You Gonna Leave Me? Never!
Update 414 Women Boxers Special #BeMore Porcupine
No rest for the wicked here at Dusty Towers!! After MSM went mad yesterday about the Olympic boxing farce, the substackers got rolling this morning ( Ahem…I would like to point out I was ahead of the pack 😎). So here we go again plus a couple of other important things to add on.
By the way I was delighted that one of my favourites boxers, the great Barry McGuigan has come out on our side of the argument 😊
This is the first in the new Heroes Season and it was an easy choice - it had to be Million Dollar Baby!
In the 2004 film, boxing trainer, Frankie Dunn ( played by Clint Eastwood) eventually and reluctantly agrees to train young woman boxer, Maggie Fitzgerald ( Hilary Swank). Maggie is supported by Dunn’s gym assistant and former boxer, Eddie ‘Scrap Iron’ Dupris (Morgan Freeman).
Thanks this time to three wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Women’s Boxing in the Woolympics
I am pleased to report that the second woman to meet a man in the women’s boxing, albeit she was easily defeated, lasted the distance and (it appears) was not seriously hurt. This doesn’t make it any the less unfair, of course!!
https://x.com/oliverbrown_tel/status/1819369642936123497
On Megyn Kelly’s show, she discusses the Angela Carini fight with Charlie Kirk ( and this includes some illuminating comments about Kamala Harris!!) - first 30 minutes:
Geoff Kidder and Ella Whelan on The Academy of Ideas( The punch felt around the world 02 August) write;
The Olympic women’s welterweight boxing match between Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Italy’s Angela Carini sent shockwaves around the world. Khelif - who has a disorder of sex development (DSD), including heightened testosterone levels - battered Carini before the Italian retired from the bout after 46 seconds. ‘I have never felt a punch like this’, she said after the fight.
At a time when the participation of male athletes in women’s sport categories is such a live issue, this brutal inequality shocked millions. Indeed, before Khelif and Carini’s bout, the Irish boxer Kellie Harrington said she would refuse to compete against any boxers who are biological males. But it is the authorities, not individual athletes, who should be taking responsibility. Despite all of this, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and many in the sports establishment and media continue to bury their heads in the sand and pretend all is well.
Khelif is one of two boxers at the centre of controversy at the Olympics. Along with Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, both boxers had previously been deemed ineligible for the female category by the International Boxing Association, likely because of a cheek swab establishing that they have XY (male) chromosomes rather than XX chromosomes (female). As the charity Sex Matters points out, the IOC has allowed the two to participate in the Paris Olympics on the basis that ‘their passports say female’. If the IOC is prioritising bits of paper over previous medical examinations, this is clearly a problem.
There are some who have pointed the finger at Khelif for agreeing to step into a ring with an unfair advantage. But it is important to maintain the distinction between the few athletes with the unusual case of DSD, and the likes of swimmer Lia Thomas, cyclist Emily Bridges or weightlifter Laurel Hubbard. While the former may or may not have lived as a female from birth, the latter three are ‘trans’ - having been born and gone through puberty as male, but now identifying as women and therefore entering women’s categories. Notably, men becoming transwomen often achieve more success competing against female athletes than they did against males.
Nevertheless, in sport, biology is not quite everything, but it’s almost everything - the different social conditions and categories we give to people outside the ring or the pool become irrelevant in contests which require an even playing field for strength, endurance and power. On average, men (or perhaps more precisely, people with ‘male advantage’) can run faster, jump higher and punch harder than women and this is particularly true at elite level. If this were true in only a handful of cases, it would make no sense to distinguish sporting categories based on sex. The differences are consistent and tend to be overwhelming.
In the case of boxing, this is not merely a matter of fairness, it can be downright dangerous. The punching power of male boxers can be extraordinary - as illustrated by a darkly amusing anecdote. In the 1990s, actor Mickey Rourke decided to quit the screen for a while to pursue his other passion, boxing. He was no mug, being undefeated in eight professional fights. But he was no match for one legendary boxer, he told the BBC in 2005: ‘I once did a little sparring with Tommy Hearns. He hit me at two in the afternoon and I went down to a knee. At four in the morning, I was still throwing up.’
