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.
Angela Carini's cry translated as "it's not right!" is absolutely right. The female athletes trained and achieved Olympic level status by competing and winning in fair competitions. Expanded definitions of female and/or blurring lines of sex/gender identification has female athletes now competing in unfair competitions against physically larger and stronger opponents. Women and girls are robbed of their hard earned accomplishments and risk physical injuries. Not acknowledging or disclosing biological differences is cheating . Competing and winning in sports once included honesty and integrity.
Another issue besides the injustice is that Angela Carini might end up with permanent brain damage from being punched by a man. Sometimes, in boxing, that damage might take years to show up, like a brain tumor (some of us worry that boxing was the cause of Magdalen Bern's brain tumor) or Parkinson's like Muhammed Ali has.
I've seen it repeatedly said that Khelif was thought to be female at birth and raised as a girl, but there seems to be no proof, and the photos and videos of him grabbing Carini's breast is not something any woman would do, and neither would reaching down his shorts on camera to handle what looks like male genitalia. His training video and every photo I've seen shows massive male entitlement and smugness, again, not like what women do. Also, grabbing his female opponent's breast is exactly what a male would do to off-center a woman he wants to beat. It's sexual abuse, and so is punching her.
The only rational solution to the debacle is for the athletes in question to undergo a cheek swab test, as is completely normal in most sporting organizations that have a women's league. It is not invasive and takes very little time, and would give a final answer to those who claim that the IBA has somehow made it all up.
Those saying Khelif is a woman, though, won't hear of this. Because they know that Khelif is male and will fail. For them it's an ideological battle to eradicate sex completely as a meaningful concept, not an issue of safety in sports or fairness.
I suspect also, that Trans Identified males are holding back, hoping these DSD boxers will pave the way for them later.... "Oh, but you let those others in, why not us too...?"
In a round about way I think it's the IOCs desire in include TIMs in the women's category that has lead to them opening the door to DSD males. In a different world where Trans activism wasn't a thing they'd probably still be sex testing. The DSD athletes are the ones being used.
Ah, yes, thanks Eliza. I didn't pay much attention to this, but had picked up the vibe, "this isn't a transgender issue, they're female with development disorders," rather than t'other way around. It must be a big shock to a person and their family when the "girl" hits puberty, but presumably (at least in the absence of gender identity ideology) the fact that they are really male would be known. It would be the only thing we could really call genuine gender transition, the discovery that someone has actually been "assigned" the wrong sex at birth! But I don't know anything about how people generally deal with such abnormal development conditions - some will presumably stick to the script they've had all their young lives. Working towards a career in boxing, one would expect them to recognise they aren't typical and not arrive at this kind of situation, but the governing bodies ought to preclude it anyway.
The mess is presumably much worsened by people's ability to get a "legal gender", putting those bodies in difficult positions if they try to use biological definitions, even in the interests of critical safety. The idea of a legal gender different from one's biological gender is actually insane, even if we accept that some people may need to present as the opposite sex in particular circumstances for the sake of their delicate mental health. We're so punch drunk from gender ideologist rhetoric, we start to doubt our right to expect someone actually male to have to say, "I'm legally male, although I live as a woman," rather than demand a legal status different from reality (not to mention the inherent challenge of making sense of, "live as...").
The IOC is being deliberately obtuse and ignorant by ceasing to test for athlete's biological sex. No matter what trickster philosophers such as Judith Butler might say, the normal human XY or XX chromosomes that all but an infinitesimally tiny percentage of the population possess are not a social construct and they cannot be queered. Likewise, as long as a person has testes and those testes produce male hormones that flood the parts of the body they're supposed to flood, it doesn't matter whether they're internal or external.
A woman is an adult human with only female genetic material.
A man is an adult human with male genetic material.
Period. Forget subtleties.
Millions of children are born with birth defects (I intensely dislike the intentionally obfusticating “disorders of sexual development”. Like extra fingers or inverted heart, these are birth defects.
Some birth defects make males appear to be female.
