Apparent biological men qualify to fight in Olympic women’s boxing, woman quits a fight with biological male after sustaining strong blows to the head

90 thoughts on “Apparent biological men qualify to fight in Olympic women’s boxing, woman quits a fight with biological male after sustaining strong blows to the head”

1. Demoralization

   Alchemy

   1. After more thought, I think I should strike “Alchemy” here – I’m not sure it applies with DSD.

      Woke Marxism got everyone here though – causing problems for society to fix – all to dialectically advance Woke Marxism – leaving the affected behind.

2. That fight against Angela Carini is an outrage. I don’t understand how Khelif or any sportsperson can be so shameless as to take advantage of such a profoundly unjust situation.

   They’re going to keep sweeping this issue under the carpet until the women competitors organize themselves and, en masse, refuse to participate while these two are still in it. Let’s see if the IOC have the balls to disqualify all the actual women for refusing to fight, leaving just the two men to duke it out.

   1. I don’t think it’s possible for women competitors to organize “en masse” in a way that will have enough effect. There are always going to be female athletes who genuinely believe that TWAW and they’ll be eager to jump into the subsequent moral melodrama as Defenders of the Oppressed. Add to that the women who would now find it both easy to believe that TWAW and easy to get a spot on a team they hadn’t originally qualified for.

      If the brave coalition of women competitors fail, each member is in all likelihood now banned from sports. Those are high stakes, with odds of success too low.

   2. Women in sport have faced bans, exclusions and rape and death threats for challenging men in women’s sport, so you can’t really blame them for keeping quiet. This is an issue for society as a whole to address and fix, not just a small group of women.

      1. 1+

   3. I agree with Jonathan, women need to boycott these events en masse. Be courageous for F’s sake.

      (apologies, I’m very sad and upset by this).

3. Women competitors are certainly owed clarity about what they are facing. Is this athlete a normal woman (with natural but freakishly high testosterone levels?), or a normal man who IDs as a woman, or an intersex individual (such as XY chromosomes with insensitivity to testosterone)? The authorities should give a definitive statement on this.

   1. A normal woman cannot have testosterone levels that overlap those of men; did you see the reference I gave? Intersex people are vanishingly rare (though these could be examples), but look at the person! The IOC failed by making up rules that apparently depend solely on testosterone levels that can be adjusted, and that is just not the way to deal with this.

      1. Intersex people who were brought up as female seem to be overreresented in elite sports, for the obvious reason that they tend to be pretty athletic for a girl and thus get disccovered and funded as sport talents. In many societies, anomalies of sexual development are a sensitive taboo subject, and an intersex athlete might not know what exactly is wrong with them until a chromosome test for an international competition reveals it.

         1. It’s worse than that, several countries have actively sought out people like Semenya to train, so they can win more medals, in women’s sport. It’s cheating at a national level.

      2. Reuters claims these two are like Caster Semenya, born with androgen insensitivity syndrome. This causes an XY fetus to fail to develop male genitalia. These cases are often brought up as girls because of this. They still have testosterone at males levels. I don’t know how it affects strength. If they have male strength then they shouldn’t compete.

         Some more discussion here—not about sports (a video with an example of such a person):

         https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/discovering-my-gender-bendy-prenatal

         https://www.reuters.com/sports/olympics/olympics-dsd-rules-focus-womens-boxing-2024-07-31/

         1. Regardless of what Reuters says, to me, these two look like they are not only XY but also androgen-sensitive, and having had a lot of androgen in their past if not present.
            True androgen-sensitive individual look like biological women.

            1. The report is rather vague. I just assumed it was similar to Caster Semenya from the wording “differences in sex development.”

         2. Semenya has 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency (5αR2D), not AIS.

            We don’t know what specific DSD Khelif has, but it’s reported that his chromosomes are XY.

            1. But whatever Semenya has, it has the same effect.

               No we don’t know but presumably it has a similar effect. Definitely she shouldn’t be competing. Here’s a video of someone with a condition like the above.

               https://youtu.be/Z5HzbTpVjNE?si=ag_SQon1AHcplxGp

4. As I’ve said, I don’t think an activity whose goal is to give your opponent brain damage is a sport. That said, the boxing weight classes only make sense based on the sex of the competitors. Women need to withdraw from organizations that won’t support or protect them.

   1. You can hold any private definition of sport that you like, but historically, combat sports are among the oldest organized sports competitions. The original Olympic Games featured wrestling, boxing and pankration (essentially, MMA), and there was pushback against these activities because (obviously!) training for real combat with weapons and armor would be much more beneficial compared to that watered-down unarmed stuff. Times have changed…
      That said, yes, this is a travesty. Shame on the committee that allowed Khelif to compete.

5. This was a travesty.

   The male boxer doesn’t claim to be female, but apparently has a Disorder of Sexual Development which caused his genitalia to be ambiguous enough to allow him to be mistaken for a girl baby — an actual case of “assigned female at birth.” His natural testosterone is high because it’s being produced by his testes. There’s no such thing as functional “girl’s testes.”

   Although there’s no official diagnosis being released, people familiar with DSDs can piece together a reasonable diagnosis. According to Zachary Elliot on X:

   The boxer likely has something like 5-ARD, which involves internal testes that produce normal male levels of T with unaffected T reception. This results in the performance advantage by significantly altering the body structure permanently once male puberty is experienced.

