I sure am glad I had the sense (for a change) to wait a while before writing about what is likely to be the most lasting ethics controversy of the 2024 Paris Olympics. The initial hysteria in the conservative media didn’t add up. My prize for the worst headline goes to the conservative sports blog Outkick: “Olympic Boxer Pretending To Be A Woman Pummels Opponent in 26 Seconds, Making Her Cry.” Nice.
What happened to launch this mess was an Olympic women’s boxing march pitting Algerian Imane Khelif and Italian boxer Angela Carini against each other. After 46 seconds Carini quit, something that almost never happens in in Olympic boxing. She didn’t shake Khelif’s hand after the referee raised it, then sank to her knees, weeping. She told reporters that she quit because of the pain from those opening punches from her opponent, saying that she has never been hit so hard in her life. Instantly, critic made the episode part of the trans women in sports controversy, a la Lia Thomas et al. That was simply wrong, careless, sloppy and unethical. Here is how the conservative commentary collective PJ Media described the scene:
On Thursday, the Olympics put on a disgraceful show, pitting a man with XY chromosomes against a biological woman. Algeria’s Imane Khelif won the 16 welterweight bout over Italy’s Angela Carini after pummeling his opponent’s head over and over again. After having her head slammed by the biological male for 46 seconds, Carini was done. She removed herself from the match and then crumbled to the mat in tears. Everyone who watched saw that the Italian boxer was no match for the Algerian, who had been disqualified from previous competitions for testing positive for male chromosomes.
Wrong. Imane Khelif is not a biological man, but intersex, meaning that the proper analogy for her dilemma in Olympic competition is the intersex runner, Caster Semenya, whom I most recently discussed last fall. Here is how that post ended…
We can’t have special leagues and categories for however many gender categories science identifies and activists fight to have recognized, and there is no justification for creating artificial standards to eliminate outlier performers. The “solution” imposed on Caster Semenya—force her to take drugs that eliminate her natural advantage—is horrifying. How is this different from banging brilliant kids on the head until they have brain damage and no longer dominate their less gifted fellow students in school? What right do the sports czars have to declare an unprecedented, unique competitor unfit to compete because her, or his, unique qualities are advantageous? Why are so many woman condemning Caster as a cheat, when they should be defending her as a human being with as much right to compete as she is as anyone? Because she’ll win? Because it’s unfair that God, or random chance, or her own dedication rendered her better at her sport than anyone else?
The unique physical characteristics of many, many other elite athletes can be said to have bestowed the exact same kinds of “unfair” advantages that allow Semenya to excel. The only question should be: Are these her real, natural abilities? If so, it is unethical to punish her for being born superior. Meanwhile, biological men transitioning into womanhood are allowed to dominate women’s sports competitions in the U.S. This makes no sense at all…
Intersex individuals have every reason and right to “identify” as the gender they feel most comfortable identifying as, because they are, as the term implies, both sexes at once. Semenya is not the equivalent of the formerly male competitors now making a mockery of women’s ports in the U.S. and elsewhere. She’s naturally gifted, she has a vagina she was born with, and she’s not cheating by insisting that she be allowed to compete as she is.
I have nothing but sympathy with Semenya’s plight. But now what?
Now what indeed. There is a material difference from allowing an intersex runner who has always lived as a female lap less gifted female runners in a footrace and letting a similarly unique female boxer beat a normal woman’s brains in. The quick answer is that this match should never have taken place: what if Carini hadn’t quit? What if she had stayed in one punch too long, and was crippled or killed? It’s just moral luck that she wasn’t. But it’s easy to say what shouldn’t have happened. What should have happened?
It doesn’t help that there was already controversy surrounding the intersex boxer. Khelif is won a silver medal at the International Boxing Association’s world championships in 2022. In March 2023, Khelif was disqualified by the International Boxing Association in a gold medal match. The IBA cryptically said that a test showed that she “did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria” and was “found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.” Whatever that means: the second part could describe Serena Williams as a tennis player.
