As usual, the conservatives have found an absurd issue at the Olympics to have a screaming fit over. First it was an opening ceremony that they thought mocked the Last Supper (it didn’t, unless you think Jesus’ last meal was a wild bacchanal), and now it’s a women’s boxing match that the transvestigators have decided was unfair because the winnner was a man.
The inaccurate statements about her identity were boosted by prominent anti-trans individuals like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, as well as politicians like US Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance and conservative Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Their statements stirred up a storm of anger on the right despite the fact that Khelif is a cisgender woman.
As Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos has explained, there aren’t any transgender athletes at the Olympics this year who are competing outside of the sex they were assigned at birth, though IOC rules don’t bar their inclusion so long as they meet certain eligibility criteria. “There has been some confusion that somehow it’s a man fighting a woman,” International Olympic Committee (IOC) spokesperson Mark Adams told reporters. “The question you have to ask yourself is, are these athletes women? The answer is yes.”
Imane Khelif is not trans, and was assigned female at birth. She’s a cis woman! But somehow, because she’s strong and can punch hard, attributes any woman who becomes an Olympic boxing competitor would share, her sex and gender are called into question.
That reaction has since spawned scrutiny of Khelif, who was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman. False claims that she is a trans person or that she is a man pretending to be a woman quickly spread thanks to reports she was disqualified from a 2023 International Boxing Association event and the resurfacing of comments by the president of that organization suggesting that her elimination was because she failed a hormone test.
She probably has some unusual physiological characteristics that confused officials of the IBA, but every Olympic competitor is a genetic freak, or they wouldn’t be operating at such a high level of performance. Simone Biles is way out there on the edge of human capability; Michael Phelps has an unusual morphology that made him a strong swimmer. Shall we disqualify them because they don’t have average athletic ability? That’s the whole point of the Olympics, to single out people with exceptional physical characteristics! You don’t get to whine that it’s unfair when an athlete at that level is amazingly good at what they do…or even worse, call into question their identity or history or social role or sexual preferences because you don’t like that they win.
There’s another ugly side to this whole affair.
Beyond questions of sex, there are racial dynamics at play in the perceptions of this match. Female athletes of color — particularly those of African and African American descent — have long been accused of being men when they’ve beaten white women in competition. This happened most notably with tennis phenom Serena Williams and track star Caster Semenya, both of whom endured tropes that cast Black women as more masculine and threatening.
I guess conservatives just want to police women’s behavior. Surprise.
The International Boxing Association was kicked out of the IOC International Olympics Committee, for corruption and drug dealing including distributing heroin.
They have zero credibility.
Joanne has absolutely lost it about this. I’m embarrassed AF to have even defended her from the evangelicals.
Or rather, women’s bodies.
Although . .. actually, it’s both. And they actually want to do it to everyone They want to police women’s bodies and behaviors, and also men’s bodies and behaviors,
And people of color get policed extra hard.
@ ^ Autobot Silverwynde : JK Rowling has become worse and worse on this over time. Once she seemed fine and didn’t have this issue of being an increasingly more extreme transphobe. Defending her before she became that is fine in my book esp if you realised and called her out on her transphobia when & after she fell ever deeper into that form of bigotry.
.***
See also KG’s #19 here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/07/06/infinite-thread-xxxii/#comment-2230628
Which notes there’s also a much less publicised Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Yu-ting ) in a similar plight too, FWIW.
Before that, of course, there was Caster Semenya ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya ) and others too.
Don’t worry folk, Jerry Coyne is on the case. After calling Khelif a transwoman, he made two posts farming clicks. The funny thing was he resisted using any pronouns and instead opted for the tortured used of “Khelif” or “Khelif’s” repeatedly until he decided that fuck it:
and then kept using “he” to refer to Khelif.
The IBA has zero credibility.
It’s run by Russians and based in Russia, one of the most evil and dysfunctional nations of the world.
They aren’t even at the Olympics this year due to their mass murderer and genocide problems.