   LGBTQ++ organizations have recently included DSDs under the “trans umbrella.” But they’ve also included Gender NonConformity as another way of being trans. That would make female boxer Carini trans, and made to fight another trans person. The “TRAs umbrella” category is such nonsense.

6. It seems in this case we are not speaking of trans women but of athletes with DSD. In Algeria gender reassignment is not allowed, for example, so this seems pretty clear in the case of Imane Khelif.

   Also, IBA issued a statement (https://www.iba.sport/news/statement-made-by-the-international-boxing-association-regarding-athletes-disqualifications-in-world-boxing-championships-2023/) in which they say among other things: “Point to note, the athletes did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential”. The reference to chromosomes comes from the president but it’s not clear if it’s just a shorthand expression for the press or they actually checked.

   Nevertheless, I think the arguments stand the same (as was the case for Caster Semenya), so I think it would be better to clarify.

   Finally, just for the sake of the news (& since I’m Italian) Angela Carini, speaking afterwards with the press, issued an apology for leaving without saluting her opponent.
   https://www.corriere.it/sport/olimpiadi/24_agosto_01/angela-carini-dramma-olimpiadi-ct-0022984c-6a64-4501-9df1-73bbb186axlk.shtml

   1. Caster Semenya is a biological male, not an intersex, and in that case there should be no competition with biological females. In such cases yes, Semenya could be regarded as a trans woman having transitioned from a biological male to a self-identified biological female. That could also be the case here, because even biological males can have DSDs.

      I’d suggest you look at the two references about the boxer having failed a testosterone test; they’re not the ones you impugn.

      Also, see Sastra’s comment just above.

      1. I think, in fact, it’s not “even in males”, but that _most_ DSDs appear in males.

      2. Semenya and Khelif may well be biological males, but they would not count as trans women under the usual definition. “Transgender” is usually defined as “identifying as a gender different from the gender you were assumed to be at birth”, not “Identifying as a gender different from your biological sex”.

         I think it’s extremely plausible that both Semenya and Khelif were assumed to female at birth (even if this assumption was biologically inaccurate). In that case, there was no transition to a different gender identity, and they would not qualify as transgender.

   2. Angela Carini has absolutely nothing to apologize for. It’s the organizers who put her in that situation who should be apologizing to her.

      1. Someone is accusing her of having planned to retire from the match since before the beginning.
         It’s maybe worth pointing out that reading her lips she does not only say “it’s unfair” (“non è giusto”) but also says to her coach “it hurts too much” (“fa troppo male”).

         So I think it’s classy on her part to acknowledge that usually you salute your opponent after the match “I was wrong. I came out of the ring full of anger. I have never finished a match without saying goodbye to my opponent. I apologize to Imane for not greeting her”

         Also I agree that the organizer are the problem; and again, I think Angela Carini is right in avoiding to critique her opponent (who, as somebody else already said, probably really thinks she is female, IF she has ambiguous genitalia and was raised as one): “I am no one to judge Imane. The truth is that we know nothing about my opponent, except one thing: that she is not at fault. She’s a girl who’s here to do the Olympics, like me. Who am I to judge her? It’s not up to me, it’s up to others to do it”.

         This to me seems a polite way to say it’s IOC’s fault

         1. She said that well, and I’m glad she clarified it.

   3. Doesn’t surprise me that the operation is not allowed in Algeria. It is subsidized in Iran where transing is an “out” so gay people don’t get hanged.

      Algeria is a Muslim country run on very secular, socialist/poverty lines.

      On a sidenote, they became the very last country to get lead out of petrol a few years ago.
      D.A.

7. This is a tougher case than many other cases, because this individual seems to be ‘intersex’ not ‘trans’.

   From what I can tell, Khelif is a male with DSD who has lived as a woman since birth and who suppresses androgen to pass as a woman. Khelif has probably been referred to as a woman and thought of herself as a woman since she was born.

   So I can understand why it is seen as very insensitive to say “you can’t compete with women; you’re actually a man”.

   Of course, that’s probably what you have to do for the integrity of women’s sports.

   But I don’t like to see the vitriol with which this person is being attacked in some quarters. Unlike some ‘trans-woman’ athletes who likely joined women’s sports in order to cheat, Khelif has likely been living as a woman for a lifetime and doesn’t think that she’s doing anything wrong by competing with women. Especially since modern gender ideology suggests that it’s okay.

   It’s a very unfortunate situation, driven mainly by unclear rules in sport on how to determine who falls into the ‘female’ and ‘male’ categories. (In Biology, sexes are defined by gametes, but that’s not necessarily how we have to segregate sports… Should segregation be chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, etc.)

   1. It may seem harsh, but for the purposes of boxing, Khelif is a man. And the purposes of boxing is the only thing that’s relevant here.

      1. We don’t segregate sports to keep eggs only fighting against eggs or Y chromosomes only fighting against Y chromosomes. We segregate sports because egg-producing individuals differ on average from sperm-producing individuals in their physical characteristics, which are what we actually care about.