The IBA was stripped of its recognition as the official boxing body for the Games by the IOC for corruption and financial related issues. Meanwhile it refused to be clear about just what the issue was with Khelif “The athletes did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential,” it said. Not helpful. So the IOC s dismissed the shrugged off the IBA’s verdict calling it “arbitrary” and “without any due process.”
Okay…but does that make it responsible to let a freak boxer fight an unsuspecting woman and render her brain damaged or dead? To get around the banning of the Algerian boxer by a discredited body, the IOC used rules from 2016 in determining boxers’ gender eligibility. IOC spokesman Mark Adams told reporters. “I hope we all agree that we’re not calling for people to go back to the days of sex testing which was a terrible, terrible thing to do. This involves real people and we’re talking about real people’s lives here.”
Yeah, like the real life of the Italian boxer who was hit so hard she feared for her life. Adams is apparently a boob: his justification for Khelif’s qualifications as a female boxer was that she was “born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport.” Oh, she has a female passport! Well, that settles it then.
The Olympics, not for the first time, appears to be run by idiots. Woke idiots. Physical examinations are now considered abusive, and women who test for high levels of testosterone or who may be intersex are no longer required to undergo “medically unnecessary” procedures or treatment.
So: are we back to “Now what?”
Here are some ethics calls I feel comfortable making:
1 This isn’t Imane Khelif’s fault, any more than it was Wilt Chamberlain’s fault that he was bigger than any other NBA player. She has, as Adams said, always lived a a female; she isn’t a “biological male.” It’s not surprising that she went into sports: she could clobber other girls in just about anything but ballet. That is her right.
2. Did Angela Carini do anything wrong? Someone convinced her she did: she officially apologized today, saying “I’m sorry for my opponent. If the IOC said she can fight, I respect that decision. It [her behavior in quitting and crying] wasn’t something I intended to do. Actually, I want to apologize to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke.”
No, she was scared. I don’t think she should respect the IOC’s decision to risk her health and life. Yet I also believe that if a woman decides to box, she can’t cry when she’s hit too hard. There’s no crying in boxing.
3. It is amazing to me that the IOC boxing divisions would allow such a physical mismatch. It is incompetent and irresponsible, and if Carini had been killed or seriously injured, the who sport would have come under fire.
4. My ethical position regarding Semenya doesn’t work with contact sports, because the safety of the athletes are involved. Maybe this is ethics zugzwang again; maybe there is no ethical solution. But allowing a strong-as-a-man female boxer to beat up a normal woman cannot be permitted.
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Ethics Alarms 
Would boxing allow a welterweight fighter to be matched with a heavyweight. I think you can make some comparisons with testosterone levels because that, like size and muscle mass, give physical advantages to competitors.
Why couldn’t the intersex competitor be matched with an equivalent male athlete. What genitalia a competitor possesses is irrelevant in the match therefore it should not be used to determine which league the person competes.
The entire reason we have different leagues for different sexes is exactly because of differences brought about by genetics and the precursor hormones that create those differences. If there is no difference then get rid of gender based programs of any type.
You have to be careful these days when someone says they are “intersex”. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors surrounding it; it’s often used to intentionally obfuscate the trans issue. I’ve seen it applied to biological XY males who have a small penis or even undescended testicles. Was the unnamed testing performed by the boxing authority a genetic test that showed Khelif to be XY? We most likely will never know as “intersex” is used as a cudgel to shut down any discussion and label those who what clarification as bigots.
Not in this case, however.
XY / XX chromosomes aren’t even a reliable indicator of expressed gender when it cones to intersex individuals. There is at least one documented case of an XY individual who presents readily recognisable as female who was only discovered because she had conceived another XY female offspring.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190741/
I too am glad I didn’t jump to conclusions about this. My first reaction was that something was amiss because they don’t do the trans thing in Algeria. There isn’t a lot of visible gender nonconformity in the Muslim world.