“Not until 2019, nearly two years after the organization elected a president with what U.S. officials call deep ties to Russian organized crime and heroin trafficking, did the IOC finally banish the perpetually troubled group.”
The IBA isn’t totally useless though.
If you have an opiate addiction, they can get you some heroin for a price.
It seems entirely odd to me that we actually have gender categories for sport at all. Why not let people of all genders and none play and compete together?
Because there are differences in average height, weight and a few other minor details? Fine, use the actual metrics in question rather than the entirely imperfect and very murky proxy of gender. Have height categories, weight categories, BMI categories, muscle mass categories, bone density categories – whatever the actual relevant factors are.
Or maybe we could just do away with professional sport altogether and spend the money saved on something of value.
Why?
Back when conservative Christians were having shitfits about Harry Potter, it was because they equated stories about witchcraft ad wizardry with Satanism, or somesuch nonsense. It was a stupid meltdown for stupid reasons. If someone attacked JKR’s books now for those reasons, it would still be stupid. Don’t feel embarrassed about that.
JKR is currently having shitfits over gender essentialism and transfolk. That’s her own stupid meltdown for stupid reasons.
Actually, come to think of it, it is amusing how J.K. Rowling is now far better known for being a rancid bigot on twitter than for writing her rubbish, derivative children’s books. If you had asked anyone a decade ago what she could do to be more well known for something else, I doubt anyone would have been able to suggest an answer. It’s almost impressive how thoroughly she’s trashed such a reputation.
Holy fuck, how can anybody with two fucking brain cells believe that a country in which even homosexual acts (whatever that is) are penalized with up to 3 years in prison and that is conservative to the max would knowingly send a trans person to the olympics?? I mean seriously.
And that “manlyness” didn’t do piddly shit for her. Her record ist a measly 37-9, so she basically lost 25% of all her bouts. So let’s “investigate” those who kicked her behind, ’cause shurely those also have to be men/trans/whatever.
And I’ve seen that 46 Seconds in question. Pro tip for the italian woman: in boxing it helps if you keep your hands up.
And what about other mutants like …..let’s say…oh Manute Bole or Yao Ming(?) in basketball? Should we bonesaw them from the kneekaps down? Or Robert Förstemann (cyclist, look up the pictures and tell me that all men are created equal) .
Some people…..
@10:
Wtf, I actually looked up Robert Förstemann . Wtf are those proportions! The guy is basically a thin man attached to two tree trunks.
One of my favorite things to do with people who start complaining about trans participation in women’s sports is to challenge them to name their favorite athlete and/or team (depending on the sport in question).
They can’t because none of them actually care about women’s sport beyond using it as another means of othering trans people. The goldfish impressions when they realize they’ve been called out are hilarious.
Obviously it’s time to start handicapping people of outstanding ability ala some of Kurt Vonnegut’s writings. Graceful, athletic people must wear extra weights to slow them down and ruin their balance, good-looking people will wear ridiculous false noses, eyebrows and ears, and smart people will need earbuds that emit thought-scattering high pitched tones every few seconds. Everyone will have equal ability, thus making the world fair and safe for mediocre white people.
How does Coyne know that Khelif has the equipment for “making sperm”? I know that he has this weird obsession with gamete size as the most important criterion for defining sex, but I haven’t seen anything (nor do I care to see anything so invasive) about her “equipment”. And if he says she “perhaps not the ability” to make sperm (and how does he know that?) doesn’t that mean she’s not a man?
This is just sickening that people are so concerned about the details of what’s in her shorts.
Also :
Our shared planetary home is being changed drastically, rapidly for the worse. Hottest temp records are tumbling like dominos in a hurricane. Record daily maxima, record overnight minima, sea surface temps, atmospheric temps, glacial retreat and melting, islands battered by storm after storm,oceans acidifying, corals bleching and dying, bioodiversity fading as species after species vanishes forever, landslides, floods, extremes, disasters. Fires are blazing across vast areas destyroying homes, crops wilting, prices thus rising, poverty increasing, drought and people dying.
