What is a woman?

There's no need to speculate at elite sport level.
No woman will even qualify for heats in male sports, let alone be within reach of the podium.

Men have no skin in this game. Only women stand to lose anything.

We are talking about the Olympics. Her identity doesn't matter for the purposes of what category she should be competing in.

No. Individuals do not get to choose their sex.

it is not a category.

Humans are not hermaphrodites. That's a myth, fake news, circulating in certain circles.

Sex is not a choice. There is no confusion about the plumbing. it may not look or do what the owner wants, and it may have unusable extras but sex can still be determined.

And defaulting to female after male puberty is not right and should not be done in elite sport.

Is this the same coach that put their hand on Khelif’s chest? Hardly the act of a man who thinks the person they are coaching is female, if that is the case.

I’m not ignoring the tests, I’ve already said that if she has a condition giving her physical advantages on par with men then she should not be allowed to compete in female boxing. The IOC need to run proper gender testing to ensure the safety of female boxers. If she has a vagina and internal testicles then she is an extremely rare case. I’m not saying she should be allowed to compete against female boxers. The question is what is a woman. If this person doesn’t fit either category definitively then it is up to her to identify as she wishes, and not for random people on the internet to determine.

Funny how the act of being 'A man' is never speculated on.

Because everyone knows what a man is evidently.

“And for the people shouting "she's a man COZ SHE LOOKS LIKE A MAN" you guys are the most un feminist of all. As someone who has been overweight and told 'you look like a bloke' on many occasions that's just fucking offensive”

And this point lacks coherence. I am sorry to hear you have been abused the way you have.

It is not however, a comparable example or are you attempting to compete against a group of people who are part of a protected characteristic that you are not eligible to compete against? No? Then you have just politicised your own situation as an emotionally manipulative distraction.

The point isn’t that Khelif or Lin ‘look like men’ because they fail to meet someone’s beauty standard. The points people raise is that they both have clearly visible virilised male body cues that indicate that their bodies use the testosterone that their bodies produce. And no, not at ‘female’ levels. But healthy male ranges of testosterone.

Allowing femurs and arms to grow longer, to keep hips narrow and knees too so that q-angles can be observed, so that muscle and vascular definition can be observed. It is not about judging ‘feminine’ or not. It is about seeing the impacts of male puberty in plain sight.

But by all means continue to double down. There will be no proof that will be produced any time soon. And in the years to come and the truth comes out, you will not even care that you were wrong and call others names because they disagreed with you. It must make you feel good now though. Well done, you.

You heard it here people! The coach said it's a woman so it must be! You no longer have to identify yourself. Coaches get to do it for you.

Look this person isn't claiming an identity.
They are stating they are not biologically male.

It has nothing to do with anything anyone says. Not coaches, not passports, not the contestants family. Stop trying to make it political.

It's physical.
The contestant and a lab somewhere know the truth.
One of them has spoken up. The other needs to release the results. This is not going away.

This was boxing. Not an individual sport. Not a low contact sport. Sex matters.

I would be in favour of a Mumsnet biology book.
There's a lot of people who would benefit from it.

Please provide a link to a source where Khelif has stated she has periods and a female reproductive system. I haven’t been able to find any so would find that really helpful. I’ve only seen Khelif stating that her passport and birth certificate state female, therefore she is a woman. If she has the DSD which is widely speculated (5ARD) it is categorically impossible for her to have periods and a functioning female reproductive system - in fact, at puberty it is likely she developed external male genitalia (they were always there, but once the testes she was born with were activated at puberty they would have become much more obvious). This DSD is colloquially referred to as “penis at 12.”

It has been stated that the failed test was not a testosterone test. Therefore the “this is a woman with high levels of testosterone” rumours which are circulating are incorrect. The only real alternative test though is a chromosomal test, which presumably has shown these athletes have XY chromosomes and therefore have 5ARD. 5ARD only develops in biological males, who can appear superficially female at birth due to ambiguous genitalia but will go through male puberty. Please read up on Caster Semenya for a more famous example of this.

