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Home » Striking an Olympic blow against women

Striking an Olympic blow against women

The New Neo Posted on by

By now you’e probably read about the Olympic women’s boxing match in which a genetic male’s blows were so hard that the female opponent gave up after 46 seconds, in dramatic fashion:

Italy’s Angela Carini quit 46 seconds into her Olympic boxing match with Imane Khelif on Thursday, after the Algerian – who failed a gender eligibility test last year – landed the first significant punch of the fight.

The pair were competing in the women’s 66kg category, in a round-of-16 bout in Paris, but the fight had barely begun before it came to a premature end.

After an early pause in the fight, due to Carini needing to adjust her head guard, Khelif landed a clean right hand. Almost immediately, Carini motioned to her team and opted against continuing, with the referee waving off the contest. …

After Khelif’s hand was raised, Carini dropped to her knees in tears. Before and after that moment, the Italian twice seemed to ignore Khelif’s attempts to console her.

Carini could also be heard telling her coach, “It’s not right, it’s not right!” before promptly leaving the arena. The Telegraph and BBC reported that Carini had suffered a suspected broken nose, and the 25-year-old soon told reporters that she had never been punched so hard in her career. Khelif, also 25, did not stop to answer questions.

Initially I imagined – as you may have also assumed – that Khelif was transgender. But, although we don’t know the details, that’s apparently not the case. Khelif is definitely a genetic male: XY. But he may have something called androgen insensitivity syndrome, which muddies the waters somewhat.

When I was in grad school I had to memorize a huge list of such sex/gender anomalies. They are all rare but they are true cases in which it can sometimes be difficult to assign a sex. For example, for androgen insensitivity, the genetic male’s body cannot use its testosterone and the person becomes feminized to a greater or lesser degree. At times, the phenotype is completely female and such a person probably would do well and not have an unfair advantage if allowed to enter women’s sports. However – and it’s a big however – some people with the disorder are predominantly male in appearance. If Khelif has this condition, he would be of the latter type, and IMHO should not be competing against women.

You can read about it here:

There are two categories of androgen insensitivity syndrome: complete and partial.

In complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, the body does not respond to androgen at all. This form of the syndrome occurs in as many as 1 in 20,000 births.

In partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, the body responds partially to androgen. Partial androgen insensitivity occurs at about the same rate as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome.

Babies born with the “complete” type appear to be girls, are raised as girls, and often don’t find out they are XY until they try to have children. But babies born with the partial type exhibit a wide range of possible symptoms:

Babies born with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome may have sexual characteristics that are typical of a male, a female, or both. They may have a partial closing of the outer vagina, an enlarged clitoris and a short vagina. They may be raised as males or as females and have a male or female gender identity.

Other symptoms of partial androgen insensitivity syndrome include failure of one or both of the testicles to descend into the scrotum after birth and an abnormal penis in which the urethra opens on the underside, instead of at the tip. In the least severe cases, the only sign of androgen insensitivity syndrome is male infertility.

As I said, so far the Olympics officials are keeping mum on exactly what’s going on with Khelif, but my guess is that it really is a case of partial androgen insensitivity syndrome. But because Khelif appears to be quite far down on the “mild” scale of things, he (and I think on the whole that’s the proper pronoun for Khelif) should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports.

The Olympics officials probably based their decision on Khelif’s testosterone level. But that’s irrelevant at this point, because he quite obviously has a male phenotype in terms of musculature and almost certainly had enough testosterone getting into his system during adolescence to make permanent changes in his strength that make him more like a man than the women he is facing in the ring.

Comments

Striking an Olympic blow against women — 36 Comments

  1. Be nice if we could talk about androgen insensitivity without repeating FOAF rumors about Jamie Lee Curtis…

    Interesting that it’s an Algerian boxer, because the issue is not going to map to our problems with transgendered athletes in America. Algeria is not a happy place for the transgendered, and so why Khelif is on their boxing team at all is likely to be a very different story from what we’ve been used to reading about.

  2. Carole Hooven posted a very good (and long tweet) about this yesterday. Really went deep into DSD which I had never heard of before yesterday.

    Worth reading I think.

  3. interesting she? lost to Kelly Harrington, in 2020, in the quarter finals,

  4. Khelif is definitely a genetic male: XY. But he may have something called androgen insensitivity syndrome, which muddies the waters somewhat.

    Sounds like a handicap. There are Paralympic Games and Special Olympics for handicapped people. If he’s not happy there then let him box with other male boxers…

  5. If, God forbid, Kamala Harris becomes president, she’s going to find that going up against Putin or Xi is going to make her feel a lot like Angela Carini.

  6. I haven’t been paying attention to any of the Olympics, with exception of a little volleyball. Though I had heard of this “flap” slightly. I incorrectly assumed transgender.

