Frenzy intensifying
This is a frenzy intensifying by the day, the further Khelif advances towards an Olympic title and the more desperate the IOC obfuscation becomes. Just a few hours after Thomas Bach appeared confused as to the basic differences between transgender athletes and those with differences in sexual development, Khelif continued to cut a swathe across the competition, demolishing Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori.
The sense of extreme polarisation at ringside was uncomfortable. Outside the venue, public disquiet increased over how an apparently biological male had been permitted to punch women. Inside, a 600-strong Algerian contingent made sure the dynamic was sharply different, bedecking an entire stand in the green, red and white of their national flag. Where Khelif’s entrance was greeted with the lustiest cheers, Hamori walked out to a chorus of cat-calls.
That’s nice. That’s lovely. Man beats up woman and his fans insult the woman.
Typically, the lifespan of an Olympic scandal is finite, a couple of days at most. The sheer blizzard of storylines ensures that a single commotion can rarely be sustained beyond 48 hours. The Khelif tumult, though, seems poised to run and run. Already the IBA is preparing a press conference for Monday morning to express confidence in the test results on which it disqualified Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting from last year’s world championship. The IOC, by contrast, is digging itself an ever deeper hole, with Bach expressing a bizarre and unscientific conviction that someone can be pronounced female based on passport status.
Unscientific in the sense of obviously absurd. It’s like writing on a piece of paper “Joe here is a turtle” when Joe is in fact a human male. Passports are not magic.
The grievances on each side are growing ever more entrenched. It is approaching the point where you wonder how the IOC can possibly hope to temper the crisis. Even when it is pointed out to Bach that biology is all that matters when judging the eligibility of Khelif to fight women, he retreats into the vapid rhetoric that a boxer can be called a woman based on legal documents. His organisation is still inclined to regard womanhood as some abstract concept.
But this is a true flesh-and-blood controversy. Hamori could have contended for a medal and instead leaves with nothing, having lost to a boxer whose very involvement here is disputed. While the authorities remain oblivious, the fires are raging out of control.
I find myself wishing there were another species we could defect to.
Hi Ophelia,
I’ve been reading your blog for a while and appreciate some of your posts. I especially respect your stance on the importance of truth, as captured in this quote:
“So one intrinsic reason for thinking we ought to respect the truth, and try to find out what it is, which entails not fudging it whenever we don’t like what we find, which entails deciding firmly in advance that we will put it first and all other considerations second – one reason for all this is simply that we can, and that as far as we know we are the only ones who can. We can, so we ought to. It would be such a waste not to.”
With this in mind, I wanted to write that I have done some background searching to see where the information about these athletes in question are from. These allegations seem unsubstantiated and originated from the discredited IBA, with its head, Umar Kremlev — a man — who made these accusations. I’ve also searched online for any official test results released about their chromosomes and found none that support these claims.
It may be that Khelif and Lin don’t fit particular (some may read: white) beauty standards. Was it ever OK when Serena Williams was called a man because she didn’t fit certain stereotypes? Why is it OK today? As a woman and feminist, it’s unsettling to me that a man’s unverified claims lead to online discourse that undermine women’s achievements. I think the idea “They only compete this well… because they aren’t women” is problematic.
While the IOC might point to passports as proof of gender, and these documents don’t necessarily verify someone’s sex … much like the IBA’s rulings, which disqualified athletes who *would have* ended a Russian boxer’s winning streak. This raises questions about bias and fairness in the judgments being made. A lot of present-day culture wars, are fueled by disinformation, sometimes spread by malicious actors. This adds another layer of concern when we consider the sources of our information and the narratives we support.
Shouldn’t commitment to truth and fairness apply equally to all women, including those in sports? It seems counter to feminist principles to rely on questionable sources like the IBA to disparage women athletes.
I write this comment respectfully and will go back to lurking. Simply, I am in the habit of fact-checking the information that forms my own opinions, as I agree that arriving at the truth without bias matters, which seems to be the ethos of this blog.
There’s some disgusting stuff going on at Quora currently. A bunch of, no doubt, “good progressives” leaning hard into the good juror pose (“no one knows anything, so just shut up”) and pretending anyone who complains is a dupe of the Russians/hard-right. Of course, not a single mention of women and their concerns. No, it’s all a culture war waged by dark forces dupes and you are stupid and/or immoral if you don’t see that. But course that’s right because when it comes down to it women don’t exist or are just a definition to be altered at will.