It seems that the trans debate naturally leads to the question of why women’s sports exist at all. Why divide sports by something mutable like gender? Why not by race? Whites could have their own 100-meter dash so now they’d have a chance of winning. Why not by any other random characteristic, like eye color? If gender is self-defined, and we can’t define what a woman is, there is really no reason to split sports into arbitrary groupings.
Of course, we give away the fact that we all really do know what a woman is, despite obfuscation by activists, and there really is a genuine conflict presented by the Imane Khelif’s of the world, between being fair to individuals and maintaining the existence of women’s sports.
Different sports divide their competitors into various categories to give athletes who don’t have the natural abilities that the best in that sport have. Combat sports such as boxing, wrestling, judo and taekwondo divide their competitors into weight classes as does weightlifting as strength is very important in those sports. Rowing has a lightweight division to give smaller rowers a chance of winning.
Most sports have age categories to give younger and older athletes a more level playing field. In track and field athletics there are various age categories for those under twenty and for the older masters athletes.
Those athletes with a disability are divided into various categories depending on type and degree of disability.
Some sports may be able to take a wider variety of athlete sizes, e.g. in rugby the tallest players would usually be locks wearing numbers four and five while the halfback wearing number eight would usually be the smallest. In netball, a game derived from basketball and mainly played by women in Commonwealth countries, players are restricted in what area of the court they may be in depending on their position designation, e.g. the tall goal shoot (GS) and goal keep (GK) would be at each end by the goals whereas the much shorter centre (C) would be someone shorter who could move fast.
Equestrian events do not divide between male and female because an athlete’s sex does not confer any advantage, the strength required is in that of the horse. The athlete is required to be skilful and to be able to train the horse.
Different sports and positions in those sports give advantages to people with various body types whether they are tall, short, thin or solid but in the vast majority of sports men have a large advantage over women. If there were no separate categories for women then the vast majority of women would not be able to play competitive sport at the top level.
How therefore should we decide who is a woman? The main difference between man and woman and why we have two sexes and contrary to what the DEI mob say is that women can give birth to children. Therefore anyone who has an intersex condition where that condition would normally allow them to give birth to children then she is a women. If someone has an intersex condition that does not allow them to have children, then does that condition normally give people with that condition an advantage over women. If no advantage then they may compete as a woman, otherwise they will have to compete as a man, unless they have separate categories for the intersex.
Sorry, this person looks like a man and apparently has XY chromosomes. Earlier in the week, the ‘reliable sources’ claimed this person was XX and just had a condition that overexpresses testosterone in women. Then, it turns out, they lied. I can’t trust any information that comes from the Olympics or the mainstream media who will definitely lie to push the gender agenda. What I could see, however, was a person who looks like a man and who hits like a man in a ring with a woman who was hopelessly and dangerously overmatched. That is my most reliable guide at this point and that is all I am probably going to be able to know with even some amount of certainty.
I was not and will not now be one of those people who believed Bill Clinton when he said he didn’t smoke marijuana, then believed him again when he said that he did, but he didn’t inhale, then believed him again when he said that he did inhale, but he didn’t like it, and then believed him when he said he did enjoy it, and then believed him again when he said it was only once, and then believed him when he said he did it many times.
Well, as I’m sure you know, MR, what an athlete looks like can’t be determinative of how they are limited in their sports participation, and this athlete’s DNA composition is similarly not her fault or even concern until an official body, with due process, makes it so. Correct? Presumably the boxer has a vagina and not those male thingies, which explains why the doctor said “It’s a girl!” and why she has lived her live as one. If there is a sports governing body anywhere that isn’t staffed and run run by reactive, brain-dead dolts, I’d sure like to know about it. But the Olympics are right up there with the worst, like the boxing and horse racing organizations.