Genocide in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan and elsewhere. Going too often not even discussed. Never again huh? But look around Happening now. Here we are again.
Fucking fascism? Outright nazism even. Again?! Really diarrhoeally? In this fucking century? Yup. FFS! Rising in Europe. Short memories? We rly can’t see where it leads? Rly can’t learn from history that was just a mere sodding century ago!? Nup.
So much horror and awfulness and things we really, FUCKING really need to address and remedy right fucking now.
But this is what so many folks are obsessing about? Who wins some boxing contest and what’s in their pants as if that is the thing that matters?
Priorities?.
For.. pities ..sake!
The transphobes getting in a right muddle with this one. Almost making the case themselves, that this is not a black and white issue, like they wish to believe.
He doesn’t know that.
Coyne is just making stuff up. He is lying.
The Russians made that claim once. They provided no evidence for it. And the Russian based, Russian controlled IBA has a reputation for dishonesty, corruption, fixing boxing matches, and drug dealing up to and including heroin.
From my link above in #6.
The source is a corrupt Russian friend of Putin’s. The guy heading the IBA, banned permanently from the Olympics.
Kremlev made his accusations without providing any proof whatsoever.
It’s not at all acceptable or believable.
Coyne has put himself in the same category, as JK Rowling, JD Vance, and Donald Trump. A mindless hater and liar.
@14– We don’t know the exact nature of Khelif’s situation for medical privacy reasons, but I can tell you now that Coyne is full of shit here. Many of the AFAB athletes covered by the IOC’s eligibility rules have androgen insensitivity or other conditions that mean they cannot make sperm because they never develop functional testes. This is not difficult to understand. It is utterly shameful that a professional biologist would pump up a demonstrably counterfactual gender test to promote bigotry.
@11 lotharloo
He actually ist ab REAL mutant. His body produces a non-typical myostatin, a protein that limits natural muscle growth.
Yeah, and Coine……how did he geht a genome sequence or an MRT of Khelifs pelvis?
There is no proof or data whatsoever that Imane Khelif has some sort of competitive advantage over other women.
There is some hard data that she doesn’t.
Imane Khelif has routinely lost boxing matches to…women boxers!!!
Where is Imane Khelif’s alleged competitive advantage over women fighters here?
Imane Khelif has lost 9 matches to other female boxers!!!
The transphobes always say how rare DSDs are in the population. Approx 1:1000. So for every million people that’s 1,000. Quite a lot really.
It’s also important to remember that WADA — which has just about as much credibility as the IBA — uses as “baselines” purported average concentrations of “normal” metabolites and circulatory-system components from the general population, not athletes… and gives exactly zero consideration to persistence, to medical treatment for non-related conditions, or to whether the particular “disallowed” substance is performance-enhancing for the sport in question (Andrea Raducaanu is an excellent example; for a gymnast, the purported “extra aggressiveness” of the common decongestant she was prescribed due to a head cold is not a competitive advantage!).
The same attitudes extend to every other “biological testing” regime in organized sport. Most especially the “guilty absent proof of intentional sabotage by a competitor” consequences…
And, as noted by PZ above, the probability that an elite athlete’s own baseline levels of many of these substances will be well outside “the accepted norm” is rather high. It should surprise no one that elite athletes (regardless of “gender”) in strength-emphasizing sports like cycling, wrestling, boxing, and of course weightlifting typically have much-higher-than-general-population personal base levels of muscle-building-related components and metabolites detectable in their bloodstreams/urine. Oh, wait, it would completely surprise the esteemed gentlemen in charge of Big Sport who worry as much about their sport’s image in the general public (the one brainwashed by the War on Drugs, in the US and elsewhere)…
That’s the real problem. The standards — whether for supposedly performance-enhancing substances or for other factors like chromosomal makeup — are universal and for show, not adapted to the particular sporting event. That’s not to say that there isn’t organized “cheating” going on, especially in events that combine raw strength and endurance like cycling; it’s only to say that the entire conversation is so distorted that it’s about as credible as the basketball refereeing at the 1972 Olympics (not just that notorious five-seconds-pass-but-only-one-on-the-clock “miss” in the gold medal game, either) or gymnastics/figure-skating/diving judging like, well, ever. But because some of the results come out of a lab, neither the results nor the standards get nearly as much scrutiny.
