The IOC’s contempt for female competitors
After taking questions on the women’s boxing furore with his usual huffy condescension, the International Olympic Committee spokesman Mark Adams strived for a little consensus. “I hope,” he said, “we are all agreed we aren’t going to go back to the bad old days of sex testing.”
Actually, we are not. Adams was perpetuating the myth that sex testing was archaic, cruel and degrading, involving athletes dropping their pants for doctors to check they had the “right” genitals. In fact, a sex test was conducted only once in a female athlete’s career: a quick cheek swab with a cotton bud revealing biological sex was added to her permanent record. Anti-doping tests are far more intrusive and can happen any time.
The bad old days of a one-time cheek swab. I’m not really seeing the “bad” part.
Maybe Adams is thinking women feel insulted by the swab because it implies they’re too butch or some shit? If he is, he should think harder. The insult (and harm) of being forced to compete against a man in a women’s event is a whole lot worse.
But at the 1996 Atlanta Games an IOC questionnaire asked female athletes if the cheek swab should continue (82 per cent said yes) and whether it made them “anxious” (94 per cent said no). Nonetheless the IOC ignored almost 1,000 elite women who replied and abolished cheek swabs for Sydney in 2000.
That decision exemplifies the IOC’s contempt for female competitors and is the very reason the tough, seasoned Italian boxer Angela Carini abandoned her bout after 46 seconds to kneel weeping on the canvas with a bloody nose. It is also why in 2016 at Rio, the women’s 800m podium was filled entirely with biological males, including Caster Semenya who took gold.
Those runners and the two controversial boxers at these Games — Imane Khelif of Algeria and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting — have a DSD (difference of sexual development), that wilfully misunderstood phenomenon. They are not “intersex” — ie between or a “mix of” the two sexes — because no one is. They almost certainly have 5-ARD: they are biological males with XY chromosomes but whose bodies lack the receptor that creates external male genitalia.
In developing countries many are read as female at birth and raised as girls. But at puberty their internal testes start producing testosterone at normal levels so they acquire most of the strength, muscle mass, height and power of other men. In other words, they experience male puberty after which many start living as men. Semenya is pictured in her autobiography at 15, broad-shouldered and bare-chested on a beach in swimming trunks.
That in itself would be a nasty shock, and a very difficult version of puberty. But it’s not the fault of women, so women shouldn’t be punished because of it.
African coaches began deliberately scouting for DSD males to train for high-level female competition, since after 2000 they even had a shot at Olympic gold.
But in recent years, individual sport federations have tightened up eligibility rules regarding trans athletes and those with male DSDs. (These are totally separate, although conflated by trans activists who use DSDs to “prove” sex is not binary but a spectrum.)
Each sport has followed the same trajectory. Males start winning lower-category female contests, women lose out, no one cares until a male transitions into elite female sport: Laurel Hubbard into weightlifting; Lia Thomas, swimming; Emily Bridges, cycling. After an outcry each sport banned anyone who transitioned after male puberty from the women’s category and insisted DSD males reduce testosterone. Only World Athletics, thanks to Seb Coe, acted before, say, a mediocre male sprinter fancied FloJo’s 100m record.
Yet what of the IOC itself? In high dudgeon at this defence of female sports, it issued a gender framework document. This stated there should be “no presumption of advantage” just because an athlete is male or has a DSD. The first principle of this utterly incoherent paper is “inclusion”, which, as every sport federation has ruled, is wholly at odds with fairness to women. Second is “prevention of harm” — not to stop women like Carini being harmed by a male fist but to protect those who might suffer from being ineligible to compete.
And so we bump up against the wall we always do bump up against. Women just don’t matter. Women don’t count. Women are the inferior half, so fuck’em. If there’s a problem for men or an opportunity for men, it doesn’t matter what happens to women, as long as the men end up better off.