That is a wonderful story you just told me, but you don’t know if any of it is true. Were you told this by the same people who said that Kamala Harris wasn’t the border czar? The ones that told you that Joe Biden is fit as a fiddle and sharp as a tack and anyone who says otherwise is spreading misinformation? You don’t have anything else to judge this but your eyes as well. Look at that match. Does that look like 2 women fighting or 1 woman and 1 man? Tell the truth. What does that mean ‘their genetic makeup isn’t their fault’? You could say that of any man who wants to compete as a woman. You say this person has been led to believe they are female, that they are XX, no…now XY, but with female genitals. Well, that has happened before, just ask John Money. A boxing organization disagrees and says that this person is genetically male with male levels of testosterone and hormones. You don’t know what the truth is. Have you checked out the Chinese 3×3 women’s basketball team? I was at a restaurant and saw them come out on TV. I assumed they had switched to the men’s teams until I saw the American women come out. It seemed pretty obvious there was 1 woman on that team (named Wang) and she was the one on the bench.
https://fiba3x3.com/2024/olympics/teams/women
Make reasonable rules and stick to them. Drawing a mutant line between hormone levels and other physical characteristics like height, strength, speed, intelligence is arbitrary. A surgically or steroid altered athlete is cheating. If the boxer is competing as she was born, then that is her right: that’s what I mean by the situation not being her fault. Semenya is the right precedent, and in my view, she was discriminated against.
If the decision is made to ban mutants, fine, but define what the range is that falling outside of it makes an athlete ineligible. There are non-intersex women as big or bigger than the Algerian. Again, what she looks like is 100% irrelevent.
I’m adding below the entire, very long, explanation of the controversy from The Athletic, which is behind a paywall:
“Forty-six seconds of a boxing match was all the world needed to sidetrack the 2024 Olympics into a heated controversy about the gender of two women in the field: Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan.
That bout, which ended when Angela Carini of Italy quit against Khelif, spawned intense interest in numerous questions, some of which have clear answers and some of which don’t. The subjects include questions about the women themselves, philosophical queries about how sports approach gender and practical questions about how boxing tournaments and the Olympics are run.
Here’s what we know and a large caveat: Some elements of the situation are unclear or unknowable.
Who is Imane Khelif?
Khelif, 25, is competing at the Paris Games in the 66-kilogram (145-pound) division and has clinched at least a bronze medal. She finished in fifth place in the 60-kilogram (132-pound) division at the Tokyo Games.
She is 39-9, including one professional bout. She has notable past losses in the 2021 Olympic quarterfinals and in the 2022 world championship finals. Khelif won silver at the 2022 world championships and gold medals at the 2022 African championships, 2022 Mediterranean Games and 2023 Arab Games.
Imane Khelif prior to her match against Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori on Saturday. (Photo: Mohd Rasfan / AFP via Getty Images)
How do the Olympics classify Khelif’s gender?
International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials have said the Games primarily rely on passports along with other official national documentation and medical clearances to distinguish men’s and women’s divisions in boxing and many other sports. Some sports have additional requirements.
Khelif was assigned female on her birth certificate and has always been identified on her legal documents as a woman, according to the IOC. She has lived her entire life as a woman and is listed as a woman on her passport, IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Friday.
“My child is a girl. She was raised as a girl,” her father, Omar Khelif, said in a video published Saturday by Sky News. “She’s a strong girl. I raised her to be hardworking and brave.”
Algerian law does not allow people to change their gender on official documents or otherwise, according to Equaldex, a website that tracks LGBTQ laws by country for travelers.
“This is not a transgender case,” Adams said, later adding: “Scientifically, this is not a man fighting a woman.”
Who is Lin Yu-ting?
Lin, 25, is in the 57-kilogram (126-pound) division. She beat Svetlana Kamenova Staneva of Bulgaria in the quarterfinals Sunday to clinch at least a bronze medal.
Lin also competed in Tokyo, finishing in ninth place in the 57-kilogram (126-pound) division. She is a two-time gold medalist at the Asian championships, a two-time gold medalist at world championships and won a gold medal at the 2022 Asian Games.
How do the Olympics classify Lin’s gender?
Like with Khelif, Olympic officials have repeatedly said Lin has met every benchmark to fight in a women’s division.