This relates to Ms Khelif’s situation in that the conversation is laboring in the same space: Pseudoscientific certainty that is largely insensitive to context but is adopting a mantle of “It’s science!” because that’s more convincing to those who don’t actually know any science (like every head of WADA ever, who have uniformly been lawyers with no lab-science degrees).
Professional sports competitions are “unfair”, meaning, some people are born with an advantage. Also, their rules and regulations are arbitrary and since humans form a spectrum, there will always be people who will be at the boundary of eligibility. I absolutely agree with @15 and it is pretty clear that this issue is a made up issue and part of right’s identity politics distraction.
I had a high school classmate who was what we called back in the day a “tomboy.” She was tall, strong, fast, athletic and, if memory serves, looked a bit like Hilary Swank. We didn’t have a girls swim team, but she worked out with a private club. She also ran track and I think won a state title in shot put. Anyway, her self-owned nickname was “Moose.” People would chant “Moose! Moose! Moose!” from the stands when she ran a race. I knew her as Heather. We were in the same Advanced English class all four years. I don’t recall ever hearing a disparaging comment about Moose/Heather from sour grapes or otherwise, and no one ever questioned her athletic or intellectual abilities, rather she was admired for them.
Something I saw on a forum the other day: Instead of “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists”, call them “Feminism-Appropriating Radical Transphobes”.
Imagine the freak out they would be having if it was not just a woman athlete who didn’t “fit” their expectation, but one with the genetic glitch that produces doubling of muscle mass… “OMG she must be a man because she had a natural six pack! Women can’t have those!!”
Welcome to CripWorld! This sort of shit happens ALL THE TIME to people with disabilities of various sorts. Last time I went to see a specialist at the local county hospital, the nurse taking my vitals told me he was going to falsify my medical record because my height (I’m 4’11”) and blood pressure were outside whatever the computer program had decided the norm was. I wasted about ten minutes arguing with him, telling him that I have a medical condition in which short stature and low BP are indicators. Had it to do all over again in the doc’s exam room when he spent more than half of the appointment time berating me for my “abnormality”, by which he meant I wasn’t wearing his preferred female undergarment. And, oh yeah, the security team at the front door of the hospital groped me and made loud comments about my “abnormal” body and lack of a certain undergarment, in front of a waiting room of forty-ish patients and staff. After it was all over, I walked out and told my companion I was never going back there to be abused again. I’m 71 and have put up with shit like this all my life. Can we all just grow the fuck up and realize that people vary–a lot–and are not just a bunch of those all-the-same paper dolls that I remember girls playing with back in the 50s?
Cartomancer @7
We have segregated sports because when we didn’t, and women entered and out-competed men, men decided that rather than competing fairly, they’d just exclude half the population so their delusions of dominance wouldn’t be questioned.
Yes, the usual bigots are of course claiming that they have some magical power to determine who gets to be counted as ‘real’ women.
Khelif is from Algeria, where being trans is illegal. She was born female, has lived her whole life as female, and has managed to win an Olympic medal for her boxing while being female.
It’s exactly the same anti-woman policing as the orange buffoon claiming that Kamala Harris has magically turned into a black woman despite the evidence he f our own eyes.