Quite simply, the Khelif punch became a symbol for everything that has gone wrong in women’s sport. Yesterday morning, the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 broadcast an interview with the Team GB rower Lola Anderson, fresh from her Olympic gold medal in the women’s quadruple sculls. When asked what her teenage self might make of her achievement, Anderson spoke passionately about how women’s sport had changed in her lifetime - how important it was for her to be able to watch women compete and achieve in ways she thought might not be possible. This championing of women’s sport is completely undermined by the inclusion of biological males in the contest.
If nothing else, this spectacle has proved to millions around the world the importance of preserving women’s sport for women. Commentators on many mainstream outlets have been hesitant to talk about what happened - some even suggesting that Carini wasn’t as hurt as she made out. From the lionisation of the Lionesses to incessant Nike adverts championing Girls That Run, we seem to love to talk about women’s sport, until those women want it to be for women only.
The IOC has since released a statement in defence of Khelif and Lin, arguing that the IBA’s previous decisions were ‘sudden and arbitrary’ and that these athletes have been ‘competing in international boxing competitions for many years in the women’s category’. At the same time, prominent female athletes - like former Olympian Sharron Davies - have pointed out that simple tests would eliminate confusion and end this ‘vile circus which benefits no one’. But instead of listening to female athletes - those who are most effected by these injustices, sometimes losing podium places, sometimes getting hurt - sports authorities and commentators routinely dismiss such suggestions as ‘transphobic’ or ‘bigoted’. Indeed, the IOC is refusing to engage with women’s complaints, simply stating that the ‘current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision’.
Life isn’t always fair - sport is a great example of this fact. Sport can’t be unendingly inclusive - there must be rules, requirements and restrictions in order to ensure a level playing field for athletes. Proof - hard, cold facts - must play a bigger role than what we feel. In the name of inclusion, women are being told to step aside. This isn’t fair, and it isn’t right. It’s time we started demanding that, when it comes to women’s sport, women are most important.
Straight talking as ever from Rex Landy on her substack, Reality Bites:
Women: Born, Not Worn. Biology Dictates Reality
(DSDs Are Getting a Hammering Thanks to Cheating Tranny Men)
Aug 02, 2024
Biology Dictates Reality. I was tempted to end the post there, to be honest. Small bite-sized punchy sayings are what’s needed to counter the spin and lies about trannys.
Never seen a woman with a boner. Because we don’t have dicks. Never have. Never will. Notice how the Lamestream and their masters have NO problem saying this dude was ‘born female’? Why wasn’t he assigned female at birth like all the cervix-havers and front-holers? Now all of a sudden everyone’s assuredly saying ‘born female’ of a giant manslab. This is why you must never use cult language.
The full piece is here:
Edie Wyatt addresses the issue on her substack, Culture & State:
And you may ask yourself.
Well, how did I get here?
Aug 02, 2024
Almost exactly three years ago today I wrote about Laurel Hubbard competing in the female category of weightlifting. When the female athletes were asked to comment on the entry of men into their sport, all three women on the panel at the press conference refused to comment.
Breaking the silence, American weightlifter Sarah Robles leaned forward to the microphone and said, “no thank you”.
In the article I wrote.
“’No thank you’ are the words many young girls of colour and white girls alike, will have to say in their life when they want to say something much stronger, something louder, something ruder, something entirely prohibited.”
“No thank you” has since become an equivalent phrase in the gender critical world to “go fuck yourself”.
The online editor told me that my article briefly crashed The Spectator website because of the additional traffic. I received a message from a popular Canadian podcast asking me to come on and talk about the issues I had raised in the article. I told them that I would, but they needed to be aware that I am a gender critical feminist. I never heard from them again.
In September 2021 I wrote about the trans identified MMA fighters Alana McLaughlin and Fallon Fox, after McLaughlin had defeated his female opponent with a “rear-naked choke” and Fox had left Tamikka Brents with a concussion, an orbital bone fracture, and staples in her head.
I explained in the politest way I could imagine, that apart from the individual danger to the female athletes, the visuals and rhetoric around the acceptance of men in women’s sport was even more dangerous for populations of females in general.
I said;
“Without the ability to define sexual boundaries and the cultural consensus to have her instincts about danger in males validated, women and girls are at greater risk. A society that indulges this gender nonsense to the level that it encourages the mass gaslighting of girls and women out of factual understandings and natural instincts, is in serious trouble.”