         So, the way in which we segregate sports does not need to match the biological definition of sex. (And in fact, it probably never will, because we won’t examine gametes directly; we’ll use some imperfect proxy like chromosomes.)

         1. You don’t seem to realize that having the equipment to produce eggs is the DEFINITION of women, and to produce sperm is that of men. And that correlates almost perfectly with the puberty one goes through. Intersex individuals are vanishingly rare: 1/5600.

            1. Actually any condition with an incidence of 1 in 5600 live births is not a rare disease as doctors think of “rare”. Because the condition is life-long, every town I have ever lived in has been big enough to have one, statistically speaking, albeit born many years ago in most cases and s/he may well have moved away. Big cities will have hundreds. Any one of them could be gifted enough to make it to elite competition in athletics unless something about the condition itself works against athletic performance. DSDs encompass a whole grab-bag of mechanistically unrelated disorders whose only feature in common is that, by definition, they happen to affect the external or internal genitalia or the concordance between them. The more heterogeneous the category, the higher the apparent incidence. (The incidence of “congenital heart disease” is higher than “isolated ventricular septal defect.”)

               Most DSDs present as ambiguous genitalia apparent at birth. A few are genuine surprises when outwardly normal female genitalia turn out at puberty to harbour testes inside. With a little work it is possible to establish which of the two and only two sexes, as defined by gametic body plan, the individual really is. (This is important to the individual because undescended testes or disordered ovotestes may become cancerous.)

               So my answer to Cocomunga’s objections would be that it is possible to unambiguously determine the eligibility to compete as women for all competitors, 100%. A girl might sincerely believe she is a girl but if she has a testis that makes testosterone that virilizes her body at puberty she can’t compete as a woman. And of course no one who knows he was “assigned male at birth” should be eligible, either.

               Cocomunga, keep in mind that we aren’t trying to settle the existential question of “Are you a woman?” For sport, all we need to settle is, “Can you be allowed to compete in women’s events without compromising safety of the other competitors or the integrity of the sport?” For the latter question we can, unambiguously. The rules say so. Activists want to undermine those rules for their own agenda but so what else is new?

            2. Remember that most trans-activists firmly believe that biological sex is nothing more than a social construct.

               I’ve spoken with people who talk blithely about their gender changing on a second by second basis, at which point I tell them they are confusing their emotions with their gender and get a barrage of abuse in response.

   2. I don’t believe in personal beliefs that have shaky (or nonexistent) factual basis and are very advantageous to the individual harboring them. The same way, Elizabeth Warren allegedly believed that she was partly Native American.

8. What I don’t understand is, if the IOC’s general principle is to refer gender qualification decisions to the world governing bodies of the individual sports concerned, why in this case did they deliberately override the decision of the relevant body (the IBA) and insisted on substituting their own, clearly inadequate, criteria?

   Is there any other sport in which they are doing this?

   1. Please be aware that you apparently haven’t read the Roolz: no more than 10% of comments should be from single individuals so threads aren’t dominated.

   2. “The IBA was stripped of its status as the global governing body for boxing by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in June last year because of its failure to complete reforms on governance, finance and ethical issues.

      The IOC is therefore running the boxing competition at the Paris Games, as it did at the Tokyo Olympics, and its rules on the inclusion of athletes with DSDs and gender diversity in the women’s competition apply.

      The latest IOC guidelines, opens new tab issued in 2021 state that inclusion should be the default in such cases and that athletes should only be excluded from women’s competition if there are clear fairness or safety issues.”

      https://www.reuters.com/sports/olympics/olympics-dsd-rules-focus-womens-boxing-2024-07-31/

      1. Many thanks for that background. Per the last paragraph, it would be hard to think of a case where fairness or safety were more comprehensively at stake than boxing. Madness!

         1. Pretty extreme case. Maybe IOC will change their rules.

      2. For the IOC to be accusing a sports federation of corruption is pretty rich.

         1. A black hole calling the kettle black.

         2. It would be like FIFA calling the English FA corrupt. Quite a hoot!

         3. 1+

9. In this bout, the cornrows give him more of a female look, but have a look at this picture: https://x.com/icons_women/status/1640951143340847105/photo/2

   Does anyone actually think this is a woman?

   1. From looking at the comments on Twitter (and a few things here), it’s clear that many people don’t understand the difference between a biological male and female, or the effects of hormones and male puberty on athletic advantages. If you have the athletic advantages associated with male puberty, then you simply shouldn’t be competing against biological females.

      I should add that I changed “transwoman” in the title to “biological male” simply because if the boxer was, as is likely, a biological male, then boxing as a woman means that, unwittingly or not, the person has undergone a transition of sex from biological male to self-identified females.

      1. Dr. Coyne, as someone who competed in physical sports in high school, college, and continue to do so on a limited basis as a master’s athlete, I can state that the difference between men and women is obvious. There is no comparison. While the very best female athletes may be better than some male athletes, as you approach the top level it’s not close, even when you’re talking about something like masters swimming or running within any age group. Look at a list of local running races, like 5k or 10k or Park Runs, or any other community runs. There are some exceptions where females do pretty well, like extreme endurance sports (Courtney Dauwalter in ultra running and some marathon swimmers come to mind), but those females are outliers.
         I coached kids soccer and baseball for many years. At early ages, say 6-10, boys and girls could be relatively even (though boys were usually more aggressive). After that, boys were simply better, faster, stronger, and more coordinated. Differences are real.

