Thread 4: TWO “Female Boxers” Set To Compete At Paris 2024 Were Previously Disqualified From Women’s World Championship For Having “XY Chromosomes”

@NoBinturongsHereMate @ChaChaChooey those points all make sense thank you!

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Imane_Khelif&oldid=1240712598

The state of this Wikipedia page.. whoever's working on this, their bias is showing all through the article.

IK’s dad was in the newspapers showing off childhood pictures and coaches/training staff have been giving interviews whereas YTL, team and family seem to have deliberately kept a low profile (until now anyway)?

I expect language has something to do with it too - IK has been working and training in Europe and more people are able to translate between various European languages and English than are able to do the same between Mandarin or either of the two Taiwanese languages.

Being on Team Taiwan at the Olympics must be pretty weird/stressful without the sex test debacle, I wouldn’t be surprised if Taiwanese athletes are generally advised to stay low key everywhere except when actively competing and to delay press interviews until everyone’s back home.

I expect the profile/popularity of the weight classes and the profiles/track records of the boxers in each class feeds into volume of attention generally? Most of the really famous household name boxers of the last 60 years have been Heavyweights/Super Heavyweight and LK is a couple of weight classes higher than YTL (the women’s weight classes are a bit different to the men’s tho).

(and internet copy&’paste debaters can’t use the Russia conspiracy argument to defend YTL because YLT hadn’t fought a Russian as recently as IK 😬)

The Algerian fought first, so got more attention. And there's been more info coming out of the Algerian training camps etc, so more to talk about.

And from the 'inclusion' side of the argument, the story of a poor underdog from oppressive rural Algeria is a more useful narrative that Taiwan's top ranking medical system and less rigid attitudes to gender roles and nonconformity. 'She's got a female passport' is a less convincing argument if your country allows passports to be changed.

Interesting development about Lin Yu-ting, the Taiwanese govt. and their approach to Fair Play for Women.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5143847-taiwan-tries-to-silence-fair-play-for-women?

Yes! But why are we all focusing so much on one of them when they were both XY in a female category. I don't understand why all the news and commentary seems to downplay the Taiwanese boxer slightly in this compared to the Algerian.

As someone pointed out on Twitter the IOC are relying on the Taiwanese authorities who issued the female passport so the validation is entirely circular.

As we have seen on other threads, it is all revolving around ‘women’s’ sport. ie. Making it inclusive based on the language used.

It is just one of the reasons I now use ‘female sport’. Because when faced with the incessant pushing, let’s fucking cut to the chase and set the boundaries around the ‘sex’ category.

When you see it, the doubling down on ‘woman’ in their defence, you know that they know. Arses.

President Thomas Bach of the IOC has made it clear that Ms Lin Yu-ting is born as a woman, raised as a woman, has a passport as a woman and has competed for many years as a woman"

‘president thomas bach of the ioc has made it clear that ms lin yu-ting is born an adult female human, raised as an adult female human…’

gosh they grow so fast

It's almost as if they're part of the effort to change the definition of "woman."

Guess someone figured they needed to get in on the grifting action a bit more and keep up with IK.

Exactly, there is an entire class of people who never need make such declarations...

From the Lin article
"President Thomas Bach of the IOC has made it clear that Ms Lin Yu-ting is born as a woman, raised as a woman, has a passport as a woman and has competed for many years as a woman"
It would be so much quicker to say she's female but they never do.

Isn't that a bit of an own goal by Taiwan. Most people aren't even discussing Lin because they're so focused on Khelif

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/boxing/2024/08/16/taiwan-womens-right-campaigners-gender-row-boxer/

Meanwhile, from the Taiwanese side of things:

https://www.facebook.com/fairplayforwomen/posts/pfbid022voYpBxYGE3GEbYPnwvDPgnZZAecmTusCyQ4LpRxbs6pCBDoj8xZPvx6yg6Q3wn9l

Oo that's really interesting.

So it has a lot to do with power and corruption within the IOC in terms of who should be the next head of the IOC. So politics before women.

That makes the battle for who gets the job more interesting. There's a number of names beside Seb Coe.

If there is an Algerian power broker that makes it harder for Coe. It also means that a potential female African candidate may be nothing more than a puppet rather than being a champion of equality and gender parity.

Interesting.

Thanks for flagging that, but what an utterly ridiculous format! The provided questions were entirely unsuited to dealing with facts rather than feelings, as was the 'reflect, don't correct' rule.

Quite a difference in how they handled it, with Sharron giving statistics throughout and the other one just claiming 'I could provide statistics' but not doing so.

Looks like the Süddeutsche piece is paywalled - no tokens - but here's a couple of screen shots:

Excellent German article by (liberal) newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung on the boxing case - all the more noteworthy given they've been staunchly TWAW otherwise. Well worth Google Translate.

The two most noteworthy points to me:

• The IOC "Boxing Unit" was in fact staffed by former IBA officials, making the IOC's 3 Monkeys stance on Lin and Khelif all the more remarkable.

• Besides a general desire to score woke points, the IOC's position was also influenced by the fact that an Algerian sports functionary plays a central role on its board as de facto power broker for the African continent; he was instrumental in the push to extend Bach's term for a non-statutory third round. Bit of tit for that there it seems.

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/sport/olympia-geschlechterdebatte-imane-khelif-lin-yu-ting-thomas-bach-ioc-mustapha-berraf-frauen-lux.HGqinamFLdsnw5Q7Qz3mYh

Good article - I like the way it was about actual women athletes (and neither pretended that the boxing debacle didn’t happen nor spent ages discussing those male athletes when the focus was meant to be on female athletes).

Guardian article about women in sport.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/aug/15/womens-parity-in-sport-has-a-long-way-to-go-despite-positive-paris-signs
That did not go the way I expected!

I've just listened to it. If I were nitpicky......I'd take issue with preamble. The presenter said something like transgender people not welcome in women's sports. Tm who aren't taking testosterone are welcome.

Also, kudos to Charlie, who didn't have much beyond regurgitated slogans but at least showed up (the silences were nearly as painful as the mistruths).

Actually, I think I'd agree with Charlie's second answer about science and fairness. I think I'm more likely to be pleased by the results of unbiased science. Any reasonable person, one not blinded by wishful thinking and ideology, would see men identifying into women's sports is not fair.

Then if we're talking about people dropping out of sport. Is the already woeful participation of girls in sport likely to be improve if they have the prospect of being tackled by the fragrant Tiffany or, on the subject of tackle, having to share a changing room with 'her'.

I was confused at the premise that they should meet in the middle when Sharron made a couple of suggestions that could be considered "middle" (separate category, renaming the male category as Open so that it wouldn't feel that the trans athletes were misgendered by the name), but Charlie made none that I could hear - did I miss something? I was listening and working.

"Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.
You take a step towards him, he takes a step back.
Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man."