Boxing chief questions eligibility of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting at Olympics
Excerpt from my latest UnHerd piece:
Over the past two weeks, there has been a lot of confusion and misinformation in the public sphere when it comes to Khelif, Yu-ting, and what makes someone male or female. Media outlets have consistently referred to Khelif and Yu-ting as “female athletes” and framed the debate over Khelif and Yu-ting’s eligibility to compete in female sports as a question of policing femininity among women of colour. A USA Today “fact check” elided the controversy altogether: “Fact check: Imane Khelif is a woman.”
It doesn’t help that the term “intersex” itself is highly misleading; it implies that some people are neither male or female or both male and female or somewhere in between male and female. But intersex conditions are better understood as disorders of sexual development that affect typical male or female development. In other words, these conditions are sex-specific, not sex-defying.
All the evidence in the public domain indicates that Khelif and Yu-ting have a disorder of sexual development that affects males, such as 5-ARD. In the absence of investigation, a child born with 5-ARD may be “assigned female” at birth and raised as a girl until puberty hits, at which point they undergo male pubertal changes.
LGBTQ organisations like Glaad have only added to the confusion by insisting that, for example, “Imane Khelif is a woman” and “Imane Khelif is not transgender and does not identify as intersex.” Trans activist efforts to enlist terms like “intersex” and “assigned sex at birth” in the fight for people with typical sexual development to claim opposite-sex identities has undermined public understanding of disorders of sexual development. Whether or not Khelif has a disorder of sexual development has nothing to do with whether Khelif “identifies” as intersex.
When it comes to sex division in sports, there are some sports — like swimming and running — where fairness is what’s at stake. But when the International Olympic Committee puts male athletes in the ring with female athletes, much more than fairness is at stake. Punching power is one of the starkest sex differences between males and females — other than, you know, the whole “giving birth” thing. This is why a female athlete who trained all her life to compete at the Olympics forfeited after just 46 seconds in the ring, saying she had “never felt a punch like this,” then broke down sobbing because sporting officials made her choose her physical safety over her dream.
As the IBA points out, this ought to have been an administrative matter, dealt with sensitively and out of the public eye: fail a chromosome test and you’re not getting in the ring. The IOC chose to make this a global spectacle, exposing female athletes to great risk and Khelif and Yu-ting to scorching scrutiny. Angela Carini’s cry of “Non e giusto!” is right.
Thank you for clearing this up, Eliza. I wasn't sure what exactly was going on, except that these were not normal women. If "women" with physical anomalies are going to be admitted into women's sports, then we can expect a situation in which most of the victories will be taken by such people. It may seem cruel, but I think if you have an abnormal body (as these boxers seem to) then you simply must stay out of women's sports.
That horrid trans woman cyclist Rachel McKinnon/Veronica Ivy -- the one who said so many ugly things about his female competitors -- is also fond of saying that "sports are a human right" (I think that's the phrase he uses). The answer to that is, yes, you have a right to play tennis with your friends, or jog before breakfast, or go bike riding with your significant other -- but professional/competitive sports are NOT a human right. If you have some physical abnormality that gives you an advantage over real women (like being intersex or being a man!), then you should stay out of women's competitive sports.
This case clearly demonstrates that LGBTQIA+ activism, which purportedly has a deep understanding of and cares about people with disorders of sexual development (DSD, aka intersex), doesn't understand anything about it. Or at least pretends not to.
This is a case of athletes with a genuine DSD, where the doctor literally "guessed the baby's sex wrong" at their birth, like trans activists like to say. And yet every single trans activist repeats "she was born female, raised as a girl, and identifies as a woman; she is a woman," acting as if they've never heard of intersex. They suddenly have no sense of nuance when it comes to letting males play in female sports.
Even as people discuss 5-ARD and chromosome testing, all the IOC and mainstream media repeat is "she is not trans" to drag us back into the trans ring and punch us in the face for our supposed transphobia. Even worse, organizations like GLAAD and InterACT are bold enough to lie to our faces, saying that claims of DSD are unsubstantiated[1] even though the IOC itself has made clear that its president Thomas Bach was wrong when he said "this is not a DSD case"[2] and the IBA has also released the full details of its 2023 decision to disqualify Khelif and Lin[3] against accusations that it was politically motivated.
TRAs don't care about anything except silencing dissenters and obscuring the truth. They don't care that they get caught lying over and over. They won't quit.
[1] https://glaad.org/fact-check-participation-and-eligibility-of-paris-2024-olympic-boxers-imane-khelif-and-lin-yu-ting/
[2] https://x.com/iocmedia/status/1819667573698445793
[3] https://www.iba.sport/news/iba-clarifies-the-facts-the-letter-to-the-ioc-regarding-two-ineligible-boxers-was-sent-and-acknowledged/