This person achieves something amazing and of course the usual jerks pile on. I wonder about the behavior of her opponent as well.
Based on the linked article it seems very unclear whether this boxer is in fact genetically female or not, but stupid MFs gonna jump to conclusions.
This tweet makes a very good point.
Shes from a country where you’re not even allowed to transition if you wanted to.
For details on what it means to be a trans person in Algeria, see this article:
It’s essentially illegal to just exist in Algeria if you are an LGBTQ+ person.
Yeah. Imane Khelif (like Taiwanese Olympic boxer Lin Yu-Ting, also rumored to have previously failed a “gender test” for an earlier event, as the linked article reports) AFAICT was assigned female at birth and always identified and lived as female.
The current goss, AIUI, is that Khelif and Lin may be (I don’t think any reliable source has determined this one way or the other) XY women. If true, that would mean that they’re women born with female genital anatomy and consequently assigned and identified female, but with XY chromosomes and some kind of “difference of sex development” (DSD) that shortcircuited the usual XY-typical genital anatomy in the developmental stage.
And AFAICT, both Lin and Khelif have always identified as female and been entirely comfortable with a female gender identity, and are not plausibly suspected or accused of having modified their natural-born physiques in any way, nor of any doping attempts or other illegitimate performance enhancement.
As you point out, there is basically zero chance that the Algerian Khelif could be a surgically-transitioned transgender woman anyway, given Algeria’s harsh anti-LGBTQ climate.
And as the article reports, there are some seriously stupid MFers ignorantly making accusations about Khelif (and Lin) being “a man”. This is the same sort of shit that the Olympic champion Caster Semenya, another XY woman, had to wade through when she won races. (Apropos of which, it’s starting to look like Italian women’s elite sport is going to have to watch out if they don’t want to get an international reputation as permanent sore losers about high-T female competitors. Carini’s petulant refusal to shake Khelif’s hand is oddly reminiscent of Italian runner Elisa Cusma’s declaration, after losing to Semenya in a 2009 event, that “for me, she is not a woman. She is a man.”)
The hypocrisy in this particular stupid MFery is particularly annoying, because all these athletes like Khelif, Lin and Semenya have been doing, all along, exactly what the self-appointed gender police transphobic assholes like JK Rowling claim that individuals are supposed to do.
Namely, these athletes have been living their whole lives in the bodies and gender categories that they got at birth. They were born with female genitalia, they got assigned female, they were given female names and accepted female gender identity with feminine pronouns, and were accepted as such in their families and communities. They didn’t want or ask to transition their gender, they didn’t feel that they were in any way “born in the wrong body”, they had to put up with all the usual patriarchal-society impositions of sexist unfairness.
(Reading Semenya’s autobiography recently, I was particularly struck by her description of being sent as a teenager to temporarily live with her grandmother and three adolescent male cousins. Her cousins’ lives were basically going to school, playing sports, and hanging out with friends. Semenya also went to school, also played sports and hung out with friends when she could, but she was additionally required to do the housecleaning, do the cooking, and wash and iron her cousins’ and her own school uniforms. Did any of those male cousins use their freedom from domestic responsibilities to develop Olympic-level elite athlete skills themselves? As it happens, no they didn’t. But yeah, Semenya was obviously the one who should be doing all the cooking and cleaning and laundry, because she was a girl. 
)
As girls, Khelif and Lin and Semenya (and Dutee Chand, etc.) were all gender-nonconforming in some ways, like having short hair ( ) and playing sports and being muscular ( ). But that’s what the Gender Hypocriticals say you’re supposed to do if you find gender norms too restrictive for your nonconforming self, right? Break all the social gender conventions you want, just don’t try to get out of them by declaring you’re the “wrong” gender! Not like those evil transies!!
So yeah, these emphatically non-transgender young women are just livin’ their lives in their natural bodies and their birth-assigned gender, and they’re also working incredibly hard and successfully to be amazing athletes, and now when they win a bunch of stuff the Gender Hypocriticals are suddenly fuming at them “oh no you’re a MAN, how dare you try to horn in on the competition categories for our fragile protected sex class, you evil predatory cheater!!”
Yeah, fuck those stupid MFers.
I haven’t been following this, but I’m curious about one thing. The articles say that Khelif failed a “gender test” that apparently revealed that she had XY chromosomes. Are all female athletes required to be genetically tested to verify that they have XX chromosomes, or is there some other criteria that they have to pass to be tested?
I remember that at some time in the past Russian/Soviet female athletes, usually in events like weightlifting where muscle mass was an issue, were disqualified because they tested for high levels of testosterone. Is this an upgraded version of this?