    I was just reading about CAIS, the complete version of this topic. It’s fascinating to me that the vast majority of the outward differences between the sexes is created by the response to hormones and not hard coded in the genome. Exceptions are the testicles and ovaries, and apparently the uterus and fallopian tubes also.

  7. Khelif appears to believe himself(?) to be a woman, and was raised as a woman, and accepted as a biological woman in a country quite hostile to the transgendered.

    I’m not seeing hard evidence that Khelif has been tested and found to have XY chromosomes, only a statement reported by TASS attributed to the president of the IBA, who did not name Khelif as one of those found to have XY chromosomes. But the IBA’s official statement does not say that Khelif and Lin Yu-ting have XY chromosomes. It says only that they failed some kind of test.

    Point to note, the athletes did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential. This test conclusively indicated that both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.

    The decision made by IBA on 24 March 2023, was subsequently ratified by the IBA Board of Directors on 25 March 2023. The official record of this decision can be accessed on the IBA website here IBA Board of Directors Meeting Minutes.

    The disqualification was based on two tests conducted on both athletes as follows:

    Test performed during the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships in Istanbul 2022.
    Test performed during the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi 2023.

    For clarification

    Lin Yu-ting did not appeal the IBA’s decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), thus rendering the decision legally binding.

    Imane Khelif initially appealed the decision to CAS but withdrew the appeal during the process, also making the IBA decision legally binding.

    Our Committees have rigorously reviewed and endorsed the decision made during the World Championships. While IBA remains committed to ensuring competitive fairness in all of our events, we express concern over the inconsistent application of eligibility criteria by other sporting organizations, including those overseeing the Olympic Games. The IOC’s differing regulations on these matters, in which IBA is not involved, raise serious questions about both competitive fairness and athletes’ safety.

    For clarification on why the IOC permits athletes with competitive advantages to compete in their events, we urge interested parties to seek answers directly from the IOC.

    I suspect the Western media is trying to turn this into a Western-style transgender issue for their own purposes. If Khelif really is an XY, there isn’t anyone who is in a position to know who has actually said so, from what I can find. And this doesn’t seem to be a US style transgender thing, a man moving over into women’s sports and dominating, but this is more like Caster Semenya in the 2000s, an athlete who seems not to have known she wasn’t genetically a woman.

  9. The IOC is wrong, I think, not to adopt the qualification criteria of the IBA. These two biologically male boxers have an unfair advantage over the biological female competitors. If these are people, as Neo’s excerpts indicate, who may have been raised as females, this is sad for them, as all genetic and developmental disorders are sad for those affected. But the fairness issue is for the females who enter sports competitions thinking they are competing on an equal footing with other females.

  10. @neo:Apparently the XY statement was made by International Boxing Association Russian president Umar Kremlev.

    I looked up the original, translated from Russian. He does not name any athletes, so we don’t know it was Khelif. I was reluctant to link to TASS.

    “Based on the results of DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to trick their colleagues and impersonated women. Based on the test results, it was proved that they have XY chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from the competition, ” Kremlev said.

    Like I said, I have not seen anyone in a position to know who has said that Khelif specifically was tested for XY chromosomes and has them, but maybe a link will show up. In the end Caster Semenya’s test results were made public. Right now the media is playing games of telephone, like they tend to do when they have the story they want but not quite the facts.

  11. I think it’s safe to say there’s a lot more to this than US-style women’s athletics and transgender issues, and that the Russian president of the IBA may have had some ulterior motives in making the statements he did that are not supported by his organization. I think it’s important not to let media narratives settle in our heads until we know we have enough of the relevant facts to judge whether the narratives are supported.

    IOC spokesman Mark Adams questioned the validity of the tests the IBA administered to Lin and Khelif.

    “We have no knowledge of what the tests were,” Adams said. “They were cobbled together, as I understand, overnight to change the results [of the world championships].”

    Three people familiar with the details of the women’s case pointed out that the disqualifications came three days after Khelif defeated Russian Azalia Amineva and a day after she won her semifinal bout in the 63-66-kg (139-145.5-pound) category.

    Fed up by a history of judging and bribery scandals involving the IBA even before Kremlev was first elected as the organization’s president in 2020, the IOC took control of Olympic boxing at the Tokyo Games. It became suspicious when Kremlev spent heavily on marketing himself, lined up only one sponsor — Russian energy company Gazprom — and battled with Olympic leaders. The IOC took control of the boxing competition at the Paris Games as well, and it left the sport off the program for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

    Three months after Lin and Khelif were disqualified, the IOC decertified the IBA. Another organization, World Boxing, supported by the United States, the Netherlands and several other Western countries, has emerged as a potential replacement for the IBA. In the 14 months since, relations between the IOC and IBA have deteriorated further.