Imane Khelif is a black woman boxer. I’m happy that the actual Olympic board has stepped up to protect her from the hatefulness of the usual bigots and called out the corrupt claims about her testosterone that are being pushed by the Putin owned boxing board.
https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/40716300/boxer-imane-khelif-clinches-olympic-medal-amid-gender-outcry
A Russian lab complaining about “testosterone levels”????? Might as well trust a 1985ish lab in Dresden (DDR) complaining about “chromosomal abnormalities”…
The chances that the Russian based IBA ran a testosterone test on Imane Khelif and found high levels is around zero.
.1. This is just classic Russian disinformation AKA as Russian lies.
The IBA has been locked in a conflict with the Olympics for many years and are now permanently banned.
They have an obvious motive for making up lies like this.
.2. The other data that show this isn’t true is that in fact, someone has run a testosterone levels test on Imane Kherif.
That was done for the actual current Olympics by the Olympics itself.
She passed that test.
I’m not sure what the relevance of this is but it has been claimed that when Chris Everet was the number 1 tennis player in the world her husband, who was ranked about #115 in the men’s league, was able to beat easily. So probably all the men ranked above him could also, and most men ranked below him.
The relevance is not.
Hi all, first time posting. Just FYI registration to GMail addresses is broken.
@PZ That picture really is worth a thousand words, isn’t it.
@27 Sympathies. I’m trans and disabled, a lot younger than you but can also vouch for the Experience. My fave was the time a couple of EMTs were super polite to me when they thought I was cis, but got physically rough with me as soon as they learned my legal name. I was already in so much pain at the time I was barely able to stand up.
@33 If you’re not sure what the relevance is, why are you posting it? Just to rub our noses in our physical weakness? We already get that a lot. Look at any Reddit or forum thread about how much stronger men are than women, and you will see dozens if not hundreds of guys claiming they could murder a woman in seconds with their bare hands. Yes, we know. We already know. We have known since we were children, even those of us who didn’t grow up as girls. We know and we are tired.
I have read that the IBA banned Khelif after she had the temerity to beat a Russian rising star with a previously unbeaten record. Once she was banned the match didn’t count so the Russian rising star could still claim to be unbeaten. I don’t follow sport so have no idea if this is true.
Jazzlet @34
I had read that too.
Then maybe you could wait until you figured out the relevance and then make a coherent comment. This thread is about women boxers being wrongly accused of being something that they are not, and in the process being accused of both cheating the system AND committing multiple felonies in their home country.
By the way, the home country of Khelif is one of far too many in which “honour killings” are still a thing. While most murders of women for bringing embarrassment to someone are committed against them by family members for supposedly embarrassing the family, if would be entirely unsurprising Khelif’s representation of her nation was perceived by hyperconservative muslims as a national embarrassment, requiring her murder to satisfy national honour.
In that context, bringing up, “Hey, men win athletic competitions against women pretty easily,” without having anything more intelligent to say leaves the inevitable conclusion that men competing against women has something to do with this thread.
Which it does not.
Not unless you’re saying Khelif is a man, in which case I hope you can live with yourself should something happen to her when she returns home.
Personally, I don’t think you actually hope Khelif is killed. I actually think you’re just thoughtless and feel people need to know what’s going through your brain whether you have a point or not, and you hadn’t gotten around to considering what the fuck the actual story is here.
Cis people are risking Khelif’s life through their fucking loose lips. Yes, the most guilty are people like Rowling, not people like Chesapeake, but holy fuck it drives me fucking insane that in all this reporting no one is mentioning that in the most recent year for which I could get information confirmed honour killings in Algeria numbered 39 and experts suspected the number was at least double that. That was 2019. There’s probably more recent numbers in the Arab press, but I don’t read Arabic.
Jesus fuck, people, this is not abstract. There’s a human life at the centre of this — a woman who is at risk of getting killed because Westerners can’t stop themselves from stealing her life and story to debate our favourite social issues.
There are lots of intelligent, helpful things to say about this topic. “Men are good at sports,” is not one.
The claim that Imane Khelif was banned after defeating a Russian boxer are true.
