Is the policing two-tier?

Amid escalating far-right violence across England and in Belfast over the past week, instigators and apologists for the rioting have sought to spread a pernicious myth: the idea that white far-right “protesters” are the victims of a “two-tier policing” system that treats them more harshly because of their race and political views.

That is an idea propagated by Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, as well as Laurence Fox and various other social media demagogues in the past few days. On Monday, Nigel Farage claimed that “ever since the soft policing of the Black Lives Matter protests, the impression of two-tier policing has become widespread”.

Ah the impression has become widespread – not the thing itself, but the impression of the thing. Cautious. Crafty.

Agitators point to the policing failures that allowed organised grooming gangs of predominantly Asian men to operate in Rochdale in the 2000s…

The Rochdale abuse was scandalously ignored by police. But the argument that it is a factor in policing today ignores major reforms to the way child sexual exploitation is treated in the region, including the addition of a specialist unit in Greater Manchester police and every Ofsted inspection since 2014 finding that Rochdale now responds to reported cases effectively.

The Guardian says “Asian men”; is that a euphemism for Muslim men? Is the “Asian” more or less relevant than the “Muslim”?

Wikipedia on Rochdale child sex abuse ring:

The Rochdale child sex abuse ring involved underage teenage girls in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England. Nine men were convicted of sex trafficking and other offences including rape, trafficking girls for sex and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child in May 2012. This resulted in Greater Manchester Police launching Operation Doublet and other operations to investigate further claims of abuse. As of January 2024 a total of 42 men had been convicted resulting in jail sentences totalling 432 years.^[1] Forty-seven girls were identified as victims of child sexual exploitation during the initial police investigation.^[2][3][4] The men were British Pakistanis, which led to discussion on whether the failure to investigate them was linked to the authorities’ fear of being accused of racial prejudice.

So they likely were Muslims, or from Muslim families or of Muslim background or culturally Muslim or some category like that. Not necessarily devout or even obedient, but raised on Islamic views of women, which are not exactly generous.

There’s a lot of tiptoeing around this, for pretty obvious reasons. Apart from the Tommy Robinson-Laurence Fox types nobody actively wants to say that maybe importing Islam has some downsides, but then avoiding saying it leads to grooming gangs that get away with it for too long.

The two-tier claim seems to be more of the same thing. Maybe the police hold back on protests by “Asian men” more than the police hold back on other kinds of protests. Or maybe they don’t.

The Guardian continues:

Allegations of a two-tier system had gained currency even before the events of the past week, with claims about the policing of the pro-Palestinian protests in the UK since 7 October. Robert Jenrick, now a Conservative leadership candidate, claimed in March that two-tier policing had governed the police’s handling of those protests.

Cousins, you see. Islam v Judaism. Muslims v Jews. The Guardian and Beeb and so on don’t report it that way, because…what? It’s too painful to admit? It’s too dangerous to admit? I don’t know. But the result is that the religious aspect gets left out, when in reality the religious aspect is quite important (gross understatement). We’re all schooled to frame it in ethnic terms as opposed to goddy ones, but the goddy ones do in fact matter. Is it impossible to talk about this honestly? Maybe. I feel quite squeamish about spelling it out myself.

This has been annoying.

Seattle Public Library still reeling from May cyberattack

Three weeks ago, waist-high cardboard boxes filled to the brim with books cluttered every aisle of this industrial Georgetown warehouse. Stacked in rows, the still-to-be-processed books packed 90 boxes at its peak. 

Now, two months after a ransomware attack shut down many of Seattle Public Library’s services, library workers are celebrating: They’ve finally finished sorting and processing a backlog of thousands of borrowed books. 

We get to return books again. I did enjoy returning that book about Orwell v women after all these weeks. I felt rebuked every time I saw it sitting there waiting.

On Memorial Day weekend, the library was forced to shut down everything: from the internet and public computers to use of the library catalog and in-person book checkouts. Most of the services have been restored sporadically since then. The internet is back up, patrons can again receive new library cards in person and check out physical items. The online, searchable version of the library’s catalog is also up and running.

The library still has work to do: Borrowers still can’t register for new library cards online, and other services are also down, like online account login, self-checkout lanes, holds on physical books and other items like DVDs and CDs. Library pickup lockers, microfilm/microfiche and the use of public library computers are also unavailable.

Yes holds on physical books. I want that back!

The attack has cost the library hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the total growing every day as the work continues. This includes the costs of restoration programming, the consulting firms, data-mining efforts, overtime pay and more.

Which is enraging. So much money that could have been used for better things.

Be good to your libraries.

It’s what week?

What?

What kind of weirdo association of midwives is that? There’s no such thing as “chest feeding.” It’s breast feeding or nothing.