10. Even the odds – actual biological women get brass knuckles.

11. I read about these two athletes and tried to discover facts about their sex by articles published on the internet. I was unable to. The IOC does not recognize the IBA, claiming they are corrupt. The IBA claims they tested their DNA. Neither athlete claim to be transwomen, they claim to be women. I can’t find what standards the IOC used to determine eligibility. It is wrong for the issue of these athletes’ sex to be a mystery and discussion based on supposition. It is not purient curiosity to want to know that female athletes are female. As we know, biological males competing against women is unfair. In the case of boxing it can be deadly.

    1. Under self-identification rules and conventions as we use in Canada, a man can simply claim to be a woman. He doesn’t have to claim (or admit) to be trans, or assigned male at birth or cop to any gender issues at all. He just says he’s a woman. Even if someone points out the obvious fact that he’s a man, he can say, “No I am not.” And it is transphobic to do the pointing out. If the pointer-out is in any kind of vulnerable position (like another athlete) the pointer-out will get in more trouble than the ringer will.

       If you say “inclusion should be the default” (as the IOC says), then you will incent all these men (whether they have DSDs or whatever) simply to say they are women and that will be the end of it. You can check their blood for testosterone but unless it is pharmaceutical testosterone, which indicates doping, the male levels don’t count against the self-ID if the sport’s governing body abdicates its duty (or, in this case, behaves in such a way to get trumped by the IOC.)

       This is where trans-inclusive policies have brought us to. The good-spirited people have said trans people should have all the rights of anyone else except the ones we don’t want them to have (competing as women and accessing other women’s spaces like prisons and shelters — we all know the list of “carve-outs”.) But that’s not how rights-seekers work: they want the whole shootin’ match. The very “rights” we want to deny them are the ones they most crave. And in boxing (of all sports!) they just won them.

       1. Totally agree. Canada (of course) went whole hog without thinking it through.

12. It’s worth keeping in mind how common it’s been, since at least the 80s (as far back as my personal history goes), for trans women to — how to phrase this? — “transition to being ‘intersex’/DSD individuals”.

13. How much of this could be prevented by bringing back cheek swabs? It’s a one-time test that Olympians Sharron Davies and Nancy Hogshead, as well as biologist Emma Hilton, seem to favor reinstating by the IOC.

    Neither of the boxers found ineligible by the IBA appealed that decision.

14. I wonder if these two boxers are being celebrated within the LGBTQ+& community and on college campuses. They should be, as the final expression of the ideology that identity trumps biology. Plus the added intersectionality of being from a Muslim country should earn Khelif extra points among the cool kids. It is fascinating to me that highly educated people can take the opinion that TWAW (commenters on this site clearly excluded). Is this brainwashing or hypnotism?

    1. I don’t think in reality there is such a community any more, since the aims of the “TQ” group in that acronym have diverged so significantly from those of the “LGB” members that their interests are now quite fundamentally opposed. Identity trumping biology is the very opposite of the argument on which the full and proper recognition of LGBs has been based. Although this is never said out loud, the implication of “affirmative therapy” is that people who end up as gay men are simply “failed” trans-women — that is, they should, in an ideal world, have been given puberty blockers and transitioned so that their full “womanhood” could be realized. Likewise lesbians are, by implication, failed trans-men. Lesbians who point out that their interests are not aligned with those of trans-men experience particularly virulent pushback. In other words, the endpoint envisioned by trans activists is one in which gays and lesbians are erased.

       1. JD, interesting to note the alignment between the endpoint envisioned by transactivists and fundamentalist Islam-run countries like Iran. I thought that the “queers for Palestine” protesters would face instant death if they actually went to an Islamic nation, but maybe they’re all on the same side after all.

15. Nice explanation by Carole Hooven about the biology of XY folks (yes, still males) with DSD https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1819041282594873759.html

    1. Thanks. That explains it well. These two individuals shouldn’t be competing.

16. It’s come to this as athletes who were previously disqualified to compete as females are now able to do so thanks to the intense lobbying of individual sport bodies to allow them to compete according to their professed gender. I’ve read one response from the IOC about the matter saying that the passports of the boxers in question state they are women, and that’s good enough for them! As if a piece of paper negates the reality of the fact they have internal testes and as a result during puberty now have far more strength than the female boxers they face do.

    That some athletes with this particular DSD are being picked up by small and poor countries to compete for Olympic glory is also a betrayal of fairness in sport, and for the IOC to not care is a betrayal of the Olympic spirit. I suspect the IOC is too cowardly to actually do the right thing here, thanks to the hyperbolic politics of the transgender movement. Oh well, it’s only those women who are being subject to an unfair competition who are being hurt, and they really don’t care about them as much as they do their own image.

    It’s a terribly unfair thing for those women competing in Olympic boxing this year who have to face opponents who have a biological advantage over them. This issue is a well-known one thanks to Caster Semenya years ago making it one, so there’s no excuse for the IOC to not do the right thing now. I hope the French force them to do so, as this scandal will be an asterisk on their Olympics forever otherwise.