Today again, we face the obvious reality online, that regular people do not want to see men beating up women. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) tried to handball the issue early on in the 2024 games, when it was clear that men were going to compete for women’s boxing medals, by saying they had to accept the sex that was listed on the passport.
I want to remind you that when self-identification on official documents was pitched by our government, it was claimed it was to avoid intrusive surgery, this nonsense idea was even platformed by the conservative Murdoch press.
Now we have seen, in an Olympic boxing ring, female boxer Angela Carini forfeit a fight for her own safety, because from the first punch, she knew her opponent was playing with a different set of genetics to what she had. I won’t go into the science, because ultimately this is not about science, it’s about power and politics and the ongoing oppression of women by men.
At the centre of the storm is the fake human rights category of “gender identity”. Gender identity is not a minority protection category, it is the erasure of protection.
The full piece is here:
https://msediewyatt.substack.com/p/and-you-may-ask-yourself?r=7ogxh&triedRedirect=true
Máirín de Barra on Gript News ( WATCH: Female boxer forced to quit in 46-sec Olympic bout, as row deepens 01 August) reports:
An already heated controversy over the inclusion of two boxers who had been excluded from the female category in a previous world tournament after a gender test looks set to continue after one of the contentious fighters faced off against Italy’s Angela Carini who quit after a 46-second fight in which Carini said she had “never felt a punch like this”.
Outrage has been expressed online as videos of the fight were shared, which showed Imane Khelif – who one international boxing authority says has XY chromosomes – landing ferocious punches on Carini, who said she abandoned the Olympic fight because she needed to preserve her life.
Ms Carini dropped to her knees after Khelif was announced the winner of the fight by abandonment: having called out to her coach ‘non è giusto – ‘this is unjust’.
The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls tweeted that Ms Carini “rightly followed her instincts and prioritized her physical safety, but she and other female athletes should not have been exposed to this physical and psychological violence based on their sex.”
Oliver Brown, the Chief Sport Writer for the Telegraph said that Carini’s coach had relayed that: “Many people in Italy tried to call and tell her: ‘Don’t go please, it’s a man, it’s dangerous for you’.”
“This was the right hand from Imane Khelif that left Angela Carini unable to continue. There was blood on her shorts,” Brown wrote, adding that “a first punch from Khelif, who was thrown out of last year’s World Championships after failing biochemical tests for testosterone, dislodged Carini’s chinstrap before a second smashed against her chin and spattered blood over her shorts.”
Mr Brown described the fight as “one of the most shaming in Olympic history”, with other commentators calling on the International Olympics Committee to take action.
Ms Carini, in an emotional post-fight interview said that she was “heartbroken” as she had gone “into the ring to honour my father” but that she had “never felt a punch like this”.
“I got into the ring and did my duty as a boxer and tried to fight irrespective of any controversy or anything else. I wanted to win. After the second blow to the nose, I couldn’t breathe anymore. I went to my coach and said ‘enough’ because it takes maturity and courage to stop.”
“I wasn’t able to finish the match,” the devastated boxer said. “I felt a strong pain in my nose and I said to myself that for the experience I have and the maturity as a woman that I have, that I would stop. I hope my nation won’t take it badly, I hope my dad won’t take it badly. It could have been the match of a lifetime, but I had to preserve my life as well in that moment.”
Imane Khelif said after the win: “I am here for gold. I’ll fight anyone.”
Irish boxing legend, Barry McGuigan, who was publicly critical of the decision by the IOC to let Khelif fight in the Paris Olympics said after the match : “So here is the IOC idea of fairness in the 2024 Olympic Games, shocking and unfair on Women & Girls.”
Advocacy group, The Countess, said that they had warned the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, in an open letter about women’s boxing, which was cosigned by women’s groups and individuals, that “a male punch is up to 160% stronger than a woman’s. There is a real risk of injury or death.”
Spokeswoman Sorcha Nic Lochlainn said “Our letter was co-signed by organisations and individuals including former Olympians and elite athletes like Martina Navratilova and Sharron Davies. We are also calling for immediate resumption of sex-screening of athletes who enter women’s competitions, a simple test that can be done by cheek swab. The IOC stopped sex testing prior to the 2000 Olympics, despite a majority of women athletes accepting the test and agreeing that the female category should remain female only. This testing could have avoided this whole situation.”
