UK media reporting on BBC ignoring risk of gender identity

That BBC headline infuriated me so much. Making it out to be that Carini wasn't able to cope under the pressure whereas the real issue was that she had to fight against a man.

@Ladybrrrd If the IOC are concerned over the accuracy of previous genetic testing, they should (quickly, easily, painlessly, maintaining everyone's dignity) do their own cheek swabs. Do it on every single athlete, if they don't want to single anyone out 🤷‍♀️

The debate isn't about whether these athletes have XX chromosomes - if they did, that would shut the whole thing down instantly and there would be no further discussion.

The question is, how far from standard XX female are we willing to consider to be eligible to compete against women.

That's in response to that Reddit screenshot being spammed all over social media, and posted here by @Ladybrrrd

x.com/slatzism/status/1819427537740558848?s=46&t=SPorwN-mokktL467rcZ57g

She writes in a myth debunking post on behalf of her media platform Reduxx:

1. "The IBA only disqualified L & K because they beat Russian boxers at the 2023 championships!"

No they did not. I started seeing this weird, completely false claim circulating over the last 24 hours.

Khelif beat Thailand's Janjaem Suwannapheng and was set to compete against China's Yang Liu for gold in the Welterweight category.

Lin beat Bulgaria's Svetlana Kamenova Staneva for bronze in the Featherweight category.

They were scheduled to fight no Russian boxers in either one of their categories, and only one Russian boxer won a gold medal in the entire championship (Anastasiia Demurchian, Light Middleweight).

India won the most gold medals (4) at the 2023 Women's Championship. China won the most medals overall (7). Kazakhstan won the second most medals overall (6). Russia only won 3 medals at the championship.

Also worth noting that another Taiwanese boxer, Huang Hsiao-wen, won gold in the Bantamweight category. So for all the Taiwanese mouthpieces claiming Lin's disqualification was just "discrimination against Taiwan"... lol no.

Facebook thread about this today had people who were clearly trans activists (from their profiles) stating that this man is in fact a woman who has given birth and doing their usual slagging off JKR as they like to slip her name in as often as possible.
The BBC are completely deranged on the whole issue of transgenderism in relation to women's spaces including sports. They are being ridiculously oblique in their reporting of this situation in boxing. I understand the IOC has told journalists they can’t refer to anybody as anything other than what that individual chooses. No wonder audiences are confused.

Nothingeverything · Yesterday 17:44

I don't get how they can control how journalists report this. What authority do they have?

None whatsoever, they work insidiously, by blackmail. If reporters don't toe the line, they will be thrown out and black-listed.

The only 'evidence' there is that Imane has XY chromosomes at all comes from the head of a shady Russian organization.
Imane is a woman. There's pictures of her as (quite clearly) a little girl.
Her story should be inspiring. She collected scrap metal and worked hard to do boxing in the first place because her father wouldn't allow it. She has lifted herself out of poverty and has spent yer career championing sport in a country where there are worrying patterns of obesity in children, and where girls are discouraged from participating. Instead she's facing abuse and a gross spread of information, including from governmental figures! Shame on them and Rowling.

Just goes to show where all of this hate leads. Women who don't look or act like they're 'supposed' to being dragged in to the firing line, trans or otherwise.
This Reddit post sums it up. (Might be in the wrong order)

“There has been some confusion that somehow it's a man fighting a woman. This is just not the case. On that there is consensus, scientifically this is not a man fighting a woman."

That really pissed me off, when I heard the IOC man say that. I had to walk out of the room, I couldn’t bear to listen to any more of his nonsense.

If my info is right, Khelif has a DSD in which the external genitalia appear ambiguous at birth, but chromosomes are XY. During childhood, sex differences are not that striking, so the fact that the child is a boy isn't that obvious. At puberty, carriers of this type of DSD go through ordinary male puberty, testosterone surge, muscle development and the lot.

Not sure how well he'd do among male light welterweights, probably not championship calibre, but among female boxers he obviously crushes bones. Which is the whole reason for having separate categories for those classes of people.

People do. And then use the results that demonstrate they aren't to demonstrate that gender is a spectrum and there are no binaries.

"That mask is a potent symbol of her struggle to rip apart preconceived notions of gender and gain recognition of her own gender identity--that biology is not black and white and that shades of gray should be celebrated, not denied.
Xora was raised as a boy and began presenting as a woman when she turned 25. For years, she believed that she had androgen insensitivity syndrome, or AIS, a condition that causes person who is genetically male, with XY chromosomes, to not respond to male hormones. She identified as intersex, and she thought she was lucky to escape to invasive, painful, and often lengthy surgical procedures that other intersex children undergo, a practice that the United Nations has recently denounced as "torture."
Early this year, chromosomal tests showed that Xora was mistaken—she does not have AIS. She says that this only adds to her belief that gender does not exist on a binary—and that neither trans nor intersex people should have the suffer for that."

https://archive.is/ARGbR

However, currently, in sports, a test that demonstrates that somebody

• is male rather than female or
• has a VSD

Notably, Zdeněk Koubek, a medal winning athlete in the 1934 Women's Games (back when women couldn't enter Olympics and there were no women's events) opted to live as a man after learning of a VSD. afaict, there was nothing but positive and supportive press about this decision. Koubek (voluntarily) handed back the medals and Koubek's records were cancelled.