Lin was registered as female on her birth certificate, according to Cho Kuan-ting, a city council member in New Taipei who spoke with the Taipei Times.
“Lin is registered as a female on her birth certificate. The test result from last year was not even about chromosomes,” Cho said. “It took her years of hard work to get to where she is today … She has proven herself to be the pride of Taiwan.”
Lin Yu-ting has her hand raised after defeating Sitora Turdibekova on Friday. (Photo: Richard Pelham / Getty Images)
So what is the controversy?
Khelif and Lin are competing after they were disqualified from the 2023 women’s boxing world championships. At those championships, they failed what the International Boxing Association (IBA) characterized as gender eligibility tests.
But written details of the tests have not been officially released and the IBA’s administration of the championships has been heavily criticized. This week, the association issued a statement that described the tests using only vague terms.
“The athletes did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential,” the statement said. “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.”
How did things escalate?
Attention turned quickly to Khelif and Lin when they were cleared to compete in Paris.
The IOC is overseeing boxing at the 2024 Games after the IBA was stopped from running the Olympic tournaments in 2019. There were numerous disputes, including allegations of unfair judging and a lack of financial transparency by the IBA. In April, the IBA tried to force the IOC to let it run Olympic boxing, but lost its challenge with the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The administrative spat led to the IBA and the IOC throwing barbs at each other when they had differences in how they handled the eligibility of the boxers.
Then things really boiled over when Khelif fought Carini. Carini conceded 46 seconds into the bout after squarely taking a hard punch, officially abandoning the fight. It’s unusual – though not unprecedented – for boxers to give up in that way. It’s akin to throwing in the towel, as some corners do to concede fights.
Carini says she is sad about the controversy that has emerged. Immediately after the bout, she said she couldn’t continue given the intense pain she endured from Khelif’s punches.
Imane Khelif pats Angela Carini on the back after Carini abandoned their match on Thursday. (Photo: Richard Pelham / Getty Images)
Why is there confusion about the gender tests?
This is where things get murky.
After the world championship disqualifications in 2023, IBA president Umar Kremlev told the Russian state-owned news agency Tass that Khelif and Lin had X and Y chromosomes. Based on DNA tests, he said, “it was proven that they have XY chromosomes.”
According to the National Institutes of Health: “The Y chromosome is most commonly associated with male individuals, but the Y chromosome does not singularly define a person’s sex.”
Kremlev accused the boxers of trying to deceive their competition by pretending to be women.
According to the National Health Service in England, the presence of X and Y chromosomes in women can only be determined with chromosomal testing, usually given in the form of an ultrasound or a blood test.
It is not known if Khelif or Lin underwent such testing because the IBA has not shared more details about the tests.
The IOC has also raised objections to how the tests were carried out and administered, in part because Khelif and Lin were determined to be ineligible only after they had clinched world championship medals.
Why do details about biology matter?
This cuts to the heart of so many of the most complex questions about gender and sport. These are subjects that illuminate disagreements, filled with details that aren’t always simple to find or explain.
Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC, has a job that requires him to regularly talk about these issues publicly. Yet even he had an example of the danger of imprecision on Saturday.
Initially, he said during a news conference that Khelif and Lin were not examples of athletes with differences of sex development, or DSD, a broad term used for people who are born with characteristics that do not strictly fit into long-held associations with descriptions of males and females. Minutes later, the IOC sent a correction and said Bach had misspoken. He meant to say instead that the athletes were not transgender, as he had in earlier remarks, the IOC said.
So much of the online discourse around the boxers has included false assumptions about their genders, prompting comparisons with a wide range of sports that have a wide range of rules set by their federations.
Bach said that the IOC would not take part in what he called a “politically motivated, sometimes politically motivated, culture war.”
And he repeated the IOC’s calls for national boxing organizations to unite under a new umbrella that is not the IBA to agree on better rules.
What happened during the brief fight?
Less than you might think.
Khelif and Carini touched gloves as the fight started. They opened with pawing jabs to zero in their range. Khelif took control of the center of the ring and landed a short uppercut. Carini actively counterpunched but put her left hand up 36 seconds in to get her headgear readjusted.
