Realistically speaking there’s a lot to what you say. But do you feel there should be no efforts to pursue fairness?
What if Bruce Jenner had decided at age 25 to compete in women’s events as Caitlyn? Of course Jenner was an extraordinary athlete competing in male events; if competing in women’s there would likely have been no record in ANY sport that would not have been held by Jenner.
Would that be welcomed by participants in this thread? Admired? Celebrated?
This is a great point and if JK and her ilk had the nuance and forethought to thoughtfully bring this up, people might be more willing to discuss the issue in good faith. In any event, it certainly distinguishes the Khelif and Lin scenarios from the more legitimate question regarding the participation of trans women in women’s sports.
Correct; this used to be called “testicular feminization” and is a recessive-gene disorder.
I have never met an intersex person that I know of, but in interviews with them, the one thing that never changed was that the biggest issue was that they were lied to about it. Some of them also had medically unnecessary “cosmetic” surgery on their genitalia before they were old enough to know what was going on.
…so trans women are women. Gotcha.
Just a thing for you to remember: the only people concerned about the “gender assigned at birth” are the TERFs and the transphobes. Most of the rest of us really don’t care. Its the TERFs and the transphobes who insisted that the ‘gender assigned at birth’ was all that mattered.
But now the goalposts are shifting. And it looks like you are playing your part.
It’s probably worth reiterating at this point that the only evidence for Khelif not being cis is a secret test claimed to have been conducted by an organization that is essentially an arm of the Russian government, which they won’t divulge the details of, which they apparently carried out overnight right after she beat a Russian boxer in a competition Russia was in charge of. She was raised female, identifies as female, her passport says she’s female, neither the IOC or any other sporting organization besides the IBA says she’s anything other than female, there is no medical diagnosis, and she comes from a country where being transgender isn’t even legal.
This entire brouhaha is a manufactoversy created by Russian fraudsters taking advantage of maga culture war nonsense.
Russia can’t compete in the Olympics so I bet they are spitefully enjoying this bullshit controversy they started.
Here is a tiktok addressing this:
short answer, it’s racism not science. But he shows some of the research
(My bold)
Which, itself, was created (largely) by Russian fraudsters.
It’s Russian fraudsters all the way down!
Good news, she won her most recent bout and will get a medal.
The more I hear about JK Rowling, the more I feel like she’s Britain’s version of Mike Lindell.
But with money.
…JK Rowling is much more dangerous than Lindell. She’s at the forefront of the anti-transgender movement in the UK, and she has the ear of both of the major parties. Lindell is a sideshow. Rowling is driving the movement.
Nitpick: I think you mean “possibly being intersex” rather than “not being cis”. As you note, Khelif was born with female anatomy and consequently birth-assigned as female, and has lived (and competed) her entire life consistently with that female identity.
If you identify as the gender you were assigned at birth, you are cisgender, end of story. There is zero evidence, even counting the highly suspect “evidence” of the IBA’s undocumented assertions, that Khelif is anything but a cisgender woman.
Even if it turns out that the IBA assertions are correct about Khelif being in some way intersex, she would still be a cisgender woman, because she was assigned female at birth and identifies as female.
Well, there’s no evidence that she’s non-gender-conforming in any way whatsoever, genetic or otherwise, but that hasn’t stopped people from screeching that “KAMALA HARRIS IS LETTING MEN BEAT UP WOMEN”.
That being said, you are correct and thiz whole thing is a nothingberder cooked up by fascist goons.
I have been reading about the “sex essentialist activism” movement within radical feminism in the 1970s, and it’s eye-opening to see just how hostile they were towards not only transgender but intersex women.
I was assuming that there had to be some kind of correctable mistake in the obvious logical inconsistency of complaining when transgender women don’t identify as their birth-assigned gender, and then also complaining when intersex women do identify as their birth-assigned gender. The hypocrisy is indeed blatant, but it isn’t correctable. What it stems from, apparently, is a decades-old denunciation by some radical feminists of so-called “male energy”.
It’s not at all clear what physical entity “male energy” is supposed to be, but supposedly transgender women and intersex women—anybody who can plausibly be described as having any aspect of male biology, at least according to oversimplistic classifications of exactly what biology counts as “male”—all have some of it, so they have to be kept away from cisgender non-intersex women in “women’s spaces”.
