think I had ever felt like that in my 13 years as a boxer, nor in my sparring with men,” Tamara wrote on X. “Thank God that day I got out of the ring safely.”
Asked about Khelif and Lin’s participation in the Olympics, Mark Adams, the IOC spokesman, said at a press conference, “I am not going to comment on individuals.” Then he went on to comment on individuals, saying: “They are women in their passports and it is stated that is the case.”
No matter what their passports say, if the athletes have XY chromosomes, “that means they’re male and they have no business competing in the women’s category,” Kara Dansky, feminist, lawyer, and author of The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls tells The Free Press.
“This is nothing other than male violence against women for sport and entertainment,” she says.
It’s also bloody unfair.
Sarah Ditum deals with this on her substack, Tox Report.
Tox Report 60. The rules do not apply
Confused about sex and sport? You're supposed to be
Aug 06, 2024
I wrote for UnHerd last week about the controversy over the Olympics’ failure to screen for sex eligibility in boxing, but it turned out I had more to say. If you’re interested in the science and policy issues, the Real Science of Sport podcast has been covering this in excellent detail.
The trans activist, or gender identitarian, or sex denialist, or whatever you want to call it, project is fundamentally a linguistic one: it’s about the replacement of material reality with an ideological framework imposed through the application — and, just as importantly, the denial or hollowing out — of certain verbal formulations. Here’s a typical example from the International Olympic Committee’s Portrayal Guidelines: Gender-Equal, Fair and Inclusive Representation Guidelines, in a section on “problematic language”:
“TERMS TO AVOID: “born male”, “born female”, “biologically male”, “biologically female”, “genetically male”, “genetically female”, “male-to-female (MtF)”, “female-to-male” (FtM)
Use of phrases like those above can be dehumanising and inaccurate when used to describe transgender sportspeople and athletes with sex variations. A person’s sex category is not assigned based on genetics alone and aspects of a person’s biology can be altered when they pursue gender-affirming medical care.”
Which makes it notable that, when IOC president Thomas Bach made a statement on the two boxers competing as women after failing sex tests at the World Championships last year, he used these dehumanising words:
“We are talking about women’s boxing. We have two boxers who are born as a woman, who were raised as women, who have passports as woman, who have competed for many years as women. This is the clear definition of a woman.”
Bach also said, erroneously, that this was “not a DSD case”. After the press conference, a correction was issued: Bach misspoke, and should have said this was “not a trans case”. This is both true and irrelevant, because for people like me with an interest in the integrity of women’s sport, it has never mattered whether male athletes were trans or not: regardless of identity, they have no place in women’s sport. This, by the way, is why the inclusion of trans man Hergie Bacyadan in the women’s boxing is unproblematic: because Bacyadan is, if the IOC will forgive the offensive phrasing, born female and has not undergone testosterone therapy.
Maybe Bach would argue that there’s a significant difference between “born female” and “born as a woman”, though I don’t see how this is possible to maintain, especially given the number of times trans activists have smugly announced that no one is “born” a woman, because women are by definition adults and anyway didn’t Simone de Beauvoir say “one is not born but rather becomes a woman” so why does it matter what you’re born as? (I guarantee that no one who quotes de Beauvoir in this context has ever actually read her.)
What’s particularly infuriating (beyond the fact that Bach has apparently not read his own organisation’s briefing) is that the language deemed “problematic” has only been established in reaction to a more fundamental taboo — on using the words “male” and “female”. There’s a certain self-satisfied tone to some of the commentary: well, isn’t categories for people “assigned female at birth” what the terfs wanted? But the language of “assigned female” was originally applied by trans activists, in a maneuver that co-opted DSDs (intersex conditions) in order to obfuscate the fact of biological sex by implying that every identification is liable to be a mistake.
Now, when the athletes in question appear to have DSDs and the language of “assigned at birth” may be genuinely appropriate, the phrase is used as though there could never be any ambiguity or error. The assignation is treated as absolute in the very case where it should not be. First the sex denialists rewrote the terminology to be dislocated from reality, and then they treated that terminology as the ultimate arbiter of reality.
If you are one of the people who has tried very hard to learn the correct forms of language in order to #bekind, you would be justified in wondering why you bothered. Essentially, you’re in the position of the good Soviet citizen or the Medieval monk for whom truth is always provisional and subject to revision by the authorities: more fool you if you took it seriously. The linguistic project of the sex denialist position has always been opportunistic rather than principled. The point has never been to introduce a vocabulary that precisely reflects the subjective experience of gender; rather, it has been to generate a set of shifting norms that rendered the description of women as a group impossible.
Clearly, people in general are still very confused about sex, athleticism and DSDs. There is a persistent suggestion — as made by the writer Kat Brown in the Independent — that the athletes in question are accused of being female with elevated testosterone, rather than (as the IBA has said) XY male. (Brown also tweeted that the safety issues of males in women’s sport should be ignored because “it’s Olympic boxing not tiddly winks”, which implies that she either could not care less about women’s safety, or that she plays an unspeakably violent game of tiddlywinks.)
On social media, the tweely euphemistic claim that the boxers have “girl parts” became widespread, despite there being no external verification of the athlete’s physiology (and despite the fact that this would be a weird and unpleasant thing for the IOC to confirm). The insistence that they were “born women” has been interpreted to mean that they are female, when more likely, they are male with external genitals that developed in utero to appear feminised. After more than a decade of insisting that DSDs show sex is too complex to be legislated on, sex denialists have responded to an apparent case of DSDs by insisting there is no complexity here at all.