I've been thinking it world be wise to explain DSDs as a subtype of birth defect for awhile now and from the way you laid things out I think it would be clarifying to many people.
I also suspect that it would trigger many on the left to throw an absolute shit fit. Describing birth defects like blindness, deafness, or paraplegia as 'defects' is dehumanising and ableist don't you know. People with "disabilities" are just a natural part of human diversity and implying that they're somehow "less able" than "normal" people just because they can't walk, or see, or hear is a negative stereotype that needs to be challenged. These are the same people who think there are no physical differences between men and women, obviously.
The phrase “differences of sexual development” is a tautology. There are no two people who developed identically, it’s impossible.
That’s why the term “differences of sexual development” is annoying to me: applies to every human being of the same sex and it applies between male and female sex organs - talk about differences of development.
Either the sex organs are defective (can’t effect reproduction) or they aren’t, irrespective of size or shape.
We don’t say someone has a “difference of heart valve function” or “differences of neural tube development” or “difference of palate development”. We say heart defect, spine defect, cleft palate… they are imperfect genesis of complete functioning of an organ or system.
There are birth defects (defects present at birth) which prevent complete functioning of systems for sexual reproduction - absence of ovaries or womb, absence of penis, testes, malformation of the penis or testicles, undescended testicles, which are all classes of “imperfect genesis”. A man with phimosis versus a man with retractable foreskin is a difference of development; one with a pendulous scrotum vs one with varocele is a difference of development which may impact fertility.
People with birth defects are a subset of differences of development, but people with differences of development may or may not have a defect impairing normal functioning of sex organs to achieve reproduction.
The phrase simply an attempt to hide a fact (defect) behind a truism or tautology. For people who aren’t aware that “”difference” is a code word for “defect”
It makes it sound like 100% of people can reproduce. They can’t.
But of course these are the same people perhaps who say “nonbinary” which is a contradiction.
I'm currently at the beginning of a challenge to two of my health care providers' use of "sex assigned at birth" and "gender identity" in my medical records. I have asked them to change the former to "sex observed at birth" or just "sex." I have asked that they give me the option of selecting "none" in the imaginary "gender identity" category.
So far I have heard from one of the providers' units that they cannot make the changes I am requesting. I reiterated that their records are incorrect and requested contact information for the area that can make those changes.
I know I shouldn't be surprised in a world where the "female penis" is a thing but the amount of dumb shit I've seen on Twitter since the start of this debacle has been something else. Something I don't have a word for, do the Germans have a word for something that's both hilarious (in a pitch black way) and horrifying? I've seen people say that Imane was born female but has a hormone imbalance that caused "her" chromosomes to change to XY at some point, or that having XY chromosomes and testicles doesn't matter because "she" has a vagina (how do they know?). There's also all the people with pronouns and trans pride flags in their bios who have suddenly latched on to "assigned female at birth" and "has a vagina" as the ultimate determinant of whether someone qualifies as female or not.
It is interesting to ask what the material definition of man and women should be from a legal perspective. Should a male with CAIS be allowed to compete with the women even though they are technically men, but to many (most) people they look like women? If a CAIS male took a cheek swab it would show up male, should that be enough to merit disqualification? Or should we accept that the women's category is actually the 'no male puberty' category and that one can have XY chromosomes and testicles but as long as you're Androgen insensitive you can take part?
It has been fascinating to watch the media's take on this. It is a lot like a societal level Rorschach where an ambiguous situation pulls for one's core beliefs without regard for factual science. Those convinced that the human person and their seuality should be maliable as a matter of social justice blithely ignore factual human biology. Those of us (myself included) believing in the reality of biological sex interpret it quite differently. More and more in today's world we have a modern day Tower of Babel with people talking past each other.
Now those of us on the gender critical side know more or less what it was like to be a dissident in the former Soviet Union and have a run-in with the apparatchiks responsible for distorting reality and misusing the rules of institutional governance to suppress dissent.
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.
I hope most people would agree that able-bodied athletes should stay out of the Paralympics, because that is a different category. Fair Play!
Most of the differently abled athletes compete in the Paralympics for instance...
