How is that fair to the people who’ve faced her. ?
It’s up to the boxing authorities to specify what their rules are. Intersex conditions are often not even detected until there is an associated health issue. You have to determine where you are going to draw the line because competitive sports aren’t about everybody being equal. That’s why boxing, for one, has weight categories, to set the competitive parameters.
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I’m not sure I really understand the question. It’s boxing, and surely there is an accepted danger in the sport of being punched by someone bigger and stronger than you.
Whatever you think Imane Khelif is, she isn’t a trans women. An earlier ban on trans women competing in sports would not have prevented her from competing.
The IBA banned her after performing a pretty murky, and secretive gender test - which was not recognised by IOC.
By every measure in place at the olympics she was female and entitled to compete.
I think this issue is taking us into to realms of ‘well, you don’t really look like a women….’
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And the IOC tests and rulings are always perfect ?
I’m not saying they are, but I think you are missing the point a bit here.
Imane Khelif isn’t a transgender women. She was born in Algeria which has no recognition of gender variance, and assigned female at birth. She lived her whole life as female. She has been described as intersex, but does not use that descriptor for herself.
The controversy around her seems to have been started by other female boxers complaining about her size and power, after which the IBA forced her into an unspecified gender eligibility test, which led to claims that she has variations in sex traits and differences in sexual development. This could result in her having higher than normal testosterone levels, or chromosomes that tend more towards XY than is generally the case with women, despite being biologically female.
Variations in sex traits that make someone taller, or stronger, or more aggressive don’t necessarily make them a man. The problem with starting to interrogate this at a genetic/chromosomal level is that at this level we’re all subject to variances in development, and at that level of interrogation, sex is more of a gradient than it is a binary switch
Telling Imane Khelif she can’t compete as a women because she doesn’t look enough like a women as we would prefer is a very slippery slope towards female sports being for dainty pretty little things, and anyone born with physical advantages that make them better at it are not allowed to compete.
There was an astonishing moment at Wimbledon a few years ago, in the era of the Williams sisters dominating the sport, when one of the pundits got a little exited about an American competitor - slim, dainty, blonde, pretty - who was doing really well, and said “They could be the champion that America has been waiting years for”. A little mask slip in what lots of people think female sport should be.
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What they believe in is power and protection of their elevated status (often only in relative terms…see LBJ’s comment about the poorest whites). Free market was an argument that allowed them to pretend they had high minded ideals and that it just by coincidence happened to protect that status is just the way to cookie crumbles. Free Market can get fucked the second it doesn’t serve their actual values. That is what 80% of American Conservativism is…things they pretend to believe that are more respectable than the things they actually believe but achieve largely the same ends.
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At least, sexual dimorphism is. There is usually an overlap in sexually dimorphic traits and some of the results are quite surprising, particularly in prenatal androgen levels which appear to affect both male and female athletes.
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The accusation came from the IBA, a discredited organization now essentially in thrall to the Kremlin. They had been kicked out of their role as organizers of Olympic boxing and so had incentives to fuck with the event, with the added bonus of kicking up a “woke” firestorm in the west. No documentation has been provided of this disqualifying test result, nor have any of her other tests flagged this as an issue.
And unfortunately they have defined it terribly. This stuff is complicated. In endocrinology when X hormone causes y effect it is very often the case that more x fails to causes more y. In the case of testosterone, while higher levels in men is a characteristic of the difference between “men” and “women” testosterone levels themselves have essentially 0 predictive power when it comes to performance…not within gender or comparing between gender.
The point has been made over and over again that even biological sex is not binary. It is possible to come up with a biological definition and draw a line, but that will be an artificial distinction being drawn and lots of people will be caught on the wrong side of the line for the handwaving “women’s sports is for biological women” people. The common sense rule on what counts as a woman that many trans critical people make would actually include Imane as a woman. If they adjust their rule to exclude her it would move the line in a way that covers a lot of the other athletes they have a problem with.
