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.
