Essentially, women have been banned from competition under various spurious grounds since the competition began - for example, until 2014, it was claimed the ski jump would damage women's wombs; skeet shooting was mixed sex until 1992 when it was made single sex but with no women's event, so women were effectively banned from that Olympics (the women's competition was introduced in 2000). There are so many examples like those, and the curious thing is that the IOC's embrace of gender identitarianism coincided with the approach of equal competition for women - almost as though the failure of direct discrimination against women led to the entrance of the more subtle form.
Thanks for this summary. It’s bizarre to see this discrimination rearing up yet again, only now in fancy new “inclusion” wrapping. And it’s ironic as well. My teens and I have been enjoying the sheer variety of high-performance human body types shaped by all these sports - from the swimmers to the gymnasts to the runners, etc - all a living, breathing riposte to the Instagram surgically-enhanced & filtered concept of beauty. In the Olympics, bodies are optimised for function - and what incredible function!
How depressing to have that undermined by gender ideologues and misogyny, even now.
I was going to try to argue that the IOC could still be acting in what they perceive as good faith (sticking up for vulnerable minorities, being on the Right Side of History (TM)) whilst nonetheless being hopelessly wrong. But when you put it like this...
I think the most generous way to frame it is that, institutionally, the IOC has a deficiency model of sex difference (women are a physically inferior form of human, and the women's category is a catch-all for those who fail to meet the criteria of being men in any way) rather than an equity model of sex difference (women are a specific category among which excellence should be identified and celebrated). For the IOC, the project does not appear to have been sex/gender equality, but the inclusion of "non men" within sport. Ofc even then, they would have done a better job if they hadn't outsourced their decision making to a partial hack like Joanna Harper... https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-should-gender-be-defined-in-olympic-sports/
It's as with this backlash against feminism at large --- use our biology against us until a tipping point is reached and it's not acceptable anymore, then do an about face and declare no one really knows who's female anyway and it doesn't matter. See "The curious timing of postmodernism" by Karla Mantilla, 1999.
And crucially, as many have pointed out, this renders women's relatively newly acquired rights *as women* null and void—anyone could be a woman, we don't really know what a woman is, don't be biologically deterministly exclusionary, you bigot, etc.
Mario, it might help to take a meta-meta-historical viewpoint of women's sports in general—they serve as a method by which women can gain independence, monetary reward, scholarships, good health, etc. There's been resistance over time to approval of women being physically active because it represents a threat to men in a number of respects. Look at how any excuse was thrown at the wall over a century ago to explain why women shouldn't ride bicycles: our wombs will fall out, our faces will get unflatteringly red, etc., when really the concern was that we had an independent method of transport; women were supposed to stay in the home and be pale and thin. When faux physiological concerns are rendered invalid, as I noted below, the next move is to claim no one knows the physiology anyway, mysterious new discoveries have been made meaning that no one knows who's female and who isn't, etc. Likewise with sports scholarships. Now that women have successfully gotten sports scholarships, etc., oh, well, who says there's such a thing as women's scholarships, let's be inclusive. It's an ingenious way to cut into the ways women can gain educational and therefore financial success. But to cut down on my rambling a bit and get more specific about the Olympics, the fact that women are as a whole about 9% less fast or strong as men means that there's a potential cohort of competitors that men could win much more easily against if only it were allowed, so various parties that have an interest in men winning more can lean on the idea that the women's category is just oh-so-nebulous. It so happens that actual women's sports has become popular, as you say, so it's a bit of an uphill battle, but money talks and if those parties with an interest in men winning ultimately make the rules, here we are.
I don't think I am smart enough to participate in this conversation, but I am a female fighter, so I'll have a go. When I read about the XY/XX differences in those Olympic athletes, my immediate thought is not "Oh that means I'd be fighting a man" because I don't think it's that simple. How do we know what elements of a male development leads to the "40-50% greater upper limb strength and 12kg more skeletal muscle mass"? Is it the chromosomes? I don't know. The Wikipedia page on DSD was eye opening. I even wondered - if I had a test would my chromosomes would all be in the right place? I don't know what my opinion is on all of this. It's really, really hard, and I'm just a bit surprised you seem to be so confident that this test means the athletes in question are more dangerous to other female fighters, and have "pushed out" another XX fighter. I'd certainly fight another female fighter with a DSD - a trans women - probably not.
Ofc, it depends on the DSD - and the podcast I recommend at the top is very good on this. Some XY people with DSDs are insensitive to androgen (CAIS) and wouldn't present a particular risk to women in sport, but they would also look typically female with typically female athleticism (there is then a policy q about which sex class CAIS XY people go in, given they probably don't gain male athletic advantage despite being genetically male).