After the brief pause, Carini ate a stiff right straight from Khelif. She put her left hand in the air again to concede.
Khelif’s punch wasn’t delivered particularly forcefully. But it landed flush as Carini had opened up her stance and lifted her chin while throwing a weak hook.
Imane Khelif walks out of the ring after defeating Angela Carini. (Photo: Mohd Rasfan / AFP via Getty Images)
Will Khelif and Lin be disqualified from the Olympics?
Probably not.
The IOC released a statement Thursday reiterating that every athlete in the boxing tournament complied with the Games’ eligibility and entry regulations. On Friday, Adams said the 2023 disqualifications rendered Khelif and Lin victims “of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA.”
Those positions make it highly unlikely that Khelif and Lin would be disqualified on the basis of gender in the middle of their Olympic tournaments.
On the contrary, Khelif clinched at least a bronze on Saturday with a win against Anna Luca Hamori of Hungary. There was some posturing but it played out mostly like a normal fight, with Khelif taking a unanimous decision.
go-deeper
GO DEEPER
Khelif clinches Olympic boxing medal amid media frenzy
“Eligibility rules should not be changed during an ongoing competition and any change must follow appropriate processes and should be based on scientific evidence,” Adams said.
How have Khelif and Lin directly reacted?
Their public comments have been very limited and not focused on gender.
“I am proud of this win, especially for my country Algeria here in Paris,” Khelif told beIN Sports on Saturday after she clinched the bronze. “I have been preparing eight years for this Olympics.”
She briefly spoke with reporters after defeating Carini, saying: “Difficult for a first fight. Insh’allah for the second fight.”
Lin did not speak with reporters after defeating Sitora Turdibekova of Uzbekistan on Friday.
Khelif posted an Instagram photo of her smiling in the ring Thursday after her win and shared the IOC statement from Thursday on her Facebook page.
Who is Umar Kremlev and why is the IBA at odds with the IOC?
Kremlev has overseen the IBA since 2020 and has some ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In May, a report from a Chinese state-run television network said Kremlev was part of a Russian delegation chosen by Putin to promote sports in China.
The IBA has also had financial backing from the Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom, which it announced in 2021 as a sponsorship that would help keep it from insolvency.
And during these Games, the IBA has been defending its choices and needling the IOC.
On Friday, Kremlev said the IBA would award Carini prize money as if she were an Olympic champion. “I couldn’t look at her tears,” Kremlev said in a statement. “I do not understand why they kill women’s boxing. Only eligible athletes should compete in the ring for the sake of safety.”
The IBA has been the governing body for most of the sport’s international competitions, though in the fractured world of boxing that doesn’t cover headline professional bouts like the ones fans would normally buy on pay-per-view. Those are generally put on by individual promotional companies.
The IBA was the first international federation to lose its IOC association.
Along with allegations of manipulating bouts at the 2016 Olympics, the IBA promised to hand out more than $3 million in prize money to fighters and teams in Paris in 2024. That led the IOC to issue an ultimatum: Countries who stayed loyal to the IBA could be barred from competing in boxing at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
“This total lack of financial transparency was exactly one of the reasons why the IOC withdrew its recognition of the IBA,” the IOC said in May.
How did the 2023 world championship play out?
On March 23, 2023, Khelif rolled past Janjaem Suwannapheng of Thailand to qualify for the world championship finals. But hours before the final the next day, Khelif was disqualified (Suwannapheng fought instead and lost).
”There are some countries that did not want Algeria to win a gold medal,” Khelif told Algerian Ennahar TV after the tournament. “This is a conspiracy and a big conspiracy, and we will not be silent about it.”
Earlier in the same tournament, she had defeated the Russian boxer Azalia Amineva.
Also on March 23, Lin fell to Kazakh boxer Karina Ibragimova in the semifinals and clinched a bronze medal. Lin was stripped of that medal the next day.