No, it’s a bit different.
The IOC largely lets individual regulatory bodies set the rules for eligibility. That was the IBA until the IOC stripped them of that authority recently. The new temporary regulatory body for boxing has cleared Khelif for competition.
But back to the IBA, last year, the IBA put out a decision that Khelif and a Chinese boxer were disqualified from competition. The President of that IBA stated it was because they possessed both X and Y chromosomes. But that’s not really satisfactory. Possession of a Y chromosome, by itself, doesn’t mean a lot. As it happens, biology can be weird. But the IBA never really gave any more details or presented any lab results. So, the “failed” test itself is questionable as all hell.
As it happens, the IBA’s only sponsor is Gazprom and run by a guy with ties to Putin and Russian oligarchs. Not exactly screaming “transparency and corruption-free”. Minutes from the disqualification meeting also indicated the head of the IBA personally made the decision and left it to the staff to justify it afterwards. They also emphasized at that meeting that they should get around to setting gender testing guidelines (!?) in the first place. Again, not exactly what you’d expect from a process that was above board.
Due to his statement about X and Y chromosomes, there are lots of guesses about what this means and what might have plausibly happened (again, biology is weird and there’s lots of plausible scenarios), but basically somebody made a vague statement that doesn’t really mean a lot by itself in actual biological terms. The IBA itself is now discredited, but Khelif still has to deal with the fallout.
For what it’s worth, it is illegal in Algeria to undergo gender transition and Khelif was identified as female at birth by local doctors. And hardly has a perfect record in boxing anyway.
Long story short: we only have the word of a corrupt liar about the gender test in the first place, but this lets other competitors and nations try to score silly points at the expense of somebody else.
More to the point, the people who deny the possibility of transgenderism generally claim that the genitals you have at birth, and your natural hormone balance, and your chromosomes, and so on, are all the same thing. But they’re not. Regardless of what you think about psychological gender, you have to accept the factual existence of physical intersex conditions. There are people who naturally have a vagina and a Y chromosome, as well as many other combinations of “mismatched” physical, objective, verifiable sex traits (I put “mismatched” in quotes because, while such combinations of traits are unusual, I don’t mean to imply that there’s necessarily anything “wrong” with them).
Further, many of these conditions aren’t obvious. Most of us don’t actually know our own hormone levels, and even fewer of us know our chromosomal composition. Most of us can make a guess that’s highly likely to be correct, based on strong correlations with more easily observed traits, but those correlations aren’t perfect, and so those guesses are still sometimes wrong. Doubtless, some of the folks saying “Well, I’m a real man, with XY chromosomes”, or “I’m a real woman, with XX chromosomes” are among those who are wrong.
If psychological gender exists at all (and most anti-trans folks accept that as true), then transgenderism is just one more example of an intersex condition.
[Moderating]
I split this discussion off from the Stupid Motherfuckers Omnibus thread.
[/Moderating]
@chela already tried to spread this bullshit
“Radical Feminists” like JK Rowling probably can never credibly slide back into plausible deniability after this.
There are only two possibilities for why she chose to spread an actively dangerous rumor about Khelif.
The first is that in her quest to protect women and girls, some women are allowed to be thrown to the wolves as collateral damage.
The second is that it never really was about protecting women and girls from people who were assigned male at birth and chose to change their biology and/or how they present socially, it was about making sure she doesn’t have to encounter people who don’t fit the way she feels about the gender binary.
Yes, and so does the Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting mentioned above (the other competitor disqualified last year by the IBA, on the extremely murky grounds that you summarized).
For example, JK Rowling is foaming at the mouth on Xitter (to millions of followers), accusing Khelif—who was assigned female at birth and has always been classified and identified as female, whatever her (still not reliably attested) chromosomal makeup may be—of being a “male who knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered”.
She has similarly described the Olympic participation of both Khelif and Lin—who, like Khelif, was assigned female at birth and has always been classified and identified as female, whatever her (still not reliably attested) chromosomal makeup may be—as “insanity”. Along with fretting about the potential outcome of “a female boxer” (presumably as distinct from Lin and Khelif) “with life-altering injuries”, or “a female boxer killed”.
Besides all the Gender Hypocritical bullshit, I’m absolutely baffled as to how Rowling—who has even written a multi-book crime novel series with a protagonist who used to be an accomplished amateur heavyweight boxer—can be so apparently clueless about the unremarkable fact that all competition boxers, whatever their gender or weight class, are constantly punching their opponents in the head.
(Female boxers also sometimes get life-altering injuries in the ring, of course, and a few have even been killed.)