    1. “…the fact they have internal testes…”
       If I get it right, they can have external testes plus a penis (like “Lia” Thomas) and still be considered females by IOC and allowed to fight (literally) with actual females.

17. Pity that Imane Khelif and Lin Yu‑ting apparently are in different weight classes, so presumably they won’t have to fight each other. But even with a weight disparity, that would be more fair than allowing them to fight biological women.

    I expect they will both win gold and the travesty will be complete. That should result in significant fallout, but I’m afraid the science will continue to be distorted and misrepresented by trans activists. All to appease a vanishingly small minority while half the human race gets disenfranchised.

18. One reason why the traditional organized feminist voices have been silent on this affair is that it was feminists (not just trans activists) who pressured the IOC into abandoning sex testing. Because sex testing is done only on athletes in female events, the feminists were unhappy that “women’s bodies” were being “policed” with testing that would, they claimed, lead to more intrusive anatomical examinations or even unwanted drug treatment if the athletes wished to contest the findings of the sex tests. They aren’t even keen on testing women for pharmaceutical testosterone as a doping agent because men are not similarly tested. (Men are already saturated with natural testosterone and there is no level that would be considered suspiciously supra-normal. They use synthetic anabolic steroids to build muscle illegally, not pharmaceutical T.) There is a certain doctrinaire rigidity to this position.

    The feminists scored a major victory against the Olympics in 2021 after decades of fighting against the policing of female bodies — it’s always been a sore point because there have always been men, and their governments, who wanted to cheat. But the only way you can catch them is to test all the women. I’m sure the IOC does not want to open up that can of worms again.

    The IOC party line on these boxers is that they are women — it says so on their passports — with unusually high levels of endogenous testosterone. So what?
    (They also have Y chromosomes but we don’t let that get in the way of a good story anymore.) The women they box against will just have to lump it.

    This could be the sunset of women’s sport. There is bitter feuding between the pragmatic faction that wants to keep men out, to ensure fair competition and the ideological faction that wants to stop making women submit to sex testing (even the ones they know aren’t women!)

    1. The feminist movement never appealed to me, even though I studied and worked in male-dominated fields. No one treated me badly at all.

       The feminists seem to have botched things thoroughly and are likely immune to persuasion.

    2. “traditional organized feminist voices have been silent on this affair”.

       Many, many high profile feminists from the sporting world and beyond have been very vocal on this topic. Women’s voices are often ignored in the mainstream media but surely you must have read about women’s objections to ‘Lia’ Thomas? Both for taking women’s gold medals and showing his dick in the women’s changing room. There was a sustained campaign to get him out of women’s sport. Feminists won. https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/lia-thomas-loses-legal-battle-2024-olympics-hopes-dashed-rcna156808

       Perhaps you just don’t follow any high profile feminists on social media? I’m sure you’ve heard of Martina Navratilova, Riley Gaines, JK Rowling? I recommend giving them a follow to keep updated. Or follow Graham Linehan’s ‘The Glinner Update’. He summarises what is happening every week.

       Male allies have spoken out too, like decathlete Daley Thomson and boxing world featherweight champion Barry McGuigan. https://x.com/ClonesCyclone/status/1819030959452287063

       1. The courageous women you cite are iconoclasts and outsiders, Joolz. JKR was vilified by the very female (and male) actors who would have been nobodies but for her. Maybe there is hope in the UK. Silent are the career feminists allied hand-in-glove with Leftist political parties and radical movements in Canada and the United States. They don’t even like Riley Gaines because she sounds MAGA (and there’s a race angle over here. The two boxers are POC, therefore oppressed and sacred.) As long as the trans activists help them with the abortion crusade to get Kamala Harris elected President and keep Justin Trudeau in power here, they will do the needful for trans. As I have said before, women’s sport is small potatoes, easily chucked to the curb for The Greater Good. Feminists like the famous screamer at President Trump’s inauguration don’t even know what sport is.

          As the Telegraph story linked by Pyers Simon at #22 makes clear, no one at the IOC wants to go back to sex testing of athletes because those women who have male levels of testosterone [Wot??] would then be disqualified. So there you have it. The Flavor-Aid has been drunk.

          1. It’s hard for women to speak up when they are subject to rape and death threats and organized campaigns to get them sacked. That’s why the main voices you hear are people powerful enough not to worry about that. Or those, like me, who don’t have a job to lose.

             But many, many women are working through organisations like Sex Matters, Women’s Declaration International, ForWomenScotland, LetWomenSpeak, SaveWomensSport, Gender Critical Research Network, WPUK, GLAAD, LGBA and loads of others. Many need to speak anonymously for fear of reprisals, but we are there and we are fighting for our rights.

             Women’s human rights are more important than left/right politics. I am a feminist, socialist, atheist, Scottish independence supporter, but I will stand with misogynists, Tories, the religious and Scottish unionist people in the specific campaign for women’s rights, even though I disagree with them on most other things.

             The boxers should be treated like any other male, letting POC cheat because you are afraid to call them out is racist.

             Which women have male levels of testosterone? The normal male and female levels don’t overlap. I can’t find a source for that. Prof Coyne has said this already in a comment.