On Friday, the IOC said Khelif and Lin were not given any due process.
What’s left for Khelif and Lin at the Paris Games?
Khelif’s semifinal on Tuesday is actually a rematch with Suwannapheng of their world championship semifinal. The finals for their division are scheduled for Friday.
Lin will next face Turkey’s Esra Yildiz in the semifinals on Wednesday. The final is Saturday.”
“Adams is apparently a boob: his justification for Khelif’s qualifications as a female boxer was that she was “born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female”
Interestingly, X has a number of posts complete with photos showing Khelif living everyday life as a male.
I don’t know what kind of photos those would be, unless they show her writing her name in the snow, if you get my snow drift.
There are photos of Khelif wearing a man’s hairstyle and dressed as a male. Besides, being intersex, he may very well be capable of writing her/his name in the snow.
You just described Rachel Maddow.
As we used to say, sometimes it “sucks to be you.” Life is hard and unfair. To ALL of us. Some get it less worse than others, but NOBODY gets off easy. We all have to deal with it. So for the two athletes Jack references who are women that want to compete but are booted because they were born with some male chromosomes, too bad.
The fact that within the “normal” genetic sets there are freak athletes doesn’t negate the fact that when it comes to women in sports, it’s a very distinct advantage.
Serena Williams has a distinct advantage in her sport, but she was beaten. Not often, but those with the highest skill sets could take her on and beat her. Mike Tyson was beaten by Buster Douglas. That’s just NOT going to happen in the male/female sphere for athletes in their prime at the highest levels.
There is zero comparison within men’s sports for a freak biological event to confer the kind of chromosomal advantage held by the two women.
So, no, they don’t get to compete.
Life is hard and unfair, move on, just like all the rest of us.
Yep, this is the solution.
I see stupid disingenuous comparisons (including the obligatory claims of sexism and racism) to Michael Phelps, who also had great genetic advantages over his competitors.
They’re disingenuous because Michael Phelps is the best, period. He is already competing against the best, and if his genetic gifts make him win, then so be it.
Khelif is not the best. She is competing in the “not the best” category, which exists by virtue of distinct biological disadvantages caused by XX chromosomes and the comparative lack of testosterone. Khelif does not actually belong in this category because she doesn’t have XX chromosomes. Moreover, I may be wrong, but her musculature and physique seem to indicate that her body produces testosterone at much higher levels than the average woman. The combination of these two things is enough to require her to compete with those who share her advantage–other people with XY chromosomes and increased testosterone.
The question to ask is whether it makes sense to segregate a particular sport by sex. If (and only if) the answer is yes, sex categories are justified, they need to be enforced. To ensure fairness for women, that means enforcing sex segregation so that all athletes with male advantage-including Caster Semenya-are excluded from the women’s category.
I’ve seen loads of people conflating competitive advantages (like what Michael Phelps and Serena Williams have) with category advantages. There’s nothing unfair about competitive advantages, though. It’s just being good at sport. Having a category advantage means you enjoy a benefit that isn’t supposed to exist in your sport- a motor on your bike in the Tour de France, or androgenization during puberty, in the women’s category. Semenya has that pubertal male advantage, and should consequently be excluded from women’s track events. If the Algerian and Taiwanese boxers do, too, they don’t belong in women’s boxing.
“Caster Semenya’s inclusion in female sport was *merely* grossly unfair. Allowing boxers with the same condition as CS into female bouts is *also* seriously dangerous. No amount of bluster and misdirection changes this. It’s a *profound* ethical breach.”
-Dr. Jon Pike, Senior Lecturer in Sport Philosophy at the Open University
The least worst solution is to ban boxing from the Olympics. Like football, there’s a good chance a boxer will develop traumatic brain injuries over the course of a career. Punch drunk is a term for a reason. Barring that, perhaps a better way to organize divisions is required. Maybe lump together boxers with similar punch strength or perhaps by similar carnage caused by opponents. Regardless, the Olympics are currently underway, and any rule change would have to occur after the games conclude.