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/
Nice boxing metaphor thrown in there!
Angela Carini's cry translated as "it's not right!" is absolutely right. The female athletes trained and achieved Olympic level status by competing and winning in fair competitions. Expanded definitions of female and/or blurring lines of sex/gender identification has female athletes now competing in unfair competitions against physically larger and stronger opponents. Women and girls are robbed of their hard earned accomplishments and risk physical injuries. Not acknowledging or disclosing biological differences is cheating . Competing and winning in sports once included honesty and integrity.
Another issue besides the injustice is that Angela Carini might end up with permanent brain damage from being punched by a man. Sometimes, in boxing, that damage might take years to show up, like a brain tumor (some of us worry that boxing was the cause of Magdalen Bern's brain tumor) or Parkinson's like Muhammed Ali has.
I've seen it repeatedly said that Khelif was thought to be female at birth and raised as a girl, but there seems to be no proof, and the photos and videos of him grabbing Carini's breast is not something any woman would do, and neither would reaching down his shorts on camera to handle what looks like male genitalia. His training video and every photo I've seen shows massive male entitlement and smugness, again, not like what women do. Also, grabbing his female opponent's breast is exactly what a male would do to off-center a woman he wants to beat. It's sexual abuse, and so is punching her.
The only rational solution to the debacle is for the athletes in question to undergo a cheek swab test, as is completely normal in most sporting organizations that have a women's league. It is not invasive and takes very little time, and would give a final answer to those who claim that the IBA has somehow made it all up.
Those saying Khelif is a woman, though, won't hear of this. Because they know that Khelif is male and will fail. For them it's an ideological battle to eradicate sex completely as a meaningful concept, not an issue of safety in sports or fairness.
I suspect also, that Trans Identified males are holding back, hoping these DSD boxers will pave the way for them later.... "Oh, but you let those others in, why not us too...?"
In a round about way I think it's the IOCs desire in include TIMs in the women's category that has lead to them opening the door to DSD males. In a different world where Trans activism wasn't a thing they'd probably still be sex testing. The DSD athletes are the ones being used.
Ah, yes, thanks Eliza. I didn't pay much attention to this, but had picked up the vibe, "this isn't a transgender issue, they're female with development disorders," rather than t'other way around. It must be a big shock to a person and their family when the "girl" hits puberty, but presumably (at least in the absence of gender identity ideology) the fact that they are really male would be known. It would be the only thing we could really call genuine gender transition, the discovery that someone has actually been "assigned" the wrong sex at birth! But I don't know anything about how people generally deal with such abnormal development conditions - some will presumably stick to the script they've had all their young lives. Working towards a career in boxing, one would expect them to recognise they aren't typical and not arrive at this kind of situation, but the governing bodies ought to preclude it anyway.
The mess is presumably much worsened by people's ability to get a "legal gender", putting those bodies in difficult positions if they try to use biological definitions, even in the interests of critical safety. The idea of a legal gender different from one's biological gender is actually insane, even if we accept that some people may need to present as the opposite sex in particular circumstances for the sake of their delicate mental health. We're so punch drunk from gender ideologist rhetoric, we start to doubt our right to expect someone actually male to have to say, "I'm legally male, although I live as a woman," rather than demand a legal status different from reality (not to mention the inherent challenge of making sense of, "live as...").
The IOC is being deliberately obtuse and ignorant by ceasing to test for athlete's biological sex. No matter what trickster philosophers such as Judith Butler might say, the normal human XY or XX chromosomes that all but an infinitesimally tiny percentage of the population possess are not a social construct and they cannot be queered. Likewise, as long as a person has testes and those testes produce male hormones that flood the parts of the body they're supposed to flood, it doesn't matter whether they're internal or external.
A woman is an adult human with only female genetic material.
A man is an adult human with male genetic material.
Period. Forget subtleties.
Millions of children are born with birth defects (I intensely dislike the intentionally obfusticating “disorders of sexual development”. Like extra fingers or inverted heart, these are birth defects.
Some birth defects make males appear to be female.
