The Paris Olympics

Normalising the violation of sex boundaries

As I was putting together this morning’s post, news was coming through of the battering of Italian boxer Angela Carini  by a man in the Paris Olympics. I wondered whether to refer to it, as a particularly horrific example of the male “violation of boundaries and assault on women’s rights’” I was writing about. I decided against, as it might have  created unnecessary confusion - the man who battered Angela Carini is probably a man with a DSD (Difference in Sex Development), rather than a man who ’identifies’ as a woman. Yet for anyone concerned about fairness or safety in women’s sports, the difference is irrelevant - it is men in women’s sports that are the problem, not a particular type of men. 

Coverage in the mainstream media has been, with some notable exceptions, appalling. BBC radio’s World at One, for example, presented the man as if he was a woman with unusually high levels of testosterone, rather than a man with typically male levels of testosterone. Unforgivably, the report included a BBC sports reporter saying he was not a doctor but he could tell that Carini was not seriously hurt. BBC radio returned to the topic with a typically biassed take in its late evening news programme, The World Tonight, interviewing a ‘trans’ male boxing manager and a ‘trans’ male academic, but no-one else.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that what happened in this morning’s fight was not an unfortunate accident, but the outcome of a deliberate decision by the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to prioritise ‘inclusion’ (based on ‘gender’ or DSDs) over the safety of women athletes. This is particularly important in contact sports like boxing, where, as biologist Emma Hilton has noted, “the power gap between a male and a female punch is 162%. That is, males can punch 2.6 times harder than women.” 

The male in today’s fight, and another male in tomorrow’s, were both DNA tested by the International Boxing Association (IBA) at last year’s world boxing competition in New Delhi. They were both found to be male, and disqualified from competing further in women’s boxing. The IBA tests were dismissed by the IOC, because to accept them would challenge the IOC ‘inclusion’ policy. Instead, the IOC’s only test was the sex marker in the participant’s passport (another argument for an end to sex falsification in identity documents).

The Paris Olympics started with men parodying women at the opening ceremony, continued with allowing a child rapist to participate in the beach volleyball, and are now glorifying male violence against women in the boxing ring. Paris will go down in history as the Olympics that glorified male violence against women, and normalised the destruction of the boundaries protecting women and women’s sport. 

The next Summer Olympics will be held in Los Angeles, in a State, California, whose administration happily places male offenders in women’s prisons. Will they make a stand and protect women’s sports? I doubt it. Will we have to wait until a woman is killed before sense and fairness returns to the administration of the Olympic Games? I hope not.

For further information:

How did we get here? (The Real Science of Sport Podcast, 1 August 2024)   

The end of female (Alessandra Asteriti, Gender Dissident, 1 August 2024)