Transgender man wins women's 100 yd and 400 yd freestyle races.

Vote4Squirrels

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122450713#Comment_122450713

It's not beyond the realms of possibility - William Thomas was 542nd in his division against men, with no physical changes whatsoever Lia Thomas was 1st in the division against women.

Emily Bridges, the cyclist has flat out refused to compete in any "open" category and although a fully post-puberty biological male with all the advantages that brings in sport (e.g. a narrower pelvis, helpful for centre of gravity/balance in cycling) wishes to race ONLY against biological women.

Whilst I am sure those individuals named are genuine in their belief of their identity - they still posess physical attributes that give them an unfair advantage over biological women. Plus as a poster noted earlier - Lance Armstrong went to such great lengths to cheat - can you honestly state that NOT ONE biological male, realising his sporting dream would never happen would change gender ?

We are about to see in 15 minutes the end of women's sports unless the authorities take action and put safety and fairness above ideology.

Vote4Squirrels

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122451787#Comment_122451787

In a way I do agree but women have trained since kids to get to an Olympics and often only get to one - I really admire our own Kellie Harrington saying she would refuse to fight but why should women step aside ??

silverharp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122451891#Comment_122451891

for the Olympics it would be such a spotlight that competing even if absurd would be a good choice , I assume the "volley Ball" one was just some internal US competition and maybe they didnt think of the risks as not a contact sport in the normal sense, but organise a protest of some sort and make it clear its not wanted

aero2k

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122450713#Comment_122450713

I have been guilty of convoluted sentences on the past, but I thought that one was unambiguous. I'll reword it: some men are identifying as women in order to enter women's sports so that they can win. An open category wouldn't suit such people - in fact when they tried it in swimming nobody entered.

Based on the photos we've seen in this thread I wouldn't use the word pretending - they're not making much of an effort in that regard. That's why sports eligibility criteria need to be unambiguous- ie on the basis of sex.

eeepaulo

that fight is on now

and its over, the italian woman stopped the fight after 20 seconds, her chance at an olympopic gold taken away by a male

plodder

Looks like Carini has pulled out after less than a minute in fight with Khelif

RancoreMayo

The real women just need to simply refuse to compete against these men, it's the only way to rid sport of these spoofers.

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122451891#Comment_122451891

I think that was fake news. I don't know where that came from but there doesn't seem to be any actual quote from Kellie Harrington saying anything of the sort (nor the opposite for that matter).

Vote4Squirrels

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452005#Comment_122452005

Never underestimate a woman's innate fear of being physically harmed by a man - a woman fighting her and Carini would be flying.

A man's wants are more important than something a woman has worked for for years.

And this is "progressive" ?

Vote4Squirrels

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452047#Comment_122452047

Oh that is good to see - but she shouldn't be put in that position, no woman should in our own sports.

plodder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452057#Comment_122452057

She was quite agitated from the start. I know sfa about boxing, but she took what looked like a few hard hits, took a timeout to readjust her headgear, then stopped again a few seconds later. Probably was no more than 20 seconds of boxing. She was very upset and crying after. Incidentally, the commentator on Discovery+ was feigning complete ignorance as to what was going on. The conspiracy of silence is unbelievable

Here's Sean Ingle who does know more about it:

https://twitter.com/seaningle/status/1818957878033621174

Vote4Squirrels

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452079#Comment_122452079

Jesus that is horrific to read. Are the commentators really clueless or just too scared to acknowledge what is going on in front of their eyes ?

chopperbyrne

I'd say it's a directive from the IOC to not mention it on commentary. TV footage cuts away as soon as she starts to kneel after the fight.

What's good is that they've been called out multiple times in press conferences, and the whole world is seeing this, and reading about it on social media.

plodder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452151#Comment_122452151

It gets worse. Ingle is the Guardian's chief sport's reporter, so he's no hack. See as well, how the TV camera in the clip cuts away when she kneels down. Can't be showing anything controversial now ..

https://twitter.com/seaningle/status/1818965121722421562

Backstreet Moyes

Their are people who call themselves as progressives and kind.

They are cheering on a man beating up a women.

If it happened outside a ring he would be in jail.

It must take some mental gymnastics to perceive yourself as nice while cheering on the destruction of female sports.

How has the Olympics got to the stage where a man is battering a women live on tv.

What a great promotion for women's boxing to young girls and how to treat women for young boys.

Francie Barrett

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452311#Comment_122452311

Just heart breaking to watch. What's worse is that most of the media and the women's groups are completely silent. 🤮

super_furry

Imane Khelif is not trans. She was born a woman and has competed as a woman all her life. If you really want to get down to it, she was born with female genitalia.

Angela Carini lost to the better fighter. At the 2020 Olympics Kellie Harrington fought Khelif in the quarter-finals and won. At the 2022 World Championship Amy Broadhurst fought Khelif and won.

I think Broadhurst probably sums the whole thing up the best - "Have a lot of people texting me over Imane Khelif. Personally I don't think she has done anything to 'cheat’. I thinks it’s the way she was born & that’s out of her control. The fact that she has been beating by 9 females before says it all."