             “the normal adult female and male testosterone range differ markedly with a bimodal distribution, the lower limit of the male range being approximately four- to fivefold higher than the upper limit of the female range”.
             [Source https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cen.13840%5D

             What the IOC wants is irrelevant. Basic fairness demands that we exclude men from women’s sport.

             As Bill Shankly said: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.” As is all sport 😁

19. As others have said, this isn’t related to the trans issue. Khelif claims to be a biological woman with a DSD, not trans.

    For 99.98% of people XX=female and XY=male, but 0.02% of the population have medical conditions that lead to atypical chromosomes.

    The IBC banned Khelif because [he] has XY chromosomes that are not allowed in women’s competitions.  They clearly don’t understand that some women *are* XY, such as women with Swyer Syndrome.  As biological women, they should be allowed to play in women’s sport. They are given female hormones to assist with their condition, they don’t take testosterone.

    Chromosomes alone don’t determine biological sex, the SRY gene is in play too, but the IBC has not released full test results for Khelif. Without knowing [his] SRY status or the DSD [he] claims to have, we can’t be 100% sure of [his] biological sex.   This information should be released to stop all the speculation. Anyone who wants to compete in women’s sport should be open about their genes/DSD.

    Having said that, I have been referring to Khelif as [he] because my own, non expert, view is that the power in [his] punches, seems to indicate a male puberty.

    1. Swyer Syndrome. I had not heard of it. A quick glance at Wikipedia says it’s like Turner Syndrome (X0), although the person has XY chromosomes.

       1. I’ve been sharing a list of chromosome variations on X, there’s a copy here…. https://x.com/joolzzt/status/1819183669799530649

          I’m no expert but I have learned a lot from people with DSDs on twitter.

          Zach Elliot has a terrific website with videos and essays on most DSDs.
          https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com

          I share his ‘ why sex is binary’ video regularly!

    2. The IBA almost certainly understands there are conditions in which XY individuals will have female phenotypes and can legitimately compete as women. The IBA has not disclosed what testing they did that DQ’d the two boxers previously, only that they carried out “two tests” that determined they were ineligible to compete in women’s boxing and that testosterone was not tested. Everything else is gossip, but to say the IBA doesn’t know about Swyer syndrome (or complete androgen insensitivity syndrome) I don’t think is fair. There is an appeal process that one boxer availed himself of (unsuccessfully) and the other did not.

       Just looking at them I agree that it is common-sensically impossible that they have an XY condition that failed to virilize them at puberty.

       It would be interesting to know what process the IOC’s ad hoc boxing unit used to determine that these obviously virilized boxers (DQ’d by their own association) were eligible to compete as women.

       1. The IBA said they don’t allow XY in women’s boxing. The piece I read didn’t say ‘unless they are women’.

          That’s why it’s important for the info to be released. Anyone who wants to compete in women’s sports should be open about chromosomes and DSDs. You mentioned elsewhere that some women object to sex tests. I’ve haven’t heard anything about that in the UK, is it just an American thing?

          1. I haven’t found any source for the claim that IBA tested for chromosomes, apart from a quote from the president of the association to russian press.
             I’d bet the president is not the most skilled person in the organization scientifically-speaking.

             The latest official statement the association released just days ago, explicitly citing the two athletes competing in the olympics, did not disclose the detail of the test performed, they just said they did not limit themselves to checking testosterone (link above in the comments).

             I’m afraid this leaves us with no clue regarding the condition the athletes have (but I agree that simply from looking at them I’d exclude something like Swyer or CAIS).

             As for the IBA rules on eligibility, though, in this document (https://www.iba.sport/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20240303-IBA-Technical-Competition-Rules-v7-clean.pdf) they say ““Women/Female/Girl” means an individual with chromosome XX. For this purpose, the Boxers can be submitted to a random and/or targeted gender test to confirm the above, which will serve for the gender eligibility criteria for the IBA Competitions”.

             This doesn’t seem a wise choice to me (if it’s to be taken literally) because it would not take into account (all) DSDs, and/or means they chose to exclude all those with DSDs (but this would paradoxically allow people with SRY gene transferred on X chromosome to compete in women events, and I doubt it’s what they intended).

             1. That’s what I was referring to. By saying “Women/Female/Girl” means an individual with chromosome XX.” They are excluding women who aren’t XX. And by rejecting the two suspect boxers, the assumption has been they they are XY. If they were XX they would have met the XX criteria and been accepted. But their process isn’t logical at all, so who knows 🤦‍♀️

                They seem to be making it over complicated. If you want to enter women’s sport then be open about your sex. The fact that Khelif isn’t being open makes one assume he has a reason to hide his sex.

          2. No it’s an Olympics thing. The Wiki entry on Swyer Syndrome actually discusses sport. I found this history of sex testing at the Olympics from a reference at that wiki:

             https://web.archive.org/web/20100126090814/http://www.123hjemmeside.dk/Facius/7031466

             The Olympics is assuming XYs with things like androgen insensitivity syndrome are OK to compete with regular XXs.

    3. I think you can go further than that, Joolz. Sex and chromosomes match in all people (except those in whom no gonads developed), as these organs necessary for “making” sex can’t not match the sex chromosomes except by failing altogether to develop..