The Russians’ credibility and motivations are so off the charts dubious that no objective observer could take them seriously.
Imane Khelif has been checked by a far more credible and relevant organization, i.e. the Olympics itself and has passed her tests.
This is all true, so far as it goes. The further implication — that the Russians disqualified her FOR THE PURPOSE of maintaining their star’s unbeaten status is not proven. Yes, it happened. No, we don’t know for sure the motive. But the fact that it happened sure as hell seems suspicious.
@anxionnat That’ fucking awful. I’m really sorry that you had to put up with that awful behaviour.
The difference between Canadian and US/UK coverage of this fiasco is wild: https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/summer/boxing/olympics-ioc-bach-imane-khelif-boxing-paris-2024-august-3-1.7284659
The transmisics spend a lot of time telling us they’re very concerned about Big Trans exploiting children for profit, leaving them with “irreversible damage.”
Now they’ve discovered boxing exists and they are very concerned. What are the worried about? Is it the fact that children participate in boxing, leaving them with CTE? Nope! They’re just concerned that a woman who doesn’t meet patriarchal beauty standards is competing.
If they were really concerned about children being exploited for profit, they would be calling for a ban on all minors participating in boxing, American football, and any other sport that gives them a high risk of CTE.
Also, I’ve gone to psychiatric shadow jail because someone wrongly accused me of being at risky of possibly committing “self-harm” in the future. They didn’t have to claim I had actually done anything (I hadn’t), just that I might hypothetically do something in the future. With that in mind, it’s kind of shocking to me that boxing, even among adults, is legal. Why aren’t all professional boxers being arrested for being a “danger to themself or others?” And why isn’t the IOC on the hook for promoting it?
But of course transmisics don’t care about any of that: they just care about enforcing rigid gender roles.
#28Strewth
“We have segregated sports because when we didn’t, and women entered and out-competed men, men decided that rather than competing fairly, they’d just exclude half the population so their delusions of dominance wouldn’t be questioned”
I wasn’t aware of that.
My Grandma played football in th3 UK between the wars in front of huge crowds, and the establishment put an end to it, but not because they were beating men. It was for other misogynistic, economic and political reasons.
Do you have any references for this ?
@42: sounds like “pre-crime” … pah. Also: “transmisics”?
And re: this thread in general, there’s an older FTB post that may be of some relevance here:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pervertjustice/2022/08/18/that-female-athlete-doesnt-look-feminine-enough/
@ 44
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transmisic
Problem? (You realise it’s typical of transphobes to say they can’t be because they’re not scared of transpeople right?)
The women’s boxing at the Olympics has continued to be a transmisogynist shitshow. Imane Khelef’s next opponent took to social media to portray her as a monster; one of Lin Yu-ting’s opponents in the 57 kg class gave an anti-trans salute after losing her bout; and several other boxers have made transmisic comments to the media.
Given how the corrupt IBA has been excluded from Olympic participation, it would not be hard to imagine a motive for them finding some way to stage a controversy, so as to reflect badly on the Olympics. (Which is not to say I have evidence to back that up; just that I would not be surprised to see evidence of retaliation against the IOC to appear.)
After Crip Dyke’s outraged response-32-I can see that I should have said -37-more about the fact that Chris Evert’s husband could beat her easily at tennis. My comment was supposed to be a response to #7 cartomancer:
“It seems entirely odd to me that we actually have gender categories for sport at all. Why not let people of all genders and none play and compete together?
Because there are differences in average height, weight and a few other minor details? Fine, use the actual metrics in question rather than the entirely imperfect and very murky proxy of gender. Have height categories, weight categories, BMI categories, muscle mass categories, bone density categories – whatever the actual relevant factors are.”
It seems to me that if players were divided in that way that the top players would almost always be men. In tennis probably the top ranked first few hundred players would be men since there are few women who would rank as high in the relevant categories . Remember that her husband ,ranked about #115 could beat her easily. So at least the top 115 and probably many more would be ranked above any woman . Who wou;d want a system like this. Certainly not any women. My response, while not on the thread’s subject, was not as thoughtless as it seemed. It was in response to cartomancer’s comment. Sorry.
chesapeake, relax.