This is starting to look like a concerted effort by the “Gender Critical” movement to deliberately misrepresent and demonize these women as much as possible, in order to reinforce their transphobic narrative that any form of gender “deviance” is ultimately about “males” physically assaulting girls and women.
I have read some speculations that the whole disqualification kerfuffle about Lin and Khelif originated as, or got exploited as, some kind of Russian psy op via the IBA. That still seems a bit over-the-top CT to me, but there is definitely some real malevolence coming from somewhere in the attacks on these women.
[ETA: and I think DeadTreasSecretaries’s analysis makes sense.]
Emphasis mine.
Girls with Swyer syndrome have an XY chromosomal makeup (as boys normally do) instead of an XX chromosomal makeup (as girls normally do). Despite having the XY chromosomal makeup, girls with Swyer syndrome look female and have functional female genitalia and structures including a vagina, uterus and fallopian tubes.
Girls with Swyer syndrome lack sex glands (ovaries). Instead of sex glands, women with Swyer syndrome have “gonadal streaks”, in which the ovaries do not develop properly (aplasia) and are replaced by functionless scar (fibrous) tissue.
They have normal female reproductive organs, including a uterus, fallopian tubes, and vagina. However, the ovaries do not develop and are replaced by clumps of tissue where they would normally form.
JK Rowling is a truly terrible human being who could not possibly be more full of hateful shit on this topic. Christ, I’m sick of her noise.
XY chromosomes with a female external appearance can also be due to Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which appears from a cursory Googling to be a different condition from Swyer Syndrome.
There are lots of potential things happening.
What sickens me is that a lot of very thoughtful, well informed people have been coming up with plausible scenarios to explain the test results. Only - there are no actual test results. There’s only the word of some very shady characters that they have test results.
So, lots of very thorough and patience explanations and work going into explaining what could well be totally bogus ‘findings’ from con artists who made things up as they went. It’s appalling.
There are several other DSDs (differences [formerly “disorders”] of sex development) that can result in XY individuals developing female genitalia and consequently being assigned female at birth. [ETA: as Chronos already mentioned, but have some more detail anyway.] Here’s an article with a table listing a couple dozen of them.
The ones that people seem most likely to have heard of are:
- XY complete gonadal dysgenesis or “Swyer syndrome”, as per your link. Causally classified as abnormality of gonadal development.
- Androgen insensitivity syndrome, or cellular inability to respond to androgens (the Belgian supermodel Hanne Gaby Odiele reportedly has this condition). Causally classified as defect in androgen action.
- 5α-reductase type 2 deficiency, which the abovementioned Olympic champion runner Caster Semenya reportedly has (and I think maybe her fellow champion runner Dutee Chand as well?). Causally classified as defect in testosterone metabolism.
There’s a bunch more, but TL;DR: Embryologically, female sex development appears to be the default for human beings, and any one of a fairly large number of atypical physiological events can redirect the usual Y-chromosome-triggered development of male genital anatomy towards the female default.
We don’t know whether Khelif and/or Lin have XY chromosomes, but if so, there are several different DSDs that could have caused them to be birth-identified as female and consequently to live their lives as girls and women. AFAICT there is zero medically valid reason, whatever their DSD status, to refuse to identify them as female.
People can of course argue—and at present many people in elite sports competition organizations are basically spending their professional lives arguing—about whether and how different kinds of XY women should compete with different kinds of XX women in sports, based on their physiological differences.
But trying to cut that Gordian knot by simplistically declaring all XY women athletes to be “males” and “cheaters” who are “stealing” achievements from XX women athletes is just ignorant malicious bullshit.
Besides, of course, as Great_Antibob notes, the baseline ignorant malicious bullshit of just pigheadedly asserting that a particular woman athlete is XY based on nothing but an undocumented claim by a representative of an organization that has been sanctioned for corruption and other ethics violations.
Yeah, it’s pretty hilarious that people are calling on the International Boxing Association as an authority. They’re one of the most corrupt organizations in all of sports, and they were stripped of recognition from the IOC because of it.
Elsewhere, someone saying she is a geneticist says:
A person with Swyer Syndrome is Male with female parts. They do not generate female reproductive hormones, They do not go through puberty without artificial hormones. They do not develop eggs. They are a Male that developed incorrectly. Most choose to present as female as I said above because it’s an easier lifestyle than attempting reconstruction surgery. Choosing to present as female does not mean they are biologically female.
The standard is biologically
XY = Male
XX = female
XXY = Male
XYY = Male
Is that the same as the Olympic standard? I would assume they do a bunch of genetic tests on athletes to screen out genetic engineering as well as the usual drugs and hormones for performance enhancement.