       The 0.02% figure refers to all individuals who have the forms of DSD that result in an apparent “intersex” condition. The large majority of these are infants born with ambiguous genitalia. (As with other congenital anomalies, the cause is not usually able to be determined.) Once you figure out what sex they actually are, by body plan for making which gamete, there is no mismatch between chromosomes and sex. (Even if the individual will be anatomically incapable of productive mating, the sex can still be established in everyone who is 46XX or 46XY, without circular reference to the chromosomes.) If a baby is born with female-appearing external genitalia, which is as far as we go with children who appear otherwise healthy, but turns out later to masculinize at puberty (as with 5-ARD), his chromosomes (XY) will match that later proof of male sex. His external parts aren’t part of the definition of sex, because we know they can be malformed when the machinery is defective, just one can be born with six toes and a cleft palate.

       I would say there are no conditions where XX can produce fully functional and fertile testes, and no conditions where XY can produce ovaries — which by definition contain immature gametes before birth — and a uterus. (Mosaics and chimeras of XX/XY are the exceptions that test the rule, proving it in this case. Pregnant women do occasionally turn up with XY chromosomes in some cells.)

       So in all cases, a pure 46XY test result proves the athlete is male. All that needs to be done is to hear his appeal, if he makes one, that he has a rare condition that prevented his being masculinized at puberty. 5-ARD is not one of those conditions. It can explain why he thought he was a girl during childhood but it’s now irrelevant for competition.

       The activists queering our systems for understanding the world are trying to make it artificially complicated — “women with physiologically high T”, which is nonsense — because it suits their agenda. XY in a masculine-looking body = male = DQ for women’s events.

20. Instead of dissecting the minutiae of DSDs, or going through the multitude of ‘gender’ options to set rules for fairness, would it just be a simple test:

    Did you go through male puberty?

    If yes, you aren’t eligible to compete in women’s sports.

    Is this too simple?

    1. I think it needs to be spelled out so it’s not open to misinterpretation by people who don’t understand biology.

       The world is such a mess that some claim you can go through the puberty for the opposite sex. Insane, but they do. It’s part of the debate about puberty blockers. Several people have insisted that when you come off blockers and start cross sex hormones then you go through he puberty for your chosen gender, rather than your sex. It’s not true of course. If you miss the optimum puberty window then you don’t go through puberty. The x-sex hormones just change sex characteristics, they don’t mature the brain, affect the bones or change brain matter like actual puberty does.

       It’s why kids who go on blockers at Tanner Stage 2 have retarded brains and can’t experience sexual feelings or orgasm as adults. They are left intellectually, emotionally and sexually stunted for life. It’s child abuse.

       Puberty is essential for “development of frontal cortical circuits, and hippocampal and amygdala connectivity.”

       https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apa.17150

       1. Ah yes I see. The loopholes are linguistic.

          Gone through puberty unaided by wrong sex hormones maybe?

          its so weird to be thinking about chemical concoctions and normal young human development. But here we are. .

          1. Yes. TRAs are expert at twisting language and redefining words to suit themselves. I agree with your “wrong sex hormones” phrase, but a TRA would say they are the “right sex hormones” because their body is the wrong sex and they need the “right sex hormones” to fix it. 🤦‍♀️

             Many AGPs insist they they are literally women. One, Fred(a) Wallace claims to be “a sperm producing female”. 😜

             But guys like him will twist the final wording whatever it says. It’s what they do. They don’t accept any reference to ‘women’, unless it includes men.

    2. Yes it’s too simple. The question is “what does male puberty mean for these oddball cases like Swyer Syndrome and androgen insensitivity syndrome?”

       It’s seems that Swyer Syndrome don’t have high levels of testosterone at any age since their bodies don’t produce it even though they’re XY (this is a rare condition, one in a million).

       The androgen insensitivity cases are way more common (1 in a few thousand) and they do produce testosterone.

       1. AIS is well understood by sporting governing bodies. World Athletics lets XY athletes with the complete form compete as women because their pre- and post- natal bodies are insensitive to the (dihydro)testosterone secreted by their testes. (Undescended because they have no scrotum for the testes to descend into.). This is given as a straightforward exemption to the rule that an athlete with a Y chromosome is DQ’d. The high, male levels of T are also not a disqualifier because the women are, as it says on the tin, insensitive to it. People with CAIS are often quite feminine-appearing at puberty because the abundant T is converted to estradiol by the same aromatase enzyme that is the target of one class of breast-cancer drugs. All of us have aromatase but in normal men the testosterone overwhelms the effect of the estradiol made this way.

          Her Y chromosome confers no sporting advantage and no woman she shares a locker room with would have any reason to doubt her woman-ness. There is no ethical cause for her to disclose her sex to the world. It is for women with CAIS that the desire to avoid a “witch-hunt” of sex testing comes from. But as so often happens, open borders means anybody can get in, even people you really do have grounds to keep out.

          To a lay audience, an official could say “XY is a DQ” without getting into the weeds about what is a rare exemption (much rarer than 1 in 1000, more like 1 in 20,000 live births) which would surely be honoured, even if it required an appeal, because the condition has a certain notoriety and public fascination. But these boxers obviously don’t have it.

