Algerian boxer filing legal claim over online harrassment

Is the next step by the IOC unisex olympics? if so that is the end of the olympics...

Couple of phrases spring to mind -

Sometimes if you stick your head above the parapet it gets fired at.

If you cannot stand the heat stay out of the kitchen..

Yes. Again the IOC could have cracked down on this. It's not about individuals. Finding 'women' who had certain medical issues was done by sporting bodies. It exploitation. We know that international female athletes take their cycle into account as part of training as a routine thing. We know that they may make efforts to stop that cycle. If you don't have a cycle in the first place this also raises questions that would be on the radar of coaches. Cultural differences over the acceptability of asking these questions are not relevant by the time you get to international level.

Yes, 17 years old. Was spotted while playing football.

Arguably someone has broken privacy laws (I note here that where they are located matters because it depends under what jurisdiction they fall). Information that was not public possibly has become public.

The IBA were in a difficult position, because they had previously ruled one way and were asked to clarify that information. The question is did someone reveal more than they should?

This doesn't take away from the question of fairness in sport though and safety reasons to be asking those questions.

In the UK you could potentially argue a defence based on it 'being in the public interest' to make a point about it (The likes of JKR are almost certainly fine in UK law).

Then there's harassment. Harassment can be going further than making a public interest case. This involves levels of contact and the amount of talking about the subject and how personal it gets. There's a difference between talking about someone's chromosomes and testosterone on a technical level and then talking about say how hairy someone is or how they've bulges in certain places or particular feminine/masculine personality traits. Are these things relevant to ability to box is the basic point here I think.

Has harassment occurred? I'd argue it probably has. Is there a good reason to still discuss this case - yes it falls under the public interest - and there's are ways to do this without being harassing.

Crucially I would argue here that the IOC have failed everyone involved though. They have not dealt with the initial issue which has left the two boxers in question exposed. They have failed to protect them. Protecting them might have included banning them from the word go because the IOC should have seen this issue was going to blow up and they should have been prepared for it. Saying they are female cos of their passports was never going to be sufficient. They needed to have scientific evidence to back up why their position of 'ending invasive sex tests' was acceptable, safe and fair. They needed to have scientific evidence to back up why athletes with a testosterone level due to medical reasons higher than accepted level under anti-doping rules was safe and fair in a contact sport when non contact sports have already ruled it is not and crucially have been backed by the international sport arbitration court about this. They needed to have a good argument about why a sex test is invasive but accepted anti-doping tests are not invasive because the IOC backs anti-doping and the position about sex testing is incoherent as an argument next to it.

The IOC could have stopped two athletes becoming sucked into a huge international debate. They choose not. They have argued they were on the side of those two athletes but their position was always going to result in this situation and it was entirely foreseeable. That's not protecting athletes. That's setting them up deliberately to make a point and to hell with the IOCs responsibilities.

This will only intensify the debate on this too. An harassment claim isn't the solution. The solution is in demonstrating there's not a problem on both an individual and wider scientific level.

The funny thing is, winning the gold is likely to be counter productive in the longer run, because all it does is reinforce the feeling of unfairness. That just reinforces determination in the long run to demonstrate a scientific problem.

These boxers might find themselves in a few years time trying to argue they won fairly but wouldn't be eligible because of a rule change which is brought in for fairness and safety.

They been handed a poison chalice by the IOC.

An harassment claim is extremely unwise under the circumstances even if it's thought of as likely winnable. Lawyers are, again, using the situation for their own gain not the overall best interests of the individual concerned. Precisely because the IOCs position is unlikely to be tenable in the long run.

I feel sorry for the two involved. The IOC has let them down badly. All entirely preventable and foreseeable after Caster.

It's appalling.

She didn't enter to beat up women. She's boxing other women since childhood. It's not like she found out oooh I have male chromosomes let's start boxing so I can beat up women.

I believe they started boxing as a late teenager. Not quite the ‘from childhood’ story being spun.

I think I've seen you on Question Time.

The difference between the sexes is determined by whether your body is set up on a pathway to make small gametes (sperm) or large gametes (eggs).

While DSDs can create confusion via the appearance of genitalia, particularly prior to puberty - on expert examination, it will be clear what sex someone is and what has disrupted normal development.

She didn't enter to beat up women. She's boxing other women since childhood. It's not like she found out oooh I have male chromosomes let's start boxing so I can beat up women

No, but do you think that national coaches, wanting to boost the national team, might go looking around for people who are plausibly female, but actually male for these purposes?

Given that some countries and coaches have habitually dosed children with steroids, and train them from very young in ways that are pretty bloody close to torture, do you really think that going and finding children with natural advantages like internal testicles because of a DSD isn't entirely likely?

If IK found out he was male in 2022, he cheated in 2024 regardless of the IOC endeavours to provide cover.

I for one want to see this in court.

The IOC should hang its head in shame.

Here's the link again explaining what DHT is.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK557634/#:~:text=DHT%20plays%20a%20vital%20role,facial%2C%20and%20pubic%20hair%20growth

I have described what 46XY 5-ARD is. That is known and accepted science.
Can you explain what you mean when you say "science does not agree with me across the spectrum", please?

As a matter of interest, if a young female family member passes through puberty without beginning menstruation, how long do you think the parents would leave it before consulting a doctor?