@aussielad made the point in a different thread the other day that I thought was really good, that homophobia directed towards women is often not really from the same place as the version directed towards gay men, and more often is closer to misogyny and that is also what is driving a lot of this discourse.
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homophobia?
My spell check has been incorrectly flagging and changing lots of stuff today 
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It’s a fair comment, though. And I do find the bulk of transphobia does seem to have misogyny at the root. I was reading an article yesterday (I can’t remember whether it was US or UK) but they were stating that women would have to present their passport if they wanted to use a public toilet.
Now that is an absolute outrage, and also goes against any form of sex descrimination legislation. But the comments were then - well this only applies to transgender women. Of course, there is no way of determining who is or isn’t without a wee peek up their skirt (assuming that they haven’t had gender reassignment surgery), so in effect they are saying that their definition of a women is “the pretty ones”.
In terms of homophobia aimed at women, again it seems to be aimed at the more masculine presenting women (“butch” - not sure if that is still politically correct, but that is how I know some women identify). Apparently the “lipstick lesbians” are fine, and it comes down again to who are regarded as the pretty ones.
Sorry, that’s a complete diversion, but we have been looking at facial recognition software at work recently, and the one thing we have noticed is that it is very poor at spotting gender on geriatrics.
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Again you are missing the point.
Allowing Imane to compete in a contact sport essentially makes it impossible for a level playing field.
I sympathise with her and her circumstances but it just can’t be as easy as what you claim.
For me , my sympathies do belong to the people she’s won against too. Where and when does that come into the picture ?
There are women who train their life for Olympics. And it’s not about how feminine Imane looks. Far from it. The point is that you don’t discriminate against 50 people who’ve earned the right to represent themselves in Olympics fairly for the rights of one person or a handful of persons who while they have struggled to get where they are , did get a useful assistance on the basis of their genetic structure.
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And I do agree with you. Mostly.
But ever think of whether women would be comfortable sharing toilets with someone who hasn’t transitioned yet ?
I get it. Life isn’t fair. The fight for equality should go on. But there are bigger battles to be fought there.
Equality for me doesn’t mean someone ought to get a boost up when it comes to competitive sports. Transpeople should get their rights. But sports and competitive professional sports at that is a privilege too.
Bigger battles to be fought there. Someone can fight for their identity but that doesn’t mean he/she can get the privilege of competitive sports.
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People who haven’t transitioned don’t use toilets that are not aligning to their presented gender. You have to be careful with your terminology here as well, as transitioning is a process, not an event.
As for whether women are happy with those that have transitioned, that question has been asked and most women are happy with it. Interestingly, the number not happy with it has been increasing, which rather matches with the amount of misinformation that has been distributed (rapists in dresses and the like). I’m not sure how long that has been going on in the US, but UK PMs up to and including Theresa May were largely in favour of aligning trans policy with internationally recognised WHO recommendations.
I think @Magnus posted an article the other day which was how minority issues are turned into propaganda by those that want to make people angry and anxious. Transgender right very much falls into that category.
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Your fucking with us, aren’t you?
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He is not the one missing the point. She has competed at this level for years, and until recently (her mid 20s) did so unremarkably. The controversy around her participation came after years of her being an also ran on the world stage, but critically immediately after she took away the unbeaten record of a much touted Russian prospect. The rogue federation that runs amateur boxing, and that had become an arm of the Russian government, then started a smear campaign against her as a way to justify wiping away that defeat and restoring their propaganda tool. They have provided no evidence of the problematic test result and no other test she has even been subject to has revealed this or any other anomaly.
Even if it turns out that the Russian accusation is on the up and up, there is a near decade of performance from her demonstrating that the supposed advantage she naturally had was not enough to actually be a contender.
Btw, on the subject of toilets, I was in the Netherlands recently and nearly all the public toilets, in bars, restaurants etc were unisex, not male or female, and, surprisingly, there were no chaotic scenes of panic and horror. It’s really just a made up problem.
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You’ve engineered this whole discussion just to casually drop your latest globetrotting, haven’t you?
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It’s next door.
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From Berlin? Spoken like a true globetrotter.
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