This calamity is not merely the IOC’s fault — it is precisely what it wants. This is sport run according to its stated principles of gender inclusion and the obliteration of sex classes. For Paris it even issued a glossary for journalists of “terms to avoid”, including “born female” and “biologically male”.
Yet fewer people will now be censored. The IOC is not just at odds with sport federations but many current female athletes, including female boxing champions who are refusing to fight Khelif and Lin. As the tide goes out on pernicious gender ideology, why does the IOC still deny science? Perhaps to court US sponsors or stay “relevant”.
But mainly because it is profoundly institutionally sexist. In 2015, it allowed any male who reduced testosterone (to a rate still ten times the female average) into female sports without consulting a single woman. It discriminates against female athletes by denying their biology where once it used it against them, banning women from the ski jump until 2014 because it might damage their wombs.
And it abolished a simple test that would have stopped Paris being remembered for televising male violence. Bring back the cheek swab: for female boxers the bad old days are now.
I do wonder how these guys sleep at night.
Is that the right link in the OP? It goes to a tweet from Fair Play For Women; I’m not seeing the Janice Turner commentary.
Oops, sorry, fixed.
Wonder what the result would be if they polled elite female athletes today about bringing back the chromosome testing? I would guess 98% in favor.
Chromosome testing, at least on its own, is not the answer. There are women who are XY and there are men who are XX.
@Ohtobide The cheek swab is really an initial ‘screen’ to see if any further investigation is needed, rather than a ‘test’: xx chromosomes -> end of the matter, cleared to compete in female category; xy -> testing needed to find out what the condition is. One of the problems up to the early 90s (as well as some incredibly insensitive handling of results) seems to have been that it was used crudely as a test (xx -> in . xy -> out) so, for example, xy athletes with complete androgen insensitivity would be banned from the f category despite having no male advantage – those athletes can now compete unrestricted in the f category at least under world athletics rules whereas those with at least partial sensitivity to androgens have their participation regulated by being required to supress testosterone
A very good article in Quillette on this topic:
XY Athletes in Women’s Olympic Boxing: The Paris 2024 Controversy Explained
@Ally Hall
XX chromosomes should not be the ‘end of the matter’. There are men who are XX. They are almost certainly infertile but apart from that a lot of them are normal males who have been through male puberty and have testosterone levels in the male range. So chromosome testing would certainly have to be combined with hormone testing. Perhaps XX with unadjusted testosterone levels within the normal female range could be the ‘end of the matter’. But then there might be a question of whether the levels were really unadjusted and whether they had always been low. Let’s face it, there is no simple solution and there will always be some unfairness.
@Ohtobide ok, but the population being screened is not all athletes, it’s just those who want to compete in the female category, then those who were wrongly thought at birth to be female but have male advantage can be excluded. If they are ‘normal males’, observed to be male at birth, brought up as boys, etc, they wouldn’t be among this population, right? (or are many of these xx males assigned female at birth?)
@Ally Hall
No, I don’t think they would be seen as female at birth. But they might know they were XX (a lot of people do know their chromosomes nowadays) and so feel free to compete against women if XX is all that is needed. I understand that coaches spend a lot of time trying to find 5-ARD men to compete. I imagine they would certainly search for XX men if XX is the ‘end of the matter’. One solution might be chromosome testing + hormone testing + observation of genitals. But then that would be “archaic, cruel and degrading, involving athletes dropping their pants for doctors to check they had the “right” genitals” wouldn’t it? Although I don’t think it would be nearly as unpleasant as what I have heard all athletes must endure when being tested for drugs.
@Ohtobide agreed, there may well be no system that is both practical and 100% watertight. It’s difficult to see how you can avoid the need for some provision for medical inspection in case of suspicion, or maybe just include it in something like the regular medical that some countries require for participation in school sports. (Yes re drug testing: the testers have to observe the urine leaving your body and going into the cup. Getting anywhere near elite level as an athlete involves signing up for a degree of indignity in the name of fairness)
Ohtobide, there is no one marker that we use to identify someone as male or female. Males (typically) have XY chromosomes, male external genitalia, male internal genitalia, and make small gametes. Females (typically) have XX chromosomes, female external genitalia, female internal genitalia, and make large gametes. In addition, there are the secondary sexual characteristics, which typically develop at puberty and are (typically) reliable markers of sex. These include things like size, musculature, presence or absence of Adam’s apple, etc.