As reported by Gript, The Countess had earlier this week called for the “immediate resumption of sex testing by cheek swab ” in order to ensure the “protection of the female category at the Paris Olympics”, as controversy continued regarding two boxers in the games.
Two Olympic boxers – Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting – qualified to compete in Paris by coming through events organised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Both had been disqualified from a previous world boxing event in New Delhi in March 2023 organised by the International Boxing Association (IBA) after it was claimed that testing showed they had XY chromosomes.
Nic Lochlainn said that Ireland’s Michaela Walsh is in the 57kg category with Lin Yu Tin and Gráinne Walsh is in the 66kg division with Imane Khalif.
The IBA, which governs amateur boxing, was stripped of its Olympic recognition in 2023 after the IOC said there was issues around “financial transparency” and “fairness in the appointment of judges and referees”.
The IOC has defended its decision to include the two boxers, saying that the Tokyo 2020 boxing rules (enforced at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 and the related qualifying tournaments) were used as a baseline to develop its regulations. Sorcha Nic Lochlainn, sports spokeswoman for The Countess, called for sex testing at the games, saying: “Two boxers who failed sex testing by the International Boxing Association have been allowed to compete in the women’s divisions at this year’s Olympics”. She said that male competitors in a female competition would have “higher levels of testosterone and male body development.”
“It is outrageous that two athletes deemed ineligible for the Women’s World Boxing Championships in March of 2023 are now able to self-declare eligibility for the Olympics. The International Olympic Committee is on the one hand celebrating the first ‘gender equal’ Olympics and on the other undermining the very basis of
the female category. They are making a mockery of themselves.”
Mark Adams, the IOC’s spokesman, defended the decision saying: “These boxers are entirely eligible – they are women on their passports.” He added that: “It’s not helpful to start stigmatising people like this. We all have a responsibility not to turn it into some kind of witch-hunt”.
In response to his statement, Barry McGuigan said that Mr Adams “wouldn’t know a left hook from a fish hook”.
The Countess said the primary issue was one of male advantage in sports. “The IOC delegated eligibility criteria for women’s sport to the individual sport governing bodies. The IBA has a female-only policy and previously disqualified the two boxers because they were found to be male. However, because the IBA are not overseeing boxing at the Paris Olympics, the IOC has set up its own unit for boxing eligibility and allowed these two male boxers enter the women’s category,” Ms Nic Lochlainn said.
“The IOC guidelines issued to individual federations around transgender inclusion suggest that there be ‘no presumption of advantage’ for males who declare they are women,” Nic Lochlainn said, “This is clearly ludicrous and has been proven over and over again to be false. Although the absolute male advantage varies by sport, it is clear that this advantage cannot be removed. Allowing males into female sport undermines the very reason for the existence of the category in the first place. It is akin to allowing twenty-year-olds to identify as under twelves. There is just no way to ever make it fair.”
“In boxing, it is clearly unsafe as well for the women who have worked so hard to qualify. A man’s punch is up to 160% more powerful than a woman’s. There could be serious injuries resulting from the IOC decision. We are calling on them to instigate immediate review and remove these boxers from the female category,” she said.
Regarding sex testing, Nic Lochlainn explained that this used to be done by a simple cheek swab, but the testing was stopped before the 2000 Olympics. She went on to say “We are calling for resumption of sex testing of all athletes who enter the female category, and the removal of any athlete that is found to be male. The category exists to allow women and girls to compete fairly and safely and should be protected.”
The IBA last night issued a statement in relation to the controversy saying that “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,” the statement said.
“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,” it added.
The IBA said that the disqualification was based on two tests conducted on both athletes at the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships in Istanbul 2022 and the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi 2023.
They added that Lin Yu-ting did not appeal the IBA’s decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), “thus rendering the decision legally binding” – and that “Imane Khelif initially appealed the decision to CAS but withdrew the appeal during the process, also making the IBA decision legally binding”.
Dusty -this is very important I think.
