London Review of Books’ contribution to sex & boxing furore

This used to happen in the west as well. Austrian skier Erik Schinegger (born in the 1940s) discovered he was male in his late teens.

One reason why there a no white western athletes with DSDs are appearing in the Olympics as female is that they would have been tested as infants, had a Y chromosome identified and been registered as male so would not be eligible!

Thanks for posting this OP, I shared a link on the megathread but had wondered if it deserved its own. I've literally this second been looking at the author's Twitter page and her pinned Tweet advertises a paper published in 2022 entitled 'You Ain’t Woman Enough: Tracing the Policing of Intersexuality in Sports and the Clinic' which she describes as an 'article on the surveillance of intersexuality'. I haven't read it.

Oh my God.

Yes of course racism, both individual and structural, exists and is as visible in sport as anywhere else.

Poor application of true consent in surgery to individuals with DSDs is a scandal.

None of this means it is impossible to define what being female is, or impossible to define what sex people with DSDs are.

And the East German athletes that were 'subjected to gender testing' were women being coercively and sometimes unknowingly doped by corrupt regimes for political advantage. Isn't that a scandal too? And if you allow sex to be real, can't you analyse the sexist element to that?

Once more the Thai boxer is not even mentioned in this. And once more the goalposts of the past are hurried forward. The specific changes in sport rules that gave permitted this are now a foggy collective 21st century 'it ws always like this, everything was fine once we got away from' what Mark Adams deathlessly called 'the bad old days of sex testing'.

What a fucking ignorant (or deliberately manipulative) MESS.

Blimey. It seems pretty confused. But one thing I get from it is that IK and various other non-white athletes from the global south ( including Caster) have been picked on because we in the north are prejudiced against them, as we used to be against the Russian women because we judged that they didn't look feminine enough.