    On Wednesday, Kremlev posted a video on X, criticizing the Paris Games Opening Ceremonies and calling IOC President Thomas Bach “a chief sodomite.”

  12. @Kate: But the fairness issue is for the females who enter sports competitions thinking they are competing on an equal footing with other females.

    I agree with this, Kate, and it would be nice to find some kind of accommodation for the Caster Semenyas of the world, but it has not yet even been established that these two boxers are biological males at all, and the reasons for their disqualification may have more to do with Russian athletics corruption than anything biological.

    I think it’s doubly important to be careful here, not just because of our mental hygiene. If Algerians start to believe Khelif is a really a man, how could Khelif ever return home and what might they do to the family? The truth is whatever it is, but if this isn’t true, we could be ruining a woman’s life because we took a corrupt Russian’s word for it and let the lie get around the world before the truth put its pants on.

    (The Taiwanese athlete doesn’t have to go home to a Muslim country.)

  13. Boxers previously barred from women’s events will fight in Paris Olympics

    Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu?ting of Taiwan failed to meet gender eligibility tests at the Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi last year, prompting their disqualifications.

    At the time of their disqualifications, the president of the International Boxing Association, which governs the World Boxing Championships, alleged that the boxers’ chromosome tests came back as XY (women typically have two X chromosomes, while men typically have an X and a Y chromosome).

    “Based on DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to trick their colleagues into posing as women,” the association’s president, Umar Kremlev, told Russia’s Tass news agency at the time. “According to the results of the tests, it was proved that they have XY chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from competition.”

    • Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan failed to meet gender eligibility tests

    • Based on DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to trick their colleagues into posing as women

    • According to the results of the tests, it was proved that they have XY chromosomes.

    Let these handicapped men (Khelif and Lin) fight in the Paralympic Games and Special Olympics — or let them fight other men in the Olympics if they ever get that far.

  14. @Karmi: I quoted the original sources, buddy, not the media telephone games.

    The IBA does not say what the tests were.

    Kremlev did not name the athletes to TASS, or the number.

    The IBA has a history of bribery and judging scandals, and the athletes were disqualified after Khelif beat Russians. The IOC has decertified the IBA from Olympic boxing.

    As for the IBA president’s word over the IBA’s word, remember that the director of the FBI just said he wasn’t sure Trump was shot, and the FBI’s official statement says he was…

    At this point we don’t know what’s true. Nobody who actually knows has said anything that can be verified. A lot of people want to make it about transgender issues before the facts are in. There’s plenty of real, egregious cases in the US to get indignant about, we just don’t know yet if this is one of those.

    That’s ok, we’re not required to chase media squirrels.

  15. Niketas Choniates – first, I am not your “buddy”. Second – original source says same thing. Khelif and Lin “failed to meet gender eligibility tests” at the “at the Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi”. It doesn’t name them directly, but if you get someone to help you figure out how to connect the dots, then you will see that Khelif and Lin are XY boxers.

  16. @Karmi:first, I am not your “buddy”

    Bummer.

    It doesn’t name them directly, but if you get someone to help you figure out how to connect the dots, then you will see that Khelif and Lin are XY boxers.

    This is how the media does it. They put the dots down that they want you to connect, and leave out the dots that would give a different picture. Then they say they didn’t mislead you, and they’re right because you misled yourself with what they gave you.

    This is exactly what the “intelligence officials” said about Hunter’s laptop: they didn’t say it was Russian disinformation, oh no, you just didn’t read closely…

    Former director of national intelligence James Clapper, who signed the letter, told Kessler, “There was message distortion. All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five” of the letter.

    I think it’s wiser to wait and not chase the squirrels, but do what you want.

    This XY thing may be true, or may be not, but either way it could be putting Khelif’s and Khelif’s family’s lives in danger. Not BS danger like when you misgender someone by not using their preferred pronouns, but killed by an Islamist mob danger. I think it’s best to wait a little.

  17. Niketas Choniates, you are right that if this is “Russian disinformation,” we need to await more reliable sources. I will watch and see. Certainly the Italian boxer, a female champion, was speedily disabled in her fight.

  18. “anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives online who claim they’re transgender”

    Transgender spectrum (e.g. homosexual), probably.

    Yes, social conservatives who are pro-sodomy, Diversity (e.g. racism, sexism) , abortion, pedophilia, sadomasochism, and other nominally “secular” religious relics from ancient times.

    Aside from evolutionary considerations to discern the complementary status of both sexes, for purposes of safe female sex and feminine gender inclusion, the trans/quasi-gender proponents should support not only mass classes, but structural disparities to mitigate the progress of misogynistic elements in liberal factions.