As Janice Turner observed in the Times this weekend, the Olympics has always been grudging about the inclusion of women’s sport. When outright bans are no longer acceptable, undermining the category of “female” is a way to serve the same misogynist logic. Bach can break the “rules” of his own organisation, because he is doing so in service of the deeper rule: that femaleness should be made unspeakable.
Sex Matters have done a piece on this as well ( 07 August).
The final of the women’s 66kg (welterweight) boxing at the Paris Olympics takes place on Friday at 9.51pm.
Sex Matters has been producing videos and briefing documents to help people understand the situation and dispel misinformation. Whether you are talking with friends, posting on social media, calling into a radio show or writing to your MP, we hope these briefings will help you feel confident about the facts.
There are two boxers competing in the women’s category who some people believe to be male. Imane Khelif of Algeria, a welterweight, is through to the final and will take home either gold or silver. Lin Yu-Ting from Chinese Taipei, in the featherweight class, will fight for a place in the finals and the chance of gold, but has already secured bronze at a minimum.
Whether these boxers win or lose, it is unsafe and unfair for male athletes to compete in combat sports for women. When Italian boxer Angela Carini fought Khelif, she said she had “never felt a punch” like Khelif’s. In the next round, Hungarian fighter Luca Anna Hamori used her fingers to make XX symbols in the ring after losing to Khelif. [ Dusty - this was actually the Bulgarian boxer - see my last update].
What is going on? The boxers and their coaches refuse to say, but it is likely that both have the same disorder of sex development as the South African runner Caster Semenya; that is, they have XY chromosomes, internal testes and male levels of testosterone, but were wrongly recorded as female at birth. Here’s our explainer about DSDs in sport, and the fuller picture of the problem:
One-page briefing on sport and DSDs
The problem of male inclusion in women’s sport
The controversy, disruption and unfairness could have been avoided by the International Olympic Committee, which is running the boxing competitions in Paris. The IOC says that Khelif and Lin are definitely women, but it defines being a woman as having an “F” on your passport.
The IOC’s 2021 Framework document says there should be “no presumed advantage” for those with a transgender identity or differences of sex development. It is committed to letting people identify as they wish, taking the sex on their passport as proof, and opposed to sex testing, even though that can be done with a simple cheek swab.
We’ve looked into the IOC’s position and explained why it’s ideological rather than scientific.
Update 419
In the wake of the boxing farce at the Olympics, Terven ladies are being encouraged to take photos of themselves doing the X symbol and post them around Twitter ( it will get confusing if I call it ‘X’ 😊) and elsewhere with the above hashtags. You don’t have to show your face, of course. Go on, ladies 😊
Thanks to a friend for sending me this great photo.
Stop Press
Imane Khelif has won the final by unanimous decision against Yang Liu of China.
Lang Yiu should get the gold medal, of course!
Get those photos rolling!
Update 420
Ben Bloom and Rob Bagchi in The Telegraph ( Gender-row boxer Lin Yu-ting wins gold 10 August) report:
Lin Yu-ting won gold for Chinese Taipei - Richard Pelham/Getty Images
Lin Yu-ting became the second woman [MAN!] previously banned for failing gender eligibility tests to claim Olympic gold as the boxing competition in Paris ended in yet more controversy.
A day after Algeria’s Imane Khelif won 66kg gold, Chinese Taipei fighter Lin comprehensively defeated Poland’s Julia Szeremeta, whose face was left smeared in blood after the 57kg final.
The result will do little to quell the storm that overshadowed the entire Olympic boxing competition after it emerged that Lin and Khelif had both been kicked out of last year’s World Championships before being allowed to compete in Paris.
A number of high-profile sports figures questioned their involvement, with tennis great Martina Navratilova angrily responding to Khelif’s win on Friday night by saying: “Thanks for nothing IOC [International Olympic Committee]. Shame on you. This is a travesty.”
Khelif admitted her [ HIS!] Olympic gold medal had a “special taste” because of those who had attacked her [HIM!].
Unlike her [HIS!] Algerian counterpart, Lin had largely kept her [HIS!] counsel amid the furore, opting against making bold public statements and quietly continuing on her [HIS!] way to the final. She [HE!] had not lost a round in any of her [HIS!] opening bouts but Szeremeta was expected to provide her [HIS!] toughest task.
Szeremeta could not get close enough consistently to Lin - Mike Egerton/PA
Lin was cheered to the ring by the few pockets of Taiwanese support inside Roland Garros’s showpiece Court Philippe-Chatrier and started the faster of the two fighters, attempting to exploit the long range that her [HIS!] gangly frame provides.
She [HE!] earned a clean sweep of the judges’ scorecards in the opening round, twice pinning her [HIS!] Polish opponent on the ropes, and continued to keep Szeremeta at bay in the second as the Pole struggled to get close enough to launch an attack.
Lin did find herself [HIMSELF!] on her [HIS!] knees at one point in the final round, but the incident was deemed a slip and victory came without a blemish on all five judges’ scorecards.
The full article is here:
So two larping men have - surprise, surprise - won Gold Medals that should have gone to women. And they have done so with ease - of course! The IOC is a farce!
#BeMorePorcupine
#XX
#SaveWomensSport
Great idea, thanks Dusty.
#XX
#SaveWomensSport