Other forms of DSD mean a person has XY chromosomes, but is born with a feminised genital appearance; however, at adolescence, they go through male puberty and acquire not just male athletic advantage but also a typically male appearance in terms of fat distribution and bone structure. 5-ARD, the condition Caster Semenya has, falls into that category, and that or something similar is the most likely explanation for someone having been recorded female at birth but later acquiring the appearance of an adult male and testing as XY.
Essentially, such conditions result in genetic and phenotypical men who have been raised as girls for part of their lives because of atypical genitals - a difficult situation for them personally, but not a very complex one for sex divisions in sport. Including someone with 5-ARD in women's combat or collision sports is incompatible with safety and fairness (and the latter applies to all sports, not just combat or collision).
FWIW, the only thing I'm certain about is that the IOC should be conducting its own sex screening rather than relying on passports. Certainly, based on the appearance of the boxers in question and their reluctance to appeal or undergo independent testing, I have strong suspicions that they are likely to be 5-ARD, but this can only be suspicion. The important principle is that, when it comes to safety and fairness in women's sport - and especially women's combat sport - relying on passports as the IOC has here is not just inadequate, it's negligent.
The IOC don't do a sex test because they believe anyone is a woman if they say they are. If an athlete's government is willing to give them a female passport (and there might be any reasons for this from poor countries getting a chance to gain Olympic medals to the local cultural understanding that women are simply substandard men) that's good enough for the IOC. It reflects the *international* nature of the Olympics in a world that overwhelmingly hates and oppresses women. I guess we should be happy that at least they now appear to feel guilty about it, hence the lies and verbal wriggling.
Even leaving aside the 2024 boxing, it’s very concerning that the IOC can’t articulate why they have a women’s category. Can only assume they have been forced to accommodate women under duress and they would rather not bother.
This was excellent -- so many astute observations re: use (and abuse) of language and the erasure of women as a coherent class.
Sorry I cannot read the Times link. Can anyone tell me why the Olympics never like women's sports? It's fun and exciting.
If the one word answer is misogyny, then why?
Essentially, women have been banned from competition under various spurious grounds since the competition began - for example, until 2014, it was claimed the ski jump would damage women's wombs; skeet shooting was mixed sex until 1992 when it was made single sex but with no women's event, so women were effectively banned from that Olympics (the women's competition was introduced in 2000). There are so many examples like those, and the curious thing is that the IOC's embrace of gender identitarianism coincided with the approach of equal competition for women - almost as though the failure of direct discrimination against women led to the entrance of the more subtle form.
Thanks for this summary. It’s bizarre to see this discrimination rearing up yet again, only now in fancy new “inclusion” wrapping. And it’s ironic as well. My teens and I have been enjoying the sheer variety of high-performance human body types shaped by all these sports - from the swimmers to the gymnasts to the runners, etc - all a living, breathing riposte to the Instagram surgically-enhanced & filtered concept of beauty. In the Olympics, bodies are optimised for function - and what incredible function!
How depressing to have that undermined by gender ideologues and misogyny, even now.
I was going to try to argue that the IOC could still be acting in what they perceive as good faith (sticking up for vulnerable minorities, being on the Right Side of History (TM)) whilst nonetheless being hopelessly wrong. But when you put it like this...
I think the most generous way to frame it is that, institutionally, the IOC has a deficiency model of sex difference (women are a physically inferior form of human, and the women's category is a catch-all for those who fail to meet the criteria of being men in any way) rather than an equity model of sex difference (women are a specific category among which excellence should be identified and celebrated). For the IOC, the project does not appear to have been sex/gender equality, but the inclusion of "non men" within sport. Ofc even then, they would have done a better job if they hadn't outsourced their decision making to a partial hack like Joanna Harper... https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-should-gender-be-defined-in-olympic-sports/
It's as with this backlash against feminism at large --- use our biology against us until a tipping point is reached and it's not acceptable anymore, then do an about face and declare no one really knows who's female anyway and it doesn't matter. See "The curious timing of postmodernism" by Karla Mantilla, 1999.
Perfect summary.
And crucially, as many have pointed out, this renders women's relatively newly acquired rights *as women* null and void—anyone could be a woman, we don't really know what a woman is, don't be biologically deterministly exclusionary, you bigot, etc.
The last gold-medallist in skeet shooting while it was still mixed-sex was Zhang Shan. a Chinese woman. Coincidence?