Maybe they just mean “chest feeding” as a pointless euphemism for the use of confused women who idennify as men. But they shouldn’t use it, because it’s ambiguous at best, and will sow more confusion. And anyway maybe they don’t, maybe they also mean “chest feeding” as the nightmare where men ingest a lot of hormones in an attempt to produce some toxic liquid in their male breasts and make a helpless infant drink it.

With “midwives” like these who needs misogynists?

Originally a comment by Acolyte of Sagan on Frenzy intensifying.

J.A.:

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.

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.

Deepening feud time.

Elon Musk’s claim that race riots in the U.K. are “inevitable” is “pretty deplorable,” a government minister said Tuesday, amid a deepening feud between the U.K. administration and the tech billionaire.

Heidi Alexander, the U.K. courts minister, slammed the social media boss for a series of posts on the violent disorder gripping Britain in recent days.

…

Musk has come under fire from government figures after he suggested Sunday that “civil war is inevitable.” The X owner has also described the U.K. police response as “one-sided” and has been directly critical of Starmer’s explicit condemnation of the far-right for attacking mosques.

“I think Elon Musk’s comments are totally unjustifiable,” Alexander told the BBC Tuesday morning. “I think at the moment everybody should be calling for calm.” And she added: “He does have a responsibility, given this huge platform that he has, and so to be honest I think his comments are pretty deplorable.”

That’s the thing. He has this huge platform, because he paid $44 billion for it. Therefore he should use it very cautiously. What he’s saying can’t be described as cautious.

Lots of words, no clear meaning.

Sebastian Coe has taken a thinly veiled swipe at the hugely controversial Olympic gender policy in boxing, saying that all sports governing bodies must tackle the issue head-on with a clearly defined stance.

Well yes but it also needs to be the right stance. A clearly defined stance that men can invade women’s competitions would not be an improvement. The problem with the “hugely controversial” policy that lets men punch women is not that it’s not clearly defined.

Coe is the president of World Athletics, which introduced a new gender policy last year that means any athlete with differences in sexual development (DSD) must reduce their testosterone to 2.5 nanomoles per litre to compete in any event. Transgender women also cannot compete in the female category in athletics.

The DSD policy should be just no.

Coe is seen as a leading candidate to succeed Thomas Bach as the president of the IOC and, asked on Monday what his advice would be on the boxing issue, he said: “It’s unvarnished; have a policy. Be clear and have a policy.

“You’re never going to make everybody happy but you have to plant the flagpole down somewhere and that’s why it was so important for us. If you don’t, then you get into this sort of territory.

“I did five years on the British Boxing Board of Control as an administrative steward, and I have daughters. How do you think I feel about this?”

Notice anything about those three paragraphs?

They don’t tell us anything. The issue isn’t not having a policy, the issue is having the right policy. The issue is not making everyone or anyone happy, the issue is fairness. As for how he feels about this, I have no idea! If he means he thinks the Olympics needs to stop letting men invade women’s competitions he should say so.

Nobody needs to hear what Musk thinks.

Downing Street has criticised comments by Elon Musk who posted on X that “civil war is inevitable” under a video of violent riots in Liverpool.

Keir Starmer’s spokesperson said the violence came from a small minority of people who “do not speak for Britain” and said the prime minister did not share the sentiments of the billionaire, who has previously been criticised for allowing far-right figures back on to his social media platform.

…

Musk was responding to a video posted on X by the Libs of TikTok account, originally posted by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who has been spreading videos of rioting that has targeted mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers.

The X owner criticised Starmer again on Monday night, responding to the prime minister’s statement on protecting Muslim communities and mosques. Musk posted: “Shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on *all* communities?”

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was banned from X in 2018, when it was known as Twitter, but his account was restored by Musk last year under his new ownership. Musk has since interacted with Robinson on the platform, posting exclamation marks under at least one of his posts about the violence. Musk has amplified a number of accounts posting inflammatory content about the violence, by commenting or posting exclamation marks under the users’ posts.

Such a nice guy.

Clarence Thomas found pocketing bribes again.

Justice Clarence Thomas took a previously undisclosed flight on a private jet owned by GOP megadonor Harlan Crow in 2010, a top Senate Democrat said Monday – the latest in a series of revelations that come as the high court is under pressure to strengthen its ethics practices.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden said US Customs and Border Protection records reviewed by the committee showed Thomas and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, flew from Hawaii to New Zealand on Crow’s jet on November 19, 2010, and then returned on the jet a week later.

The flight was not listed on Thomas’ financial disclosure reports and is the most recent example of the conservative justice accepting luxury travel from Crow becoming public. Earlier examples of that travel documented by ProPublica last year – including travel on Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose – prompted widespread calls for ethics reform at the court.