I can construct a point.
In tennis cis men who are professionals will physically outperform cis women.
Remember, those people are at the top of the physical distributions.
Unfortunately, skill is not everything, and balances out at the top levels.
A man playing in the women’s competition, therefore, should be an obvious statistical outlier results-wise.
Since that’s not the case, it’s not a thing.
And it’s never been the case, either.
So it’s a non-issue.
@Chesapeake
Algeria is still a country where men murder women literally for embarrassing them — that’s it. That’s all the crime that a woman need commit to be killed.
While I respect your knowledge of tennis quote trivia and your ability to construct a rationale for sex-segregated sports, I see that you still have no thought of critique or condemnation to share on how Khelif has been treated.
You say that no woman would want a nuanced, multi-category, sport specific set of divisions, but what woman would want a system in which a random comment by a corrupt Russian launches a JK Rowling-led vendetta piling internet gigabuse on an athlete’s head and setting them up to be harassed, stalked, and assaulted in their home countries after return from competition — as has happened — to say nothing of the risk that such threatening campaigns may at some point result in actual femicide?
Who are the women clamouring for this system, against which you can raise no unkind word?
You return to the thread to explain your comment, but that simply treats me as someone who does not understand your point. I understand just fine. I understood the first just fine. What I don’t understand is showing up in this thread discussing how women are abused and saying nothing about how women are abused.
You communicated your rational for sex-segretated sports just fine. Unfortunately you also communicated your indifference to the abuse of Khelif. My comment may or my not have been overwrought in tone, but addressing it did at least give you the opportunity to clarify whether or not you had anything to say on the topic of this thread, on the topic of using the existence of trans people as an excuse for the infinite abuse of women who don’t conform to expectations.
Thankfully this last question, too, has been answered clearly.
To clarify a little, since it seems Chesapeake’s comments were bouncing off mine earlier in the thread, I think the most important reason WHY we need to abandon gendered sporting categories is precisely BECAUSE doing so will help to dismantle traditional ideas of gender and patriarchal supremacy, of the sort that might endanger Imane Khelif among others. I approach this almost entirely from the perspective of the positive social engineering it could do – as I hope I made clear earlier on, I care almost nothing for professional sport in and of itself. Professional sport is a vector for regressive social and cultural attitudes – while it maintains harmful assumptions of gender essentialism and male supremacy it remains a force for ill, not for good.
Of course, the bigots’ selective and performative transphobic outrage at Imane Khelif is amusing in light of the fact that there actually IS a trans competitor in the Olympic boxing about whom none of them have said a blind thing. This being a boxer from the Philippines called Hergie Bacydan, a trans man who is actually competing in the womens’ category because his hormone levels are admissible by the Olympic rules. It looks a lot like the current system is not actually about gendered categories but de facto about actual physiological phenomena.
@Crip Dyke
“ You communicated your rational for sex-segretated sports just fine. Unfortunately you also communicated your indifference to the abuse of Khelif.” The fact that I did not comment on the main point of the thread does not mean I am indifferent to the abuse of women. I am against it. I am sorry for not communicating that and for thinking you did not understand my point. Since I had not stated it I didn’t think anyone would understand it. I fully support Khelif and oppose the anti trans people. I simply had nothing to add to what had been said.
Update :
Source : https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/boxer-imane-khelif-addresses-olympics-gender-row-as-she-reaches-gold-medal-bout/bb5baz7kb
PS. If folks want to see it or know when Imane Khelif’s final decidingwhether she gets gold or not is :
– Ibid link SBS news.
AEST here would be Aussie time (eastern) or Sydney (& Melbourne, Canberra) time currently 10.55 if that helps. Basically 78 hours from now I think. Roughly.