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452408#Comment_122452408

The far right are spreading a huge amount of disinformation about this on social media - claiming to their followers that Khelif is a transsexual who used to be a man.

Whether someone who has a lot of male chromosomes be allowed to compete in women's boxing is a completely different debate.

super_furry

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452429#Comment_122452429

Agreed. There's a real discussion to be had here but the framing of it has been very purposely disingenuous. I honestly believe that half the people weighing in on it think she's trans.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452448#Comment_122452448

Yes, they literally seem to think a male-to-female transsexual has been admitted to the Olympic Games to fight against the women in the boxing tournament.

aero2k

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452467#Comment_122452467

I haven't looked at other social media, but the focus here has been on biology rather than identity, and that biology should take precedence.

Backstreet Moyes

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452429#Comment_122452429

Your post is meaningless without links to what you are talking about.

Who is the far right and can you give us a links to their posts?

Backstreet Moyes

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452151#Comment_122452151

They are likely scared a vocal minority will get them sacked for speaking facts.

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452408#Comment_122452408

Imane Khelif is not trans, that's correct, but nor was he "born a woman". Like Caster Semenya, she is a male with a male-specific disorder of sexual development that resulted in the genitals remaining indeterminate at birth (testes not descended and malformation of external genitals), such as this: https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/8538/46xy-disorder-of-sex-development .

a condition in which an individual with one X chromosome and one Y chromosome in each cell, the pattern normally found in males, have genitalia that is not clearly male or female

But, like Semenya, the testes were still present, albeit internal and therefore Khelif went through male puberty with all the advantages in terms of muscle mass etc that this entails.

I don't consider that Khelif is deliberately cheating, in the sense that the problem is medical misdiagnosis at birth/childhood. Nevertheless, the fact remains that physically, putting a woman up against Khelif is the same as having her fight a man. It makes a mockery of the concept of male and female categories. Khelif should be fighting men, or else should just do like the rest of us and accept that we are not Olympic material. There's no shame in that.

Francie Barrett

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452408#Comment_122452408

Who said she was trans? She was disqualified from a final last year for having high testosterone levels. The allegations are that she is intersex.

plodder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452429#Comment_122452429

The IOC only acknowledged that she isn't trans a couple of hours ago. Up to that point they were saying nothing - just that her passport said she is female. They are drip feeding information in damage control mode, it seems.

RTE even have a report on it, basically questioning the result of the gender test by the IBA, despite quoting the head of the IBA saying she had XY chromosomes. It's easy to throw around claims of "far right disinformation" when confusion and misinformation abounds.

https://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/2024/0731/1462837-explained-the-gender-controversy-miring-womens-olympic-boxing/

erlichbachman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452151#Comment_122452151

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452311#Comment_122452311

This is the kind of media practice that we expect would occur in Putin's Russia, and yet here it is, the woke agenda in practice.

normanoffside

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452555#Comment_122452555

the International boxing association made a statement yesterday to say that Khelif was not disqualified for Testosterone levels, rather had failed a gender test.

Gender testing used to be common place in the olympics up until the 80s but was abandoned more recently, hence Khelif managed to get through to and compete in the last olympics.

Brussels Sprout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452551#Comment_122452551

Since this is something that is an entirely natural (if rare) phenomena you'd have to wonder how many female champions from earlier games had this condition. I remember the former Olympic Champion, Maria Mutola, from Mozambique, looked very much like a man and destroyed her competition back in the day. She never broke the world record but that's held by a Czech athlete from the 80s who was juiced to the gills.

Coincidentally Mutola went on to work with Caster Semenya who is probably the most famous intersex athlete.

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452864#Comment_122452864

Before DNA tests were a thing, it probably did happen more often than we realize.

plodder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452761#Comment_122452761

No one has said here that the fighter is "a male to female transexual" - we ARE stating that he has male reproductive organs and XY chromosomes and so went through male puberty, bringing greater muscle mass, stronger and denser bones and - for the sport he's in - a longer reach and almost three times the punching power.

In fairness, we don't actually know what organs she has or to what extent (or if) she went through male puberty. It's bit more complicated with DSDs. In all probability she was raised as a girl because that's how she looked at birth. It's true also that two Irish female boxers have already beaten her in the ring. Though that was in lower weight categories than she is in now. For me it doesn't make any difference anyway. The rules should be based on biological sex imo.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452872#Comment_122452872

There was also the middle distance South African runner Semenya.

It's definitely a major problem for world sport : anyone overloaded with male chromosomes and hormones (even if supposedly 'naturally' occurring) would have an inbuilt advantage over females, probably similar to the effects of talking performance enhancing drugs.

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452934#Comment_122452934

The effect of undergoing male puberty plus ongoing high testosterone levels is FAR above the effect of taking testosterone for short periods. Indeed male puberty alone, even if testosterone is subsequently artificially lowered, has a significant ongoing effect for the rest of the person's life.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122453142#Comment_122453142

Personally, I would ban such athletes from competing in international sport - but it is a completely different topic to the whole 'transgender' thing and people having surgery and taking massive amounts of hormones in order to change their gender.