This isn’t some naive newby not understanding about public officials not accepting backhanders, this is a Supreme Court Justice. If he doesn’t get that he shouldn’t be accepting sweeteners he shouldn’t be on the goddam bench.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates on Monday said “today’s news strengthens the case” Biden made for reforms. “The most powerful court in the United States shouldn’t be subject to the lowest ethical standards, and conflicts of interest on the Supreme Court cannot go unchecked,” Bates said.

It seems pretty goddam basic.

Round and round we go with the same old obfuscations.

Olympic boxer Imane Khelif said the wave of hateful scrutiny she has faced over misconceptions about her gender “harms human dignity,” and she called for an end to bullying athletes after being greatly affected by the international backlash against her.

…

The vitriol stems from claims by the International Boxing Association, which has been permanently banned from the Olympics, that both Khelif and Lin failed unspecified eligibility tests for the women’s competition at last year’s world championships.

Khelif declined to answer when asked whether she had undergone tests other than doping tests, saying she didn’t want to talk about it.

Ah, well, that’s it then. If he doesn’t want to talk about it we just have to trust him when he says he’s a woman. What possible reason could he have to lie about it?

She expressed gratitude to the International Olympic Committee and its president, Thomas Bach, for standing resolutely behind her while the banned former governing body of Olympic boxing stoked a furor around her participation in Paris.

For standing resolutely behind him for no apparent reason. All they’ve told us in that it’s “in their passports.” To all appearances the IOC does not actually know that Khelif is a woman, so it’s peculiar at best that they’re so resolute about insisting he is.

Khelif started her Olympic run last Thursday with a victory over Angela Carini of Italy, who abandoned the bout after just 46 seconds. Carini later said she regretted her decision and wished to apologize to Khelif.

That unusual ending raised the chatter around Khelif into a roar, drawing comments from the likes of former U.S. President Donald Trump, “Harry Potter” writer J.K. Rowling and others falsely claiming Khelif was a man or transgender.

How does the AP know? How does it know it’s “false” to claim that Khelif is a man? What makes the AP so confident that it knows?

The IOC repeatedly declared her and Lin qualified to participate in the Olympics, and it has decried the murky testing standards and untransparent governance of the IBA, which was banished entirely from the Olympics last year in an unprecedented punishment for a governing body.

But it hasn’t tested them! It cites their passports instead of tests! The IOC can “declare” any old thing, even repeatedly, but that doesn’t automatically make it true.

You’d think journalism could do better than this.

It’s hilarious that Mark Adams huffily says the sex of Olympic athletes is PRIVATE when Olympic sports are divided by sex.

Also – why does Mark Adams always have two bottles of Coke in front of him at these pressers?

Good lord. The head of the IOC is shocked, shocked, that people are publicly talking about the sex of competitors in Olympic sports. That’s PRIVATE. How very dare you. It’s PRIVATE. You filthy meddling bad people talking about who is or is not a woman; it’s PRIVATE.

Riots, clashes, two-tier policing, communinnies, violence, fires, cops.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said violent protesters who had targeted Muslim communities would swiftly face the “full force of the law” as he sought to quell days of anti-immigration rioting.

The stabbing to death of three young girls in the northwest English town of Southport last week has been seized on by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups, with disinformation spread online and amplified by high-profile far-right figures to spark disorder in towns and cities.

“Whatever the apparent motivation, this is not protest, it is pure violence and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or our Muslim communities,” Starmer said on Monday after an emergency meeting with police and prison chiefs. “The full force of law will be visited on all those who are identified as having taken part.”

The violence erupted last Tuesday after social media posts said the suspected attacker in Southport was a radical Islamist who had just arrived in Britain and was known to intelligence services.

It’s a mess.

The trouble is, there is such a thing as radical Islam, and it is bad. There is also such a thing as racism, and there’s such a thing as xenophobia, and they too are bad. Islam itself, radical or not, has content, including a lot of contempt for and hatred of women.

On the one hand stabbing little girls dancing, on the other hand setting fire to a hotel where immigrants are housed.

It’s a mess.

More entrenched than ever.

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.

Still stuck in the playpen.

Donald Trump broadsided Kamala Harris in a string of derisive social media posts on Saturday, focusing his attacks on the vice president’s intellect after a week that saw her both out-fundraise him and surpass him in some battleground state polls.

In a succession of Truth Social posts after calling off his planned ABC debate with Harris, Trump called Harris “low IQ,” “dumb,” and said she lacked the “mental capacity” to debate him.

Hm. I don’t know either of them personally, but just going by what I’ve seen of the two, I would not give him the job of evaluating her intelligence.