“Our Committees have rigorously reviewed and endorsed the decision made during the World Championships. While IBA remains committed to ensuring competitive fairness in all of our events, we express concern over the inconsistent application of eligibility criteria by other sporting organizations, including those overseeing the Olympic Games. The IOC’s differing regulations on these matters, in which IBA is not involved, raise serious questions about both competitive fairness and athletes’ safety,” they said.
However, the IOC’s spokesperson Mark Adams told the media in Paris this week that: “Everyone competing in the women’s category is complying with the competition eligibility rules. They are women in their passports and it is stated that is the case”.
“They are eligible by the rules of the federation, which was set in 2016, and which worked for Tokyo too, to compete as women, which is what they are. And we fully support that,” he added.
So, we quoted Mr Adams above. Here’s a mate of his ( 0.1% of women with penises, eh?):
Meanwhile, Alan Neale on his substack When we are real, writes:
The Paris Olympics
Normalising the violation of sex boundaries
Aug 01, 2024
As I was putting together this morning’s post, news was coming through of the battering of Italian boxer Angela Carini by a man in the Paris Olympics. I wondered whether to refer to it, as a particularly horrific example of the male “violation of boundaries and assault on women’s rights’” I was writing about. I decided against, as it might have created unnecessary confusion - the man who battered Angela Carini is probably a man with a DSD (Difference in Sex Development), rather than a man who ’identifies’ as a woman. Yet for anyone concerned about fairness or safety in women’s sports, the difference is irrelevant - it is men in women’s sports that are the problem, not a particular type of men.
Coverage in the mainstream media has been, with some notable exceptions, appalling. BBC radio’s World at One, for example, presented the man as if he was a woman with unusually high levels of testosterone, rather than a man with typically male levels of testosterone. Unforgivably, the report included a BBC sports reporter saying he was not a doctor but he could tell that Carini was not seriously hurt. BBC radio returned to the topic with a typically biassed take in its late evening news programme, The World Tonight, interviewing a ‘trans’ male boxing manager and a ‘trans’ male academic, but no-one else.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that what happened in this morning’s fight was not an unfortunate accident, but the outcome of a deliberate decision by the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to prioritise ‘inclusion’ (based on ‘gender’ or DSDs) over the safety of women athletes. This is particularly important in contact sports like boxing, where, as biologist Emma Hilton has noted, “the power gap between a male and a female punch is 162%. That is, males can punch 2.6 times harder than women.”
The male in today’s fight, and another male in tomorrow’s, were both DNA tested by the International Boxing Association (IBA) at last year’s world boxing competition in New Delhi. They were both found to be male, and disqualified from competing further in women’s boxing. The IBA tests were dismissed by the IOC, because to accept them would challenge the IOC ‘inclusion’ policy. Instead, the IOC’s only test was the sex marker in the participant’s passport (another argument for an end to sex falsification in identity documents).
The Paris Olympics started with men parodying women at the opening ceremony, continued with allowing a child rapist to participate in the beach volleyball, and are now glorifying male violence against women in the boxing ring. Paris will go down in history as the Olympics that glorified male violence against women, and normalised the destruction of the boundaries protecting women and women’s sport.
The next Summer Olympics will be held in Los Angeles, in a State, California, whose administration happily places women offenders in men’s prisons. Will they make a stand and protect women’s sports? I doubt it. Will we have to wait until a woman is killed before sense and fairness returns to the administration of the Olympic Games? I hope not.
https://alanneale.substack.com/p/the-paris-olympics?r=7ogxh&triedRedirect=true
Sarah Ditum on Unherd ( The Olympics are not safe for women Imane Khelif punctured the myth that sex is immaterial 02 August) reports:
It looked like a man punching a woman. Algeria’s Imane Khelif, at 5’10”, is only two inches taller than Italy’s Angela Carini; but watching the two in the ring of the women’s 66kg boxing at the Olympics, the difference between them was painfully obvious. Khelif’s hard, rangy body had more reach, and more power. After taking two ferocious blows, Carini abandoned the bout, receiving the final result in devastated tears.
It looked like a man punching a woman because, according to the International Boxing Association, Khelif is not a woman. In 2023, Khelif was disqualified from the World Boxing Championships along with Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting — “a result of their failure to meet the eligibility criteria for participating in the women’s competition”. This decision was based, not on testosterone levels, but on “a separate and recognised test, whereby the specifics remain confidential”.