If you're training at a national level and have access to their medical team, how many minutes do you think you'd be into your

• first medical before you're asked about your menstrual cycle
• coaching schedule planning before you were asked about your menstrual cycle.

If the person has a vagina but also testes who gets to decide they are male and not female?

If they have testes it won’t be a vagina. It might look a bit like a vagina externally, but it won’t be one.

I've seen these two charts that set out which DSDs affect which sexes. They are either male or female, not an in-between sex.

The link works for me. It's to an article on the National Library of Medicine website, called "Biochemistry, Dihydrotestosterone". It's a scientific article, published on a science website.

The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library.[5]
Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the NLM is an institute within the National Institutes of Health. Its collections include more than seven million books, journals, technical reports, manuscripts, microfilms, photographs, and images on medicine and related sciences, including some of the world's oldest and rarest works.

From Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Library_of_Medicine

And sex isn't a spectrum, if that's what you mean.

how do you know what puberty someone from rural Algeria or china went through

I'm not concerned with their socio-cultural puberty. I'm concerned with their endocrinal puberty and whether the boxers benefited from the relative advantages that accrues to them, within the context of women's sport, of having had a male puberty or not.

Is it this familiar vision and argument?

Her winning gold and the other xy boxer winning gold only goes to prove that people had a point... They have won because of their XY advantage. If they take part in the next Olympics they will both probably win again. Unless more XY boxers take part of course....

I wonder what kind of case has been filed. France has very strict rules concerning rights to privacy and this might be the case here.
This particular law can result in strange cases: a few years ago a man filed suit against his employee when she posted a video online showing him covertly filming her undressing. Unfortunately, I never found out what the final legal judgement was.

Exactly. The IOC are taking a political and ideological position on this.

They also want to allow trans-identified males to compete with women - as they did in the women's weightlifting in Tokyo.

So they don't want any clear, scientifically-based, rules that would define eligibility in the female category.

Your link doesn’t work and science does not agree with you across the spectrum.

Frasers

Intersex DSDs are a small proportion of DSDs. They are called intersex DSDs because unlike with DSDs in general, the external genitals are ambiguous at birth. It is not because the babies themselves are intersex. Nobody is. All DSDs affect either male or female embryos.

Caster Semenya has the DSD 46XY, 5-ARD. This was part of his evidence to CAS so it is public knowledge. This condition only affects males, so that is the proof that CS is male.
46XY is the normal male karyotype. 5-ARD refers to a deficiency in a hormone called 5-alpha-reductase which combines with testosterone made by the male embryo to form the androgen DHT (dihydrotestosterone), which is needed to form the external male genital structures.
DHT:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK557634/#:~:text=DHT%20plays%20a%20vital%20role,facial%2C%20and%20pubic%20hair%20growth

Because of this deficiency, external male genital structures do not form fully. A micropenis + a structure superficially resembling a vagina (it is a blind pocket or pouch) along with what would have been sacs for the testicles in a normal case, are what would be externally visible in such cases, hence the incorrect assignment at birth of female sex. Testes are present and internal. They produce normal male levels of testosterone and later in life, the boy goes through a near-normal puberty.

CS has said in his autobiography that he has a vagina and also that he had vaginoplasty, which would back this up.

So yes, CS is male and the presence of a vagina/vagina -like body part is not always conclusive.

https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/what-are-sexes

This is a good explanation of the scientific definition of the two sexes - which type of gametes the person produces, or potentially could produce.

If the person has a vagina but also testes who gets to decide they are male and not female?

If Khelif has 46XY 5-ARD, which is what is widely suspected, then he doesn't have a vagina. It's the prescence of testes that makes a person like that male. The defininition of sex is which of the two types of gametes the person produces, or would produce if everythinig was working properly. Presence of testes mean male.

Almost all people with DSDs are either male or female, because they have either testes or ovaries, but often don't have clearly defined external genitalia to match.

when it comes to sports, the authorities need to come up with some clear rules, and that’s always going to be hugely contentious and complex

If the athlete has male testes, and produces and uses testoerone in the normal male range - and especially if they went through puberty with testosterone having the normal male effect on their bodies - then they should not be eligible for the female category.

It's possible to determine this nowadays. If the simple chromosome test shows they are not the sex they appear to be, then further investigation can find out what DSD they have, and whether it gives them male advantage in sport.

The DSD conditions might be complex, but it's straightforward to find out whether the athelte has male advantage.

some intersex people have both a vagina and a uterus, they can procreate, have a baby, but also have a Y chromosome.

In that case they are female.

no one knows what category the boxers fall into

No, but the reason that competitors and their coaches started to complain to the IBA over the last few years about these two boxers, was because they appeared to have male characteristics, ie were far stronger than the range of strength in female boxers.

That's why there is widespread suspicion that they have a DSD that means they are male and have male advantage.

so no one should be saying they are a man and deluded,

I said that Semenya was deluded, because we know he is male and yet he continues to believe he's female. I said that it might be the same for Khelif.

The fact that the IOC refuses to test the boxers is what is causing this fuss. Proper tests would establish once and for all whether they are eligible for the female category or not. If they are not, the authorities don't need to reveal the reason for their ineligibility, simply to say, as the IBA did, that they are ineligible.

The fact that neither boxer went through with an appeal to the CAS over the IBA test results in 2023 stongly suggests they knew they wouldn't win their case.

Whoops image didn't link - on my phone