The former president’s remarks indicated a sustained ratcheting up of the rhetoric against Harris that many in his own party have cautioned against, fearful of detracting from what they view as more favorable lines of attack on immigration and inflation. Even as he accused Harris of enabling “corrupt and open borders” and a “terrible economy,” Trump overshadowed those critiques with personal insults, reminiscent of the rhetoric he used against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.

Reminiscent of everything, really. Crude insults are core Trump.

Harris fired back on social media on Saturday, accusing Trump of backtracking on a pledge to debate “any time, any place” and suggesting that she’d attend the previously agreed upon ABC debate whether Trump does or not.

Trump then issued an ultimatum, saying he’d either debate Harris on Fox News or not at all — while lobbing a number of insults against her intelligence and accusing her of lacking the “REAL capacity” to face him one-on-one.

“Does anyone notice that Kamala Harris doesn’t do Interviews? That’s because she’s really DUMB! She’s unable to speak properly without a Teleprompter,” Trump, who also routinely employs a teleprompter at his rallies, posted on Truth Social, comparing her speaking abilities to those of President Joe Biden and attaching a clipped video of the two welcoming prisoners freed from Russia back to American soil.

I wonder what Trump means by “speak properly.” He certainly doesn’t know how to do it himself. He knows how to keep going – how to keep saying words – but there’s no propriety in evidence at all.

Trump’s campaign is showing no signs of pulling back. In a statement, Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, echoed the former president’s insults, saying, “It’s be a disaster to have a dumb and low IQ individual like Kamala Harris as President of the United States. She has shown her ineptness by allowing crime to run rampant, failing as Border Czar, and being the most liberal candidate ever to run for President. The stakes are too great to let a dummy play pretend President.”

Jeezus. Send these people a truckload of mirrors.

The cheating continues.

Trying to burn migrants alive:

A far-right mob have set fire to a Rotherham hotel used to house migrants as police brace for more violence across the UK on Sunday.

Masked rioters, some draped in England flags, assembled outside a Holiday Express hotel in Manvers, South Yorkshire, as they clashed with police. After thugs threw bricks and smashed windows, footage emerged of a fire raging from a bottom-floor window as hotel guests looked on from the top floor. It is unclear if they were migrants.

It comes after at least 90 people were arrested after riots rocked major cities including Manchester, Liverpool, Hull and Stoke on Saturday, leaving destruction in their wake.

A library was torched in Liverpool, Merseyside, after “violent thugs” descended on it and left part of the building reduced to ash.

Bad times today.

Trump says no let’s have the debate at my house.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump proposed to debate Democratic U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Fox News on Sept. 4, and the Harris campaign said Trump is trying to back out of a debate that had been set to run on ABC.

…

Trump and Biden had agreed to a second debate on Sept. 10 on ABC News which the former president had suggested should be moved to Fox, the most popular network with his followers. Harris, who on Friday secured the delegate votes needed to clinch the Democratic nomination for the Nov. 5 election, said on Saturday that she plans to participate in the originally planned debate.

“It’s interesting how ‘any time, any place’ becomes ‘one specific time, one specific safe space,'” she wrote on social media platform X. “I’ll be there on Sept. 10, like he agreed to. I hope to see him there.”…On Saturday, Trump said on Truth Social that Harris is “afraid to do it” and that he will see her on Sept. 4, “or, I won’t see her at all.”

Dude she’s not the one demanding to change the rules.

Trump’s proposal for the debate on Fox came right after the Democratic National Committee launched an advertising campaign on Friday taunting him by saying “the convicted felon is afraid to debate” and questioning whether that is due to his stance on abortion.

David Plouffe, an adviser to former President Barack Obama who recently joined the Harris campaign, posted on social media: “Now, he seems only comfortable in a cocoon, asking his happy place Fox to host a Trump rally and call it a debate.

Here’s hoping that soon he will be very comfortable in the cocoon of private life. Or prison; that would work too.

Now this is how you do it.

[Updating to add: from 2012]

A Spanish runner, Ivan Fernandez, was right behind him and, realizing what was happening, started shouting at the Kenyan to continue running. Mutai didn’t know Spanish and didn’t understand. Realizing what was taking place, Fernandez pushed Mutai to victory.

A journalist asked Ivan, “Why did you do that?”

Ivan replied, “My dream is that someday we can have a kind of community life where we push and help each other to win.”

The journalist insisted, “But why did you let the Kenyan win?”

Ivan replied, “I didn’t let him win, he was going to win. The race was his.”

The journalist insisted again, “But you could have won!”

Ivan looked at him and replied, “But what would be the merit of my victory? What would be the honor in that medal? What would my mother think of that?”

That’s how you do it.

Janice Turner explains:

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.

And the winner is