Birneybau

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452551#Comment_122452551

But But The Far Right

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122453155#Comment_122453155

Yes I agree, and perhaps my twitter algorithm just isn't "far right" enough to see them, but I haven't seen many tweets saying that these are transgender athletes (other than the odd "passer-by" who is happening on this issue for pretty much the first time and hasn't yet got their head around it all).

What I'm seeing are people explaining that it's ok for Imane Khelif to fight Angela Carini because Khelif is NOT transgender. But that's a false argument IMO, which presumes that opposition to transgender women participating in female categories is based on dislike of trans women, rather than on a desire to protect women.

IOW, it's exactly the lie that trans rights activists are propagating about women such as Joanne Rowling.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122453250#Comment_122453250

I'm surprised the IOC didn't spot that allowing 'biological males' into Olympic boxing would be hugely controversial. The aim of the sport is to land as many punches on your opponent and possibly knock them out - the optics of this were always going to be terrible (especially in this enhanced age of social media).

crusd

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122450443#Comment_122450443

That this is not what happened here at all.

crusd

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452429#Comment_122452429

Surely the far right are not spreading disinformation? That never happens

ceadaoin.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452151#Comment_122452151

They've been told by the IOC not to say anything about a person's sex. We all have to pretend there's nothing different about these male people competing against females. Pure gaslighting at this stage

Vote4Squirrels

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122453514#Comment_122453514

It is very concerning!

Currently watching the gymnastics and the women here are unreal - we are fighters, hard as nails at times, able to compete - but men are stronger, faster, punch harder and so competition has to be separated by sex.

astrofool

Technically this seems to have happened due to a bureaucracy mess-up. The IBA which was meant to run Olympic boxing had tested and disqualified the two athletes but the IBA itself was then removed from managing the event (qualifying, refereeing, rules) due to concerns with how the IBA was run (related to russian influence) so the IOC stepped in and defaulted to the rules from previous Olympics which allowed them to compete (possibly as they couldn't get all the correct procedures in place in a short amount of time).

The IOC does not do well at taking criticism (mostly to protect their cronyism) so double down in these cases.

Podge_irl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122453827#Comment_122453827

I mean, the whole process used by the IBA is not above question either. They remain a corrupt and unreliable body and this being a personal vendetta seems not beyond the bounds of possibility.

The IOC's policies around these issues remain pretty terrible ("they both are women on their passports" is not an explanation of anything) but ultimately this is being handled poorly by everyone across the board and you have to feel quite bad for all the athletes involved really. Almost every take I've seen online has been universally terrible and falling back into competing camps. A huge number of people are incorrectly portraying the athletes as trans. It is predominantly the same underlying issue though - how do you treat eligibility for those who have undergone male puberty.

crusd

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122453369#Comment_122453369

No it’s not you with your hysterical nonsense. It’s a person who appeared female when born and was raised female. You should f right off with your wedge nonsense.

Should they have been allowed compete, probably not, but this is a medical issue around the individuals despite all attempts to equate to the trans issue

Augme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122452761#Comment_122452761

How do you know she has male reproductive organs?

thomas 123

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122454421#Comment_122454421

you’d have to wonder do they do it for the banter.

Real Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122454431#Comment_122454431

I don't know why they do it, maybe it's boredom, nobody should be okay with this whatever your gender or what you identify as.

wovay

Nothing wrong with a bit of humour.

Potential money spinner here too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co3zZrOm_d4

highpitcheric

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122454421#Comment_122454421

some are too invested in arguments about the issue.

So that when a clear example like this comes along they can only double down. The time spent in circular semantic debates, the various incidents of sniping, name calling and banning, would all come back against them.

Trans people are a third category, and they self identify as such implicitly when they make their flags and talk of new ze pronouns, and talk of their trans rights.

And its fine. Society can come to some kind of solution with a third category. But the doubling down on being something that theyre not has to stop. We know, they know. They should just own it and get on with it.

Like the rest of us jacked supermodel hyper athletes. Those are just the cards one was dealt. Get on with it.

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122454248#Comment_122454248

It would have to be a personal vendetta against an Algerian and a Taiwanese boxer, both of whom do actually look like men. Kind of a weird coincidence if so.

No I think it's more likely that, while the IBA is undoubtedly corrupt - as is the IOC, TBF - it is unrelated to the gender issue, and the IBA, like most, but by no means all, governing bodies were in the process of repairing the disastrous mistake the IOC made a few years ago when it ditched gender tests (against the wishes of something like 82% of female athletes asked) allowing anyone who identified as female to participate in the female category of their sport.

As a side effect, this simultaneously removed the thorny issue of how sports bodies should consider DSD/intersex athletes, but it was actually done principally to placate the trans lobby.

Only of course now that the IBA is no longer accredited by the IOC, there is no world governing body to take the responsibility that the IOC had "bravely" delegated to each sports governing body to make these decisions, so that for boxing, the IOC took no decision at all, and just stuck with the status quo of Tokyo.