Nitpick again, bc I can’t stop being annoying, sorry: “Gender-conforming” typically refers to gender expression, i.e., how people publicly present their bodies and behavior, measured against conventional gender norms and stereotypes about how people of this or that gender are “supposed to” look and behave.
So yes, it is certainly true that the short-haired, flat-chested Khelif is in some respects gender-nonconforming, as are zillions of other women, including many cisgender XX women. She “looks masculine” in some ways, and that qualifies as gender nonconformity.
You’re still right that there’s no actual verified evidence that there is anything in the least atypical about the alignment of her chromosomal or hormonal sex with her birth-assigned gonadal sex and gender identity. But AFAICT there’s no simple term for that.
The “beat up” language is another exasperatingly dishonest rhetorical trick in this anti-trans and anti-liberal propaganda campaign. It’s blatantly trying to evoke the impression of some random violent man criminally assaulting some helpless and terrified female victim.
By contrast, what’s actually going on in each of these Olympic boxing matches is two officially qualified and eligible female-born elite athletes voluntarily and consensually participating in a rigidly regulated and supervised sporting competition. In each case, both the athletes have been competing in the same female categories in other boxing events for a number of years, and I guarantee that each of them knows a lot more actual facts about the other’s physical characteristics and history than any of the fascist goons fuming about “men beating up women” know about either of them.
I watched the fight (not live, but on a news site). Contrary to how it’s being portrayed by some, Khelif did not beat the crap out of Carini. The latter quit after a few stiff jabs to the face. Female boxers regularly hit each other a lot harder than that. I don’t know why Carini felt so much pain that she had to quit, but it wasn’t because she had received a terrible beating from someone much stronger. This is yet another way the whole thing has been misrepresented by people with an axe to grind.
Surely you don’t expect the people screaming and frothing at the mouth about the sanctity of women’s sports to actually watch any of it, do you?
Yeah, maybe she had some boxer version of what gymnasts call “the twisties” where you know you’re not in sufficient control of your body, and she just couldn’t keep out of the way of the punches and knew she had to shut it down? I have zero knowledge of boxing, or for that matter of any other sport at any level above what might charitably be described as total mediocrity in student and amateur athletics.
But I do know that real athletes are constantly riding their bodies on the edge of serious injury during sustained extreme physical challenge, and they are always on the watch for the moments when that control crucially slips away from them. Because those moments are when the injuries happen.
I also noticed that Khelif’s more recent victory over Hamori was no 46-second walkover, either. Of course, that sort of development merely prompts the frothing gender police types to speculate that she’s just cannily shading her performance to avoid seeming “unnaturally” dominant. Can’t win with these assholes.
This entire tangent is an irrelevant sideshow because it presumes as a given that the appeal of winning sports medals is somehow so great that people are willing to go through irreversible surgeries and hormone treatments just to win them “unfairly”. Thus, we need to spend inordinate amounts of time precisely defining the line such that we can forstall these malicious people from “ruining” the sport.
Of course, no effort is made to ever verify if anyone has ever or will ever do that for what reason and the “concern” seems suspiciously to arise from people who have curiously never seemed to care about any of the other ways women’s sports could be supported or improved. They do, however, seem to share a suspiciously large overlap with people who believe there is an epidemic of men who have some urgent fetish to walk into women’s bathrooms that so overrides their other senses of propriety enough to declare themselves trans and that again, legislation is needed to prevent this menace despite zero recorded instances of it ever happening.
It’s a bare fig leaf put there to support a ideology that trans people are somehow wicked, manipulative, or gullible people from whom the rest of society needs protection from.
On the other side of the debate are people who understand that trans people exclusively go through the enormous pain and cost of transitioning purely because they would like to stop hurting as much as they currently do from gender dysphoria and that sports is an important part of many people’s lives and that most trans people would just like a chance to participate in competitive sports as a way to live their lives and the regular “fairness in women’s sports” debate is done in such bad faith and explicitly with the malicious intent to make trans women feel othered.
Heck, I’ve watched a match for charity between two influencers (who had had professional coaching) and they both took harder hits than the Italian boxer.
I refuse to believe that she wasn’t in on it somehow. Sure, maybe she did just get a sudden pain right then, but it’s so convenient.
And Lin Yu-ting, who has been facing similar “is she/isn’t she” malarky has also won and qualified for a medal.