A simple swab can detect male or female easily.
Done.
I've been thinking it world be wise to explain DSDs as a subtype of birth defect for awhile now and from the way you laid things out I think it would be clarifying to many people.
I also suspect that it would trigger many on the left to throw an absolute shit fit. Describing birth defects like blindness, deafness, or paraplegia as 'defects' is dehumanising and ableist don't you know. People with "disabilities" are just a natural part of human diversity and implying that they're somehow "less able" than "normal" people just because they can't walk, or see, or hear is a negative stereotype that needs to be challenged. These are the same people who think there are no physical differences between men and women, obviously.
The phrase “differences of sexual development” is a tautology. There are no two people who developed identically, it’s impossible.
That’s why the term “differences of sexual development” is annoying to me: applies to every human being of the same sex and it applies between male and female sex organs - talk about differences of development.
Either the sex organs are defective (can’t effect reproduction) or they aren’t, irrespective of size or shape.
We don’t say someone has a “difference of heart valve function” or “differences of neural tube development” or “difference of palate development”. We say heart defect, spine defect, cleft palate… they are imperfect genesis of complete functioning of an organ or system.
There are birth defects (defects present at birth) which prevent complete functioning of systems for sexual reproduction - absence of ovaries or womb, absence of penis, testes, malformation of the penis or testicles, undescended testicles, which are all classes of “imperfect genesis”. A man with phimosis versus a man with retractable foreskin is a difference of development; one with a pendulous scrotum vs one with varocele is a difference of development which may impact fertility.
People with birth defects are a subset of differences of development, but people with differences of development may or may not have a defect impairing normal functioning of sex organs to achieve reproduction.
The phrase simply an attempt to hide a fact (defect) behind a truism or tautology. For people who aren’t aware that “”difference” is a code word for “defect”
It makes it sound like 100% of people can reproduce. They can’t.
But of course these are the same people perhaps who say “nonbinary” which is a contradiction.
I'm currently at the beginning of a challenge to two of my health care providers' use of "sex assigned at birth" and "gender identity" in my medical records. I have asked them to change the former to "sex observed at birth" or just "sex." I have asked that they give me the option of selecting "none" in the imaginary "gender identity" category.
So far I have heard from one of the providers' units that they cannot make the changes I am requesting. I reiterated that their records are incorrect and requested contact information for the area that can make those changes.
I know I shouldn't be surprised in a world where the "female penis" is a thing but the amount of dumb shit I've seen on Twitter since the start of this debacle has been something else. Something I don't have a word for, do the Germans have a word for something that's both hilarious (in a pitch black way) and horrifying? I've seen people say that Imane was born female but has a hormone imbalance that caused "her" chromosomes to change to XY at some point, or that having XY chromosomes and testicles doesn't matter because "she" has a vagina (how do they know?). There's also all the people with pronouns and trans pride flags in their bios who have suddenly latched on to "assigned female at birth" and "has a vagina" as the ultimate determinant of whether someone qualifies as female or not.
It is interesting to ask what the material definition of man and women should be from a legal perspective. Should a male with CAIS be allowed to compete with the women even though they are technically men, but to many (most) people they look like women? If a CAIS male took a cheek swab it would show up male, should that be enough to merit disqualification? Or should we accept that the women's category is actually the 'no male puberty' category and that one can have XY chromosomes and testicles but as long as you're Androgen insensitive you can take part?
It has been fascinating to watch the media's take on this. It is a lot like a societal level Rorschach where an ambiguous situation pulls for one's core beliefs without regard for factual science. Those convinced that the human person and their seuality should be maliable as a matter of social justice blithely ignore factual human biology. Those of us (myself included) believing in the reality of biological sex interpret it quite differently. More and more in today's world we have a modern day Tower of Babel with people talking past each other.
Now those of us on the gender critical side know more or less what it was like to be a dissident in the former Soviet Union and have a run-in with the apparatchiks responsible for distorting reality and misusing the rules of institutional governance to suppress dissent.
Thank you for this explainer. It’s been confusing.