A Russian-language statement (the IBA is Russian-led) put it more bluntly: “Based on the results of DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to deceive their colleagues and pretended to be women. Based on the results of the tests, it was proven that they have XY chromosomes.” Lin did not appeal, while Khelif initiated an appeal and then withdrew it, meaning that in both cases, the judgement became legally binding.
But not binding on the Olympics, which withdrew recognition from the IBA earlier this year over multiple concerns over governance. That means the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is free to apply its own rules on sex categories in sport. IOC spokesperson Mark Adams warned against starting a “witch hunt… These are regular athletes who have competed for many years in boxing; they are entirely eligible and they are women on their passports.”
Which would be a totally acceptable way to classify sex, if the fight was between passports, rather than two bone-and-sinew bodies. Khelif is apparently not female, in a category designed for female athletes. And while the IOC has been keen to emphasise that this controversy is wholly unrelated to the contentious matter of trans women in sport, that is an impossible separation to maintain. The question of how sex should be defined — by chromosomes, by hormone levels or by legal marker on a passport — is the heart of the argument over inclusion.
What happened in the ring in Paris is a riposte to all the absurd claims that sex is immaterial to athletic performance. Witness, for example, the writers Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis, who argued in a 2012 New York Times op-ed for “letting go of the idea that the ultimate goal of a fair policy is to protect the ‘purity’ of women’s competitions”. If inclusion is the objective, “then sex-segregated competition is just one of many possible options, and in many cases it might not be the best one”.
“What happened in the ring in Paris is a riposte to all the absurd claims that sex is immaterial to athletic performance.”
And anyway, doesn’t the enforcement of sex categories simply re-instil bad old stereotypes about female weakness and vulnerability? That, at least, is what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) believes. “Excluding women who are trans hurts all women,” says the organisation’s self-identified factsheet on sports. “It invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests or accusations of being ‘too masculine’ or ‘too good’ at their sport to be a ‘real’ woman.” History professor Johanna Mellis even suggested in The Guardian that women’s sports categories might have been invented by men “to limit our athletic success and opportunities by reinforcing sexist notions of cisgender girls and women as the ‘weaker, slower sex’”.
From there, it’s a short distance to travel to the often-repeated claim that, as an article in LGBTQ+ magazine Them put it, sex differences should be viewed “much like the way we view Michael Phelps’s abnormal wingspan”. Athletes are, by definition, physical exceptions. A male person who has been legally recognised as female is simply another example of biological variation, and — claimed sports correspondent Jonathan Liew (now of The Guardian, but then writing in The Independent) — perhaps one to be celebrated: he claimed that, “in a way, it would be inspiring” if trans women came to dominate women’s sport.
So far, chromosomes notwithstanding, Khelif has not dominated women’s boxing. XY chromosomes notwithstanding, Khelif lost in the quarter-final of the Tokyo Olympics to Kellie Harrington of Ireland, who went on to take the gold: BBC 5 Live boxing analyst Steve Bunce pointed out that Khelif is “not a devastating puncher” and has ever only achieved five stoppages. The implication, perhaps, is that Carini could have fought on, and maybe even beaten Khelif if she’d been good enough. Maybe so.
But genetically male athletes do not only become a problem in women’s sport when they’re successful. Every XY athlete “included” means an XX athlete pushed out. In combat or collision sports, they also imperil the female athletes they compete against. According to the organisation Women in Sport, male athletes have (on average) 40-50% greater upper limb strength and 12kg more skeletal muscle mass when compared to age-matched female athletes at any given body weight.
A technically accomplished woman might win a fight against a man, but the risk of injury she takes in the process is immense. So Casini had every right to weigh her own safety. After the bout, she said: “It could have been the match of a lifetime, but I had to preserve my life as well in that moment.” Boxing is inherently dangerous — but there is a very different level of exposure in agreeing to be punched by another woman, and agreeing to be punched by a man.
This is the difference that proponents of eliminating sex categories in sport cannot acknowledge. Some, like Liew, may tacitly accept it while being fundamentally unconcerned about what that would mean in practice for women in sport — perhaps because they consider women’s sport to be fundamentally unserious. (“Sometimes we forget that there are bigger things than sport,” wrote Liew in his Independent piece, which is not an observation he ever appears to have made about men’s sport.)