I wish I had the energy to respond but the TRAs have all the moves practiced ready to be deployed in a minute (been there been done over) and I if allow myself to respond in kind they win.
The comment sections in my local media are likewise boiling over. The virtuous are vigorously marching to the same jaunty tune, bellowing out curses to defend the right of a man to batter women.
In distinction to other olympic scandals, this won’t blow over quickly. Khelif won’t stop being a man when the games end. He’ll just stop boxing – because he won’t be allowed to box professionally with women anywhere else, and he’s not good enough to compete with other men.
Part of the value of competition is not being able to predict the outcome. If I get to have four aces every hand, and everyone else has to make due with whatever’s left in the rest of the deck, then there’s not much entertainment value. There’s always the possibility of someone getting a royal flush, provided there’s at least one joker in the deck, but the odds are overwhelmingly against it.
So where’s the entertainment in watching Olympic women’s boxing? If everyone knows who’s (almost certainly) going to win, and there are competitors who are allowed to compete due to ambiguous rules, rules that are subject to different interpretations, then what’s entertaining about it? Seeing women get beat up by men? Seeing someone get away with taking advantage of a faulty interpretation of the rules? Is it the controversy itself?
I don’t get it. I don’t watch boxing because it’s brutal and boring anyway, but one would think that if there’s a competition being held, that there should be some reason to have it. It would be pointless for me to play a game of chess against Magnus Carlson with the intention of winning, and while I would be happy to play him, I’m sure he’d find it silly, and no one would care to see such an exercise in futility.
It’s almost impossible to win in the court of public opinion with respect to how gender ideology has practically eliminated the material reality of sex. I don’t know if the IOC can be sued by those women boxers who were unfairly matched with Khelif, but I don’t see any other way for them to get justice. If this goes on then eventually we’ll see male ringers making a mockery of women’s sport.
J.A.:
Funny you should say that because there was a transgender boxer competing in this Olympics who appears to have flown under the trans activists’ radar – or they are deliberately ignoring her for very obvious reasons.
Hergie Bacyadan is a Filipino who has won World Championship medals in two separate martial arts and is now a boxer, and she was eliminated from the Women’s 75kg class boxing tournament by China’s Li Quan four days ago. Bacyadan is a male-identifying female, albeit not medically or surgically transitioned. She has avoided all of that in order to remain eligible to compete as a woman, presumably because she knows that she will be at a massive disadvantage if she has to compete against men.
This will obviously be problematic for trans activists’ because it raises the awkward question of why they insist that female-identifying men must compete as women while ignoring the fact that male-identifying women continue to compete as their biological sex. I mean, I’m sure the mantra doesn’t go ‘Trans women are women, end of. Trans men are men unless it puts them at a disadvantage’.
I can understand why the IOC and other sporting organisations allow her to compete as a woman because despite her transgender identity she is a woman, but if the IOC are prepared to let her compete on the basis of biological sex over gender identity, why are they ignoring biology in the case of the two boxers with DSDs? That question may be rhetorical here at B&W but it’s one that really needs to be asked of the IOC.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hergie_Bacyadan
@Should be Studying #1
The IBA maybe untrustworthy, but the athletes didn’t appeal the decision with the CAS, which is an independent body.
This seemed to be good informed: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1819427537740558848.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawEcUmpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHVMkJVQIebd2gDNCZgi3_rARv2RlhPC_WSnaRTwGek5SFk5iW6fpmyp4wQ_aem_GvS1N_X-mCfb2jlIUHKFiQ
@Acolyte of Sagan #6.
Do you know what sex is reported on her pasport?
AoS, I did bring up Bacyadan’s speaking out about this with someone else on Facebook who was talking up the issue of transphobia, and they simply didn’t respond to it. Confirmation bias is hard to overcome and of course social media makes motivated reasoning easy to indulge in. I should also mention that they also have an autistic son who is now being called a daughter, so you can imagine I have to tread very, very carefully on this subject because for them it’s seen as an opportunistic attack against trans people. That this scandal is really about fairness to women in sport just doesn’t get through to them, and the reporting on it is atrocious as well and just feeds their fears.