The fact that there are some people who do not fit the typical male picture is not to say that they are female, or should be considered females for the sake of sporting, jobs, or other female-only spaces or services. In most cases, humans are good at telling the sex of an individual without any testing, but in some situations, there are ambiguities in appearance or even in DNA, which may mean looking at other markers. At that point, calling someone male or female will depend on the preponderance of characteristics, or perhaps the hormone levels.
It seems invasive to people that we should test this stuff just for someone to play sport, but the thing is, it wouldn’t be necessary if men would keep to their own sports and stop trying to bully their way into women’s sports. Because they are doing that, because of the activities of the trans, and a handful of individuals with DSDs who are taking advantage (I suspect most with DSDs are content to live their lives and let others live their own), it means we have to maintain hypervigilance. This is unfortunate, but for a large portion of the world, and most of human history (if not all), women have had to fight for their own spaces, their own sports, their own jobs, even in many cases ownership of their own bodies, then it is necessary, and fair, to keep men out of women’s sports, even if they think they are women, even if they were raised as women, even if they have XX chromosome structure, and even if they were raised female.
Ohtobide: good thing we dont have to have your approval for any measures that protect women, you would never give it. For two decades mens rights activists have lurked in the shadows conning the ivory tower that some men are marginalized due to their optional hobbies. mens rights activists have spread their misleading claims. the effect of their efforts is to harm and rob the rights of vulnerable groups such as women, kids, ppl with psych issues, gays and others to benefit men who pretend to be marginalized but arent. every man on the planet is free to compete in the male category . for the 99.999999% who cant get on an elite sports team , that doesnt mean they were excluded. for those men who cheat to rob womens spaces , places on womens teams and use silly slogans such as xx = xy and vise versa, we all lose if gender bullys are allowed to rob women of their sport. stop lying
Well said, iknklast. The addle-headed postmodernists always conclude that when we reject their epistemological anarchism we are committing the original sin of “essentialism” and indeed it easy for the less sophisticated among us to be nudged into a position where we cling to simplistic definitions that amount to a sort of essentialism without the metaphysical baggage. And that, of course, is a trap. It an untenable position that can’t survive even the briefest contact with reality and if we embrace it the TRAs will be there pointing an laughing. (They will be pointing and laughing anyway but I would prefer that when they do that they are merely living their true clown self rather than making a real point.)
As an aside, I remember many years ago when I was studying for my master’s a student in, I think, French made the long trip to the philosophy department (which at that point had been exiled to the edge of campus to share a rather eccentric and leaky, though architecturally award winning, building with the entomologists – gadfly jokes were made). His mission was to tell us that metaphysics had been finally and fully debunked and philosophy had thus been rendered redundant. Let’s say the staff were rather more gentle with him than I would have been in explaining that the analytic philosophy tradition had long ago (since Hume, at least) come to the same conclusion and for something like a century at that point been constructing a working alternative to both metaphysics and epistemological anarchism.
Alas, I fear that alternative remains in exile when it comes to intellectual fashion, but of course, hanging out with scientists is never a bad thing.
@Kyle Reese
Stop calling me a liar. And stop ranting incoherently while you are at it.
I hope that women’s sport can be saved, though it is looking increasingly unlikely, and I think all men (biological males) should be strictly excluded. But Janice Turner is just wrong to think that a once-in-a-lifetime cheek swab will settle the matter.
Yes, Kyle Reese: what Ohtobide said. This is your first comment here so please note: it’s not ok to assert that other commenters are lying. That’s a basic rule at pretty much any blog that’s not just a fight club.