None of this unfortunate situation is about identity. We don’t really need to consider identity in sport, in terms of how athletes dress or their pronouns or what bathroom they want to use. It is about biology, and we do need to know what biological sex they are. I feel very sorry for Khelif, as I can’t imagine how it must feel to grow up as a small child believing you are one sex and then to reach puberty and find that biologically you are the opposite. If she chose to carry on living as female I think a lot of people would have a lot of sympathy for her. However, that cannot extend to entering the female category of sport, which must be purely based on biological definition of sex, not gender identification. I cannot sympathise with her using the advantage that being a biological male has given her - whatever she believes about her identity - to enter female sport.

I also note that neither athlete has chosen to publish results of chromosomal testing demonstrating that they have XX chromosomes, which would put this debate to bed, nor have they taken the failed tests to the CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport). Again, rather than just reiterating that your passport says woman therefore you are one, surely you would want to build a robust case and lay the whole thing to rest? If not, is it because you can’t?

Any evidence to back your supposed theory of his non-existent vagina up? It is very rare, think vanishingly rare, for humans to go through male puberty, simultaneously have female plumbing and be healthy enough to compete in any sport. Yet now we have had at least 5 in the past decade.

I'm not buying it. And you sound enthrall to identification over truth.

Yep.

And yet, World Boxing Organisation and the European boxing confederation have also stated these boxers are male.

You can keep doubling down and declaring the IBA is corrupt. So is the IOC. Why do you believe that the corruption that is being brought up to discredit the IBA means the IBA would illegally ban boxers using false test outcomes?

The IOC hasn’t even tested. It is not that their tests are ‘insufficient’, they are non existent. The IOC have also been proven to have lied, they had the test results the whole time. They knew the labs who conducted the tests.

Are you going to say that those who knew Semenya was male and stated it were ‘baying mobs’ too? Look how that turned out.

By all means lay the blame where it belongs. Right at the doorstep of the IOC offices. In fact, take it all the way back to the campaign groups that the IOC has allowed to convince them that male people should be protected from sex testing and that any male person who effectively wants to enter the protected category of sport has been able to find a way to do so at some stage or other in the past 25 years. if they had a story that made some other people feel sympathy for them, so much the better to silence the dissenters.

Do you believe that the female boxers who signed up for the event consented to getting into the ring with male people who the IOC are supporting as being ‘women’? Yes or no?

And if they didn’t consent, who are you to tell them to effectively suck it up?

Because that is what you have done with your characterisations of people who disagree with you.

How to tell Imane is male. Imane is the only one who ever gets mentioned and the actual females are forgotten 🙄

Come on, ‘Quintessence Kyboard warrior’ (you could change your name to that)!

Oh do stop it.
You accuse us of being shallow and relying on looks.
Yet you are looking at the effects of male puberty and you prefer to rely on his scrunchies, lip stick and head tilt.
And you are claiming he's a woman because he looked like a girl aged 7.

8th rule of misogyny: Men are whatever men say they are and women are whatever men say they are.

He failed the sex test in 2022. He knows, they all know, he's a man.

Except what her coach has said.

@concretevase I assume you’ve now seen the article from Imane’s coach saying that Imane has a DSD- that means they are male in everything except birth certificate? Admitting that Imane is suppressing testosterone to be allowed to compete ( NB, still triple women’s levels but far lower than most men); and Imane’s chromosomes are not female?

So in fact we now know rather than suspect that Imane is like Caster Semenya. Imane may have believed they were a woman, but Imane doesn’t behave like a woman and has developed like any other boy into a man. The way Imane behaves in public and the way Imane is treated- intimately touched by coaches etc- makes it really clear that no one thinks Imane is actually female. Except you and some other people who would prefer to be kind to Imane than to all the women whose chances Imane spoiled by competing.

Anything to say about that?

would either of these athletes have been disqualified from competing as men?

Here you go

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KnTF9o5ZUcM&pp=ygUndGVzdGljbGVzIGRvbid0IG1ha2UgbWUgbGVzcyBvZiBhIHdvbWFu

Does anyone have a link for Semenya’s “ testicles don’t make me less of a woman” quote please?