  19. As “participants in the Women’s World Championship in India” – Khelif and Lin failed their “DNA tests” because “they have XY chromosomes”. By failing such DNA World Championship tests, Khelif and Lin should’ve never been allowed in the Paris Olympics as women participants. Nothing to do with “media”. All to do with World sports and handicaps…

  20. @Karmi:If “participants in the Women’s World Championship in India” failed their “DNA tests” because “they have XY chromosomes” then they should’ve never been allowed in the Paris Olympics as women participants.

    If. See, we’re in agreement. We’re not so different, you and I.

  21. @Kate:Certainly the Italian boxer, a female champion, was speedily disabled in her fight.

    She was, but Khelif has lost plenty of times (pronouns are not mine):

    At the 2018 AIBA Women’s World Boxing Championships, Khelif finished 17th in the women’s lightweight event after being eliminated in the first round by Karina Ibragimova.

    At the 2019 AIBA Women’s World Boxing Championships, she finished 33rd in the women’s lightweight event after being eliminated in the first round by Natalia Shadrin.

    She represented Algeria in the women’s lightweight event at the 2020 Summer Olympics, where she was defeated by Ireland’s Kellie Harrington in the quarterfinals.

    Note: 2020 Summer Olympics. Where was this controversy then? Khelif wasn’t any different.

  22. people with AID tend to be very attractive females like the Black Dahlia, Jamie Lee and Kim Novack.
    the boxer is grotesquely non feminine.
    BTW in an unpublished research by a mentor of mine, he determined that many nuns had AIS and were shunted into the convent when it was determined they had amenorrhea .

  24. “Caster Semenya”

    The honest brokers were right to abort the measure of testosterone as a metric to discern individual sex and sex-correlated gender. The qualification of each sex is established from conception, but sex-correlated gender attitributes depend on our evolution through milestones in human development that may be corrupted through external (e.g. anthropogenic) forcings.

  25. avi:

    You are apparently confusing complete AIS (very female- looking) with partial AIS. People with the latter can look very male.

  27. Khelif doesn’t have complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, since those people are basically girls and they should be considered as such. He may have incomplete AIS since those individuals are masculinized to a greater or lesser extent. However, we don’t even know at this time if Khelif has any intersex disorder; no such information has been provided. I wonder if he might have the same intersex diagnosis as Caster Semenya, 5-alpha reductase 2 deficiency, which would explain why Khelif was brought up as a girl.

    In my opinion, people with complete AIS should be considered female, chromosomes notwithstanding. Those with incomplete AIS and those with 5-apha R2D should compete in the men’s division (which should be the “open” division) whether they choose to live their life as male or female.

  28. people with AID tend to be very attractive females like the Black Dahlia, Jamie Lee and Kim Novack.

    *spit take* KIM NOVAK???!!!

    WHAAAAAAT the HELL??? C’MON, MAN!

  30. looks like whats his name in the crying game and stargate

    Jaye Davidson. Who was brilliant in both.

    Good call!
    ______________________________________

    Davidson later retired from acting, stating that he “genuinely hated the fame” he was receiving. He became more involved in modelling, and has since worked on several high-profile photo shoots, in addition to working as a fashion stylist in Paris.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaye_Davidson

  32. Dunno about women’s groups, but Phyllis Chesler, a prominent second-wave Jewish feminist, is walking the beat:
    __________________________________

    In a 2021 article for Tablet Magazine titled “The Progressive Erasure of Feminism,” Chesler wrote that the Equality Act would “dangerously privilege a minority over the majority by endangering women’s sex-based rights in terms of sports, and women-only safe spaces in prisons, DV and homeless shelters, and in the military.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Chesler#Recent_activities

  33. Who would have thought 20 years ago that we’d be discussing, seriously, the genetic makeup of an Algerian female boxer?
    Also, the Taiwanese version just beat another female in the same sport, though his/her opponent went the distance.
    And, back to my first point, it’s sports, and that is entertainment, and who cares. What about this story makes it worthy of front page, above the fold coverage?

  34. Steven Hayward at Powerlineblog.com has the ultimate riposte here in his pictures of the week column.

    The caption reads (from memory) “Why would anyone pay money to see an Algerian brutalise a European woman when you can see the same anytime on the streets of Paris?”

  35. Hi, Jerry. I don’t know about front-page, but it’s worth attention because it represents another high-profile instance of the confusion of sexes/genders which I see as a society-wide infection. The chaos introduced when civilization departs from a paradigm that’s been around for most of recorded history is worth considering. One can come to various conclusions about it, of course. This in Olympic boxing is one of the little niches of human endeavor which was not generally considered subject to such muddling until now. One more little tile laid down in the mosaic, as it were.

  36. Did you do the genetic test yourself? Or were you just privy to the results of a test that the rest of us have not seen?

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