But for others, particularly for women, and perhaps most particularly for women who are not actively involved in physical pursuits, there is a kind of hope in this denialism. They would like to believe that women’s physical disadvantage compared to men really is a purely, or at least largely, social phenomenon. They recognise women’s inferior status, and they understand that this is tied to the body; but they believe that the body is the cause of the inferiority, and so the body becomes politically inconvenient. They choose instead a tactful fiction of physiological equality — if not in the here and now, then in the inclusive Jerusalem to come.
The female body can, certainly, do more than the male authorities who run sports have historically liked to believe: there is a long and weird tradition of claiming that exercise will cause a woman’s uterus to fall out. Given fair access to training and competition (something which is still very far from assured), women do become faster, stronger, more aggressive. I know this from personal experience. I started powerlifting in my late thirties, and in my forties can pull weights I once thought cartoonishly huge. But I also know that the same weights pulled by a man would be much less impressive, which is why comparing myself to men tells me nothing at all about my progression.
Mixed-sex sports simply lead to exceptional women being forced out by mediocre men: brute strength besting accomplishment. The Olympics’ failure to protect women’s sport is a tragedy for female athletes, but it also makes a travesty of the competition overall. What should be a celebration of excellence becomes, through the IOC’s contempt for fairness and safety in women’s sport, the elevation of the mediocre. After decades of obfuscation and inanity over gender and sport, the truth of it all became clear in an entirely unnecessary meeting: between an apparently male fist and a female face.
Josh Alston in Daily Mail Australia ( Aussie Olympic boxer Harry Garside reveals fear is gripping his female teammates as they call out 'biologically male' Iman Khelif's 'dangerous' 46-second demolition of Angela Carini 02 August) reports:
Australian fighter Harry Garside has revealed his female teammates are 'quite scared' after Algerian fighter Iman Khelif's 'dangerous' and highly controversial 46-second win over Italian Angela Carini at the Paris Olympics.
His remarks come as Aussie boxer Marissa Williamson Pohlman lashed out at the International Olympic Committee over the scandal.
The women's 66kg division has attracted global attention after the IOC confirmed that two boxers who were disqualified from last year's world championships for failing gender eligibility tests were allowed to fight in Paris.
The full article is here:
Next fight for Khelif:
https://x.com/OliLondonTV/status/1819120296240336905
Tribunal Wins!
Sex Matters report in their latest newsletter on two excellent tribunal wins.
More gender-critical legal wins ( 02 August)
This week two gender-critical women won cases against their employers.
On 31st July, two days after the hearing opened, City University of London settled an employment-tribunal claim with sociologist Dr Laura Favaro.
Favaro had been barred from accessing data from a survey that she had done to research the debate around sex-based rights. She will now be able to complete her project and is set to publish her findings.
On Monday 29th July, Cambridgeshire County Council admitted liability for harassment and discrimination against lesbian social worker Lizzy Pitt, who was disciplined after making her gender-critical views public in a workplace LGBTQIA group. Citizen journalists Tribunal Tweets reported that she was awarded £55,000 for loss of earnings, injury to feelings and counselling costs. The court’ss decision on an application by her legal team to receive costs will be published at a later date.
This follows on from the case of Natalie Bird the week before, where the Liberal Democrats conceded liability for discriminating against her.
Another gender-critical claimant, Kenny McBride, lost his claim against the Scottish Government.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Excellent piece on the New Zealand podcast McBlog about an increasing number of companies worldwide who are ditching DEI 😊
Endpiece by Liz
#BeMorePorcupine
Fantastic work Dusty. What an array of great articles you’ve posted over the past few days. I particularly love the last part of theEdie Wyatt.
Very interesting that both boxers accepted the IBA results. They know they’re men. Also interesting is that some are rubbishing the results because the IBA is run by the Russians.
Unbelievable that the IOC thinks that a passport is proof of sex when it’s so easy to get documents changed these days….. Even more interesting is Starmer’s best man.
Btw Nicola Adams has spoken out against their inclusion too.
Thank goodness for some good news at the end. We need it. 💪🏻