Trans activists are all in for Khelif because they’re all in for denying the material reality of sex and how that can matter, because trans women are women, that’s why. The IOC agrees with them and says Khelif is a woman because she is one, that’s why. It says so on her passport! Never mind the material facts of the matter and just keep on pretending all is well and of course fair to women. And I’m now hearing noises about another professional boxing association trying to be an alternative to the International Boxing Association, one that would not test for sex. So it could get even worse for women in sport now.
Should be Studying — I recommend this post by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, whose essays are always thoughtful, informative, and precise. He explains that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif likely suffers from a specific disorder of sexual development, that he (or she, if you prefer) and his parents and even doctors quite possibly didn’t even realize he was male until recently, but that regardless, he has an adult male’s size and strength and therefore it is unfair for him to compete against women.
The controversy really has nothing to do with beauty standards.
‘I find myself wishing there were another species we could defect to.”
It’s easy, Ophelia. Just say “I identify as (desired species)” and, voila! Defection accomplished.
Evergreen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog
Athletes with DSDs are gold for the trans activists. Because they actually have a chromosomal anomaly leading to ambiguous sexual characteristics, a lot of people feel uncomfortable complaining. That would make them ableist! Essentialist! A lot of other undeniable ists!
Once the DSDs are accepted, then the trans use that as ammunition. If the athletes DSDs are not accepted, they present it as bigotry, failure to accept women because, as Should be Studying claims, they don’t meet beauty standards, though no one questions biological women who often don’t meet conventional beauty standards.
It’s a win-win. One way, it’s easy ammo to acceptance. The other way, it’s easy ammo to paint your opponents as horrible, anti-woman bigots.
Should Be Studying #1 wrote:
The tests were apparently run in ‘22 and ‘24 by an independent New Delhi lab which was CAP-accredited and ISO-certified. The IBA said they were not tests for testosterone, which would mean they were looking at chromosomes. Both Khelif and Yu-ting were disqualified on their basis, which must have meant they tested XY. Neither one appealed, though Yu-ting had been stripped of a title. This strongly suggests the tests were accurate and the athletes knew it. The IOC recently admitted at an Olympics briefing a that they received the IBA Boxing letter with results. Whether the IBA itself is trustworthy or not really doesn’t seem to come into it.
The only question then is whether one or both athletes:
1) have a DSD which gives them a male advantage (5-ARD & PAIS)
2) have a DSD which does not give them a male advantage (Swyer’s Syndrome & CAIS)
total insensitivity to androgen prevents testosterone from masculinizing the fetus by turning to estrogen, thus giving them a normal female phenotype.
3) don’t have a DSD but are standard males who either claim to be transgender (and think this matters) or are straight up cheating (or both.)
If we eliminate 3), we’re still left with no official test or diagnosis differentiating between 1) and 2). However, I think we can tentatively rule out 2) for several reasons:
A) If this was the case, the athletes & their coaches etc would know it because it’s not hard to test for. Since the argument for including them on a woman’s team is now very good, there is no reason they wouldn’t release results. In fact, they’d be eager to do so, and would have released them years ago when disqualified.
B.) Both Kehlif and Yu-ting have masculine physiques. While that alone wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the possibility that they’re females who “simply don’t fit beauty standards,” it does eliminate the possibility that they’ve got either Swyer’s or CAIS.
This article might be helpful in getting a general picture of the situation:
https://quillette.com/2024/08/03/xy-athletes-in-womens-olympic-boxing-paris-2024-controversy-explained-khelif-yu-ting/
Sastra, I like your analysis. Unfortunately, I think, the focus has been on demonstrating Case 2, or otherwise proving the lack of male advantage in individuals. I think that’s a problem, because it opens the door to complex tests of advantage rather than tests of maleness. We don’t test adults to see if they are small and weak and lacking in advantages of adulthood so they can play on children’s leagues, we just exclude adults from children’s leagues. Ditto weight classes.
Look at what happened with testosterone testing. When trans-identifying males were required to reduce T to participate in female events, people complained that they shouldn’t have to do that. An accommodation based on individual advantage went by the wayside.
Males regardless of abilities should not participate in events for females. Male advantage is one(!) of the reasons for sex segregation, but is not itself sex classification.
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