The International Olympic Committee has decided that two boxers who were disqualified from the World Championships last year because they failed the sex eligibility test are allowed to fight in the Olympics in the women’s category. The boxers are Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, and they start their Olympic runs this week. Mark Adams, a spokesman for the IOC, said : “They are following along with the competition eligibility rules. They are women in their passports.”
The IOC seems to be a stickler for rules, not fairness and safety. Of all the sports that ought to bar biological males from competing against women, it seems that boxing is the one. Boxing is a combat sport, where the risk of debilitating injury is high even in a fair fight, and research shows that the average punching power of a male is over 160% higher than that of a female.
But the IOC doesn’t care. The boxers are adhering to eligibility rules that apparently have nothing to do with material reality. It is possible to forge or fake a passport, but hormone levels and DNA don’t lie. The idea that demanding further explanation about these individuals is “invidious and unfair,” as Adams said, doesn’t seem to apply elsewhere.
In 2010, the Chinese gymnastics team was found guilty of age fraud. Its gymnasts had won bronze at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, but later, the International Gymnastics Federation found that Dong Fangxiao was younger than the minimum age requirement of 16 at the time of the Sydney Games. But she or her government forged her passport to state that she was 16.
The lie was exposed when the same gymnast registered for the Beijing Games eight years later as a different age. She had registered with a 1983 birth date for Sydney, which would have made her 16 for the Olympics, but then for Beijing, she registered with a 1986 birth year, which would have made her 14 in Sydney. Oops.
In 2010, the entire Chinese team was forced to forfeit its bronze from the 2000 Games, and it was awarded to the U.S. team, which had come in fourth and went home from Sydney without a medal.
You might say, “Who cares if she was younger!” But the age rule exists for a reason. Younger and smaller can be an advantage in gymnastics. Plus, the younger the age, the more abusive the training, as more intensity is crammed into a shorter period of time. FIG at least pretends to care about the well-being of gymnasts, which is more than can be said for the IOC’s attitude toward female boxers.
When I was competing nationally and internationally in gymnastics, we were routinely tested for steroids and other drugs. Our privacy was not spared.
When track star Sha'Carri Richardson was suspended from her sport after the 2021 Olympic Trials, and then banned from competing in the Tokyo Olympics, it was because she tested positive for marijuana at the trials. Her privacy was not an issue. It was announced to the world that she tested positive for a banned substance, one that is under no circumstances considered to be a performing-enhancing drug. If anything, it is the opposite. Marijuana makes you lazy, not fast.
But now, we can all tune in to watch males beat the crap out of women and steal medals from hardworking females in the ring. I don’t know what triggered the failed sex eligibility test at the World Championships. The reports are frustratingly cryptic, at best. But it definitely warrants exploration beyond “her passport says she is female, so game on!”
The sports’ governing bodies are deeply anti-woman. They are either so deluded that they believe gender ideology, which insists transgender women (aka males) have no physical advantages, to be true, or they are so afraid of the bullying activists they are willing to sacrifice the physical health of female athletes. Either way, there is misogyny at the core of this policy.
And that thing that never happens keeps happening: at the Olympics, the NCAA finals , and the Oregon state high school track championships . In fact, there are more than 700 examples of males taking titles and team berths from females in the last five years alone.
At the height of the #MeToo movement, a man might lose his job or find his reputation in tatters for being rude to a woman on a date. Now, we can all tune in to watch men beat women up on national television at the Olympics, and it’s celebrated as a victory of inclusion.
It is not inclusive or kind to allow males to compete, and fight in a boxing ring, against females. It is not compassionate. It is cruel. But women are told that to be kind they need to sit down, take their beating, and hand over their medals to males who claim to be females.
There should be an open category that allows everyone, no matter their identity, to compete. That open category should be the men’s category, as the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics decided earlier this year. NAIA President Jim Carr said, “You’re allowed to have separate but equal opportunities for women to compete.”
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But apparently that’s only true for the student-athletes who compete in smaller, mostly private colleges across the country. In the IOC’s deluded state, the women’s category is the open one. And world-class female athletes do not deserve equal opportunity to compete and win.
I don’t know what it will take to shake us from this madness. I hope it isn’t a serious injury in the ring at the Paris Olympics. But I fear that, until something happens, the delusion will continue. And women will be the ones to take the hit.
Jennifer Sey is a USA champion gymnast, the producer of the 2020 Emmy-winning documentary Athlete A on Netflix, and the founder and CEO of XX-XY Athletics .
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