Once more Janice Turner comes to the rescue
A simple cheek swab can protect female boxers

https://www.thetimes.com/article/b8a7b567-810f-4505-8c2e-e9cfb0b8132b?shareToken=bd8ee6dbf7a7ab4a95e4c816412900aa

It’s ridiculous. Surely you can’t ‘identify’ as intersex, any more than you can ‘identify’ as (say) having cancer?
What were the tests carried out by the IBA that led to their being banned? That the boxers didn’t appeal? The IBA have stated that they weren’t testosterone tests, which (doesn’t it?) leaves one to assume they were genetic tests.
And if a fight between someone with XX chromosomes and someone with XY isn’t ’scientifically a man fighting a woman’, what the actual fuck is it then?
We deserve more than the implication that a bunch of hysterical women are crying foul because one of them has been beaten by someone with short hair and a flat chest.

I've just read the most recent BBC article. They do now acknowledge that both these athletes have tested as having XY chromosomes, but they quote IOC spokesperson Mark Adams:

"There has been some confusion that somehow it's a man fighting a woman. This is just not the case. On that there is consensus, scientifically this is not a man fighting a woman."

And they make their own assertion that "There is no suggestion Khelif identifies as anything other than a woman.... There is no suggestion that Khelif identifies as transgender or intersex."

They also quote IBA chief executive Roberts: "There are many women with higher levels of testosterone than men," which doesn't tally with any graph I've ever seen.....

This hasn't cleared anything up for me I'll be honest - if it weren't for this board I would have no idea what was actually going on here.

www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/articles/cye0ex43k63o

They have the threat that they control access to the TV coverage rights world-wide. It would actually be great if a really big media set-up like the BBC or CNN said to the IOC, you know what? We'll say what we please to best inform the public, and if you want to take our coverage away, just do it, and see how that works for you. Sadly, just a pipe-dream, though!

The only answer that's generally on offer is that the IOC control which media organisations get media rights.

https://olympics.com/ioc/media-rights-holders

Even so, it's remarkable.

I don't get how they can control how journalists report this. What authority do they have?

Unfortunately, the IOC's media rules mitigate against that as does the UK IPSO (largely).

It's a striking instance of global control of the information flow for this topic.

It may well be highly unlikely - but my point is that there should be some reporting to enable the public to gain a more nuanced understanding than on the one hand fingers-in-ears ‘la la la they’re women on their passports’ and on the other ‘they’re filthy male cheats.’

It’s my understanding that these two boxers have a DSD which means that at birth they appeared female despite having XY chromosomes (which only became apparent much later, possibly not until they were tested by the IBA.

That's a highly unlikely scenario. Taiwan has an excellent healthcare system. The absence of menarche despite good height attainment etc. is likely to have triggered a clinical investigation during adolescence. If it didn't, there may have already been other considerations that influenced a voluntary lack of investigation.

Justin has been clear in the past.

The BBC are strongly consistent in being very weak on these issues.

I think gender here means sex.

I would love someone to come along with some objective biology here as I’m quite confused among all the misinformation and knee-jerk responses.
First of all, surely you can’t have a ‘gender test’ as gender is a social construct/innate feeling?
But the existence of men and women’s categories in sport presumes an empirically determinable binary. Ie people are either male or female and that can be objectively ascertained.
It’s my understanding that these two boxers have a DSD which means that at birth they appeared female despite having XY chromosomes (which only became apparent much later, possibly not until they were tested by the IBA. They have been raised as girls and their ‘innate gender identity’ is female.
So I’m not sure it’s helpful or constructive to say ‘they’re cheating violent men.’
On the other hand, their chromosomal pattern certainly aligns them with men rather than women. But I don’t know - and the reporting is by no means helping me to understand - what that actually means in terms of physical performance. As a feminist with no knowledge of human biology, it certainly seems to me that the XY combination should assign someone to male not female sport. But I don’t know what testosterone levels are going to be, or to what extent people with this particular DSD have been through male puberty - the things which are deemed to give men an unfair advantage in most sports.
These are clearly people who do not fit neatly into either biological category. All the more need, then, for some careful, sober, objective criteria to be applied by some experts in the field who are prioritising fairness over some limp ‘be kind’ agenda.
People with DSDs indubitably have a very hard life in all sorts of ways, but it’s not up to IOC to compensate them for that by giving them licence to pound women to pieces.

@FizzingAda not normally a fan of Webb but that's good to hear

Idiotic male bbc sports correspondant on R4 yesterday: 'well, I'm not sure we'll ever really know what happened in this match' in a jokey/baffled tone.

I know nothing about boxing and I can tell you what **cking happened - she stopped because she knew she'd be seriously injured or killed if she didn't. It's really very simple.

The Italian press is also bad on this. Mainly just repeating "not trans" "unusually high testosterone ".