          AIS is one valid form of the intersex trap. It does challenge our gut notion of what it is to be male and female. Here is a feminine-looking person who turns out (during adolescence, usually) to have testes that make normal male quantities of testosterone that her body can’t respond to. And she has a Y chromosome, which seems to call into question everything we learned in school about sex. (Well, in the classroom, anyway.) In sport, let her compete as a woman. But in terms of what her sex “really” is? She could potentially make only male gametes and not female ones, so biologically she’s male. But she looks enough like a woman that only her doctor and a man who might want to have children with her ever need know.

          1. This is what I thought too. If her body can’t deal with androgens then how can androgens make her stronger?

             But there was a contrary argument in one the previous comments saying she DOES have a strength advantage. So I’m confused.

             1. His body.

                He likely has 46 XY 5-ARD (5-alpha-reductase deficiency). Males with that are often mis-sexed at birth, because their external male genitalia don’t develop normally.

                Their sex becomes apparent at puberty when the testosterone in their internal testes triggers a male puberty, which gives them male punching power.

                https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/5-alpha-reductase-deficiency/

                Compare the punch power in this clip. He hardly moves when she hits him. She staggers every time he lands a punch.

                https://x.com/BigBillMoon/status/1819764620053131373

21. IBF, 31 August (just yesterday):

    “We absolutely do not understand why any organisation would put a boxer at risk with what could bring a potential serious injury within the ‘Field of Play’ (FOP). The main role of the referee in the ring is to manage the boxer’s safety at all times. How is this reasonably practicable when a boxer fails to meet the eligibility criteria to compete?

    The IBA will never support any boxing bouts between the genders, as the organization puts the safety and well-being of our athletes first. We are protecting our women and their rights to compete in the ring against equal rivals, and we will defend and support them in all instances; their hopes and dreams must never be taken away by organisations unwilling to do the right thing under difficult circumstances.”

    http://www.iba.sport/news/iba-reaffirms-the-position-and-removal-of-boxers-from-all-events/

    … lots of people got thrown by the “intersex” nature (including me) which was not clear at first (to me anyway). I thought 1/5200 is rare, but intuition can be fooled – given enough time, another competition will happen with “intersex” athletes.

    I am wondering when “intersex” athletes first started competing.

22. And it has just got more interesting. The official involved ( Mark Adams ) was Keir Starmer’s best man.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/02/mark-adams-official-ioc-olympics-boxing-row-starmer-friend/

23. Welcome to **inclusion** where bashing women is less important than hurting the feelings of the basher.

    A woman is defined by her ability or potential to produce gametes. And yes (despite the comments/posts above) that is exactly -correlates to chromosomes- how we need to segregate or separate most -the majority- of sports.

    Chess would be an example of a sport that is not in the category requiring segregation, and even with Chess, complex parameters governing thinking/comprehensive/strategizing may affect the outcome, but we can’t talk openly and honestly about any of this – because? DEI and the Party of Science.

    Here’s Colin Wright – an authority on the intersex condition:
    “Avoid the ‘Intersex Trap’
    How intersex conditions are used by activists to sow confusion and manipulate your emotions.”

    Quote:
    “One of the most effective and prevalent bits of sophistry in this arena is what I call the “Intersex Trap.” This strategy, frequently employed by those who seek to undermine the biological basis of sex in favor of subjective notions of “gender identity,” involves pointing to the existence of irrelevant intersex conditions to deflect criticism away from the central issue at hand. The Intersex Trap employs a twofold approach to dismissing the sex binary: one that relies on sowing confusion, and another that manipulates emotions.

    I will cover both of these approaches below.

    Sowing Confusion
    ===========
    The first and most common version of the Intersex Trap used by gender activists is designed to sow confusion by equating two distinct concepts—intersex and transgender. Yet, in reality, these concepts are vastly different. Intersex people possess rare developmental conditions that result in ambiguous genitalia, affecting only 0.018 percent of all births. Transgender people, on the other hand, are not sexually ambiguous at all, but merely “identify” as the opposite or neither sex.”
    https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/avoid-the-intersex-trap

    It’s an easy and good read.

    Oh and F the Party of Science.

    1. Thanks for the reference.

       I saw figures for intersex at 1 in a few thousand, higher than his estimate.

       Anything that would give a female appearing athlete greater strength would show up in sports out of proportion to their numbers.

       1. “Everything is about statistical averages”

          Hope all is well FK.

24. Perhaps there were people with Intersex conditions at the very first Olympic Games. The conditions don’t all have genital differences.

    Many, including me, have been sloppy in our terminology. I read that Khelif claims to have a DSD. That doesn’t necessarily mean he has an intersex condition. We should really use the term DSD until we know whether his DSD is an intersex condition.

    I went to refresh myself with Colin Wright’s excellent debunking of Anne Fausto-Sterling’s claim that people with intersex conditions are as “common as redheads”. It’s much lower. 0.02% of people. He also explains why Klinefelters and Turners are DSDs but not classified as intersex conditions. I used to think ‘DSD’ was a new term for ‘intersex conditions’ until I was put right.

    “while all intersex conditions may be considered DSDs, not all DSDs are necessarily intersex conditions”.

    It’s worth a read……

    https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/intersex-is-not-as-common-as-red

    1. Thanks for the link.

       1. 👍

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