Mario, it might help to take a meta-meta-historical viewpoint of women's sports in general—they serve as a method by which women can gain independence, monetary reward, scholarships, good health, etc. There's been resistance over time to approval of women being physically active because it represents a threat to men in a number of respects. Look at how any excuse was thrown at the wall over a century ago to explain why women shouldn't ride bicycles: our wombs will fall out, our faces will get unflatteringly red, etc., when really the concern was that we had an independent method of transport; women were supposed to stay in the home and be pale and thin. When faux physiological concerns are rendered invalid, as I noted below, the next move is to claim no one knows the physiology anyway, mysterious new discoveries have been made meaning that no one knows who's female and who isn't, etc. Likewise with sports scholarships. Now that women have successfully gotten sports scholarships, etc., oh, well, who says there's such a thing as women's scholarships, let's be inclusive. It's an ingenious way to cut into the ways women can gain educational and therefore financial success. But to cut down on my rambling a bit and get more specific about the Olympics, the fact that women are as a whole about 9% less fast or strong as men means that there's a potential cohort of competitors that men could win much more easily against if only it were allowed, so various parties that have an interest in men winning more can lean on the idea that the women's category is just oh-so-nebulous. It so happens that actual women's sports has become popular, as you say, so it's a bit of an uphill battle, but money talks and if those parties with an interest in men winning ultimately make the rules, here we are.
I don't think I am smart enough to participate in this conversation, but I am a female fighter, so I'll have a go. When I read about the XY/XX differences in those Olympic athletes, my immediate thought is not "Oh that means I'd be fighting a man" because I don't think it's that simple. How do we know what elements of a male development leads to the "40-50% greater upper limb strength and 12kg more skeletal muscle mass"? Is it the chromosomes? I don't know. The Wikipedia page on DSD was eye opening. I even wondered - if I had a test would my chromosomes would all be in the right place? I don't know what my opinion is on all of this. It's really, really hard, and I'm just a bit surprised you seem to be so confident that this test means the athletes in question are more dangerous to other female fighters, and have "pushed out" another XX fighter. I'd certainly fight another female fighter with a DSD - a trans women - probably not.
Ofc, it depends on the DSD - and the podcast I recommend at the top is very good on this. Some XY people with DSDs are insensitive to androgen (CAIS) and wouldn't present a particular risk to women in sport, but they would also look typically female with typically female athleticism (there is then a policy q about which sex class CAIS XY people go in, given they probably don't gain male athletic advantage despite being genetically male).
Other forms of DSD mean a person has XY chromosomes, but is born with a feminised genital appearance; however, at adolescence, they go through male puberty and acquire not just male athletic advantage but also a typically male appearance in terms of fat distribution and bone structure. 5-ARD, the condition Caster Semenya has, falls into that category, and that or something similar is the most likely explanation for someone having been recorded female at birth but later acquiring the appearance of an adult male and testing as XY.
Essentially, such conditions result in genetic and phenotypical men who have been raised as girls for part of their lives because of atypical genitals - a difficult situation for them personally, but not a very complex one for sex divisions in sport. Including someone with 5-ARD in women's combat or collision sports is incompatible with safety and fairness (and the latter applies to all sports, not just combat or collision).
FWIW, the only thing I'm certain about is that the IOC should be conducting its own sex screening rather than relying on passports. Certainly, based on the appearance of the boxers in question and their reluctance to appeal or undergo independent testing, I have strong suspicions that they are likely to be 5-ARD, but this can only be suspicion. The important principle is that, when it comes to safety and fairness in women's sport - and especially women's combat sport - relying on passports as the IOC has here is not just inadequate, it's negligent.
The IOC don't do a sex test because they believe anyone is a woman if they say they are. If an athlete's government is willing to give them a female passport (and there might be any reasons for this from poor countries getting a chance to gain Olympic medals to the local cultural understanding that women are simply substandard men) that's good enough for the IOC. It reflects the *international* nature of the Olympics in a world that overwhelmingly hates and oppresses women. I guess we should be happy that at least they now appear to feel guilty about it, hence the lies and verbal wriggling.
What an excellent point, Sarah. Keep exposing the incoherence and hopefully more and more people will realise just how naked this emperor is
Last 3000 years: "Women have the wrong bodies for sports"
Last 30 seconds: "Female bodies don't exist"
Let's not forget that women's smaller average hand and finger size give them a grossly unfair advantage in the game of tiddlywinks! 🤣🤣
Even leaving aside the 2024 boxing, it’s very concerning that the IOC can’t articulate why they have a women’s category. Can only assume they have been forced to accommodate women under duress and they would rather not bother.
Fascinating, thanks. Nicely explained!
I was left perplexed by the recent Olympic Games with regard to the women’s boxing!
The mud is a bit cleaner!