The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women From Women’s Sports
The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women From Women’s Sports
Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is the latest Olympic athlete deemed insufficiently female by extremists obsessed with the strictest of gender binaries.
No surprises here. You cannot be having babies and making sandwiches if you are doing sports.
As a stay at home Dad, I also find time to cook and play basketball in the local rec League. I personally think women should leave all that stuff to men and get back to work.
I was listening on NPR about how women were checked for femininity and given a card after an official go to see their reproductive organs for Olympic sports. Fun times!
the olympic genital inspector seems like a job for weirdos (deragatory)
It would be interesting for statistical analysis of our evolution, and for fun, to measure every one's penis and be given a male card:
Name: Robert Schmidt Soft penis size: 3" Soft curvature= downward Hard penis size: 5.75".... He keeps saying 7" Hard curvature= left up Right ball r1= 1.5" Right ball r1= 1" Left ball r1= 3" Left ball r1= 1.5" Semen color= 270, 265, 256 Semen quantity= 10ml Semen smell= standard musky 275 Semen motility= 50% above average Semen morphology= 10% at average Semen taste= pineapple and onion Penis elastic modulii data.....
Imane Khelif, Lin Yu-ting or any woman's testosterone levels give no more an advantage than Michael Phelps height, wingspan, hand/feet size and his body producing less lactic acid that shortened his recovery time. Yet nobody was screaming from their high horse about Phelps domination in the pool.
"The IOC insisted this week that no scientific or political consensus exists on gender and fairness issues. It gave updated guidance to sports governing bodies in 2021." Source
Right wingnuts can go fuck themselves.
Also, the body that DQed her in 2023 apparently ONLY found out "she was trans" (which she isn't) after she had fought 9 other matches under the same federation, with testing before each one - her defeating a Russian boxer and immediately being DQed after that match, while fighting under the auspices of a Russian boxing federation, is totally coincidence, I'm sure.
The more I think of it, it’s just an insoluble problem. Sex is not black and white. It is legitimately complicated, biologically. Yet if we don’t segregate sports, men will very broadly dominate women. All I can think is that every sport is going to need weight classes and possible hormone level classes within which people can compete. There’s a basic desire to measure skill, not just biological gifts. But that is obviously not going to work for swimming or whatever where skill is more of a prerequisite than a differentiator. I really couldn’t give a fuck about competitive sports and I’m glad because wow it’s going to be hard to keep doing.
We do not know what is between Imane Khelif's legs. It is absolutely possible to be XY and be born with a vagina that looks and works like any vagina. They might even have rudimentary (but non-functional) female reproductive organs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis
If that is true about Imane Khelif, she may not even have known about it most of her life.
Should all Olympians be genetically tested or just examined to see what's between their legs? If the former, which event do the women with Swyer Syndrome perform in? How about people with both sets of genitalia? They exist. What about people who are XXY or XYY?
And if you think the latter- please do justify that sort of invasive examination for the purposes of athletic competition. Unpaid athletic competition at that.
Do we need a protected class? If yes, there must be standards and those standards must be either endocrine or genetic or both. Yes they should be tested. Anyone failing the protected class can compete in the open class. It's really that simple.
YY is also a thing I believe
The determination of who may compete in limited-class sports must be made by rules.
It’s not a matter of who you or I think is a woman who qualifies. Only the governing body of that sport makes that determination.
I think the debate is about what a reasonable class is. I don't think that an appendage, or identity for that matter, is a reasonable proxy for capability class. In my mind you really have to go one of two ways.
You either make everything class-less (think UFC 1) where all weights, sizes, abilities, genetics compete for a singular title
Or
You make science-based classes, based around whatever the best proxy for capabilities are (testosterone, chromosomes, height, weight, body fat percentage, some combination of the former, etc)
If you use nothing as a proxy, there would be a lot of people unable to compete but it would at least be unequivocally "fair". If you use science-based capability classes you would have a wider range of "fair-ish" competitions, but there might be some weird overlap where some men, some women, and those in-between bridge accepted norms.
That really doesn't answer my question, it just splits it up between different bodies.
So let's say it's just a specific governing body of a sport? I'll reword it with a minor changes:
Should athletes be genetically tested by that body or just examined to see what’s between their legs? If the former, do the women with Swyer Syndrome perform in the male or female divisions? How about people with both sets of genitalia? They exist. What about people who are XXY or XYY?
And if you think the latter- please do justify that sort of invasive examination for the purposes of athletic competition.
I think you can give a general answer to that question which applies to all members of, at the very least, the boxing league Khelif is in.
IMO this reflects the conservative mindset that everything is black and white and that if they believe it then it will manifest itself as truth. Even if they have to force it to be so in a convoluted and hypocritical way.
What I think is that nature gives some people the mutation that could save humanity one day. The ability for XX and XX to make a XY if all the XY are unavailable. Mother Nature shows this is a rule in many of the other species on this planet.
Black and white is how both sides see it, but coming from different directions. Neither are willing to admit that there are nuances in anything.
I mean, generally, yes you’re right. The devolution of political discourse has seen to everything being boiled down to one side vs the other. But in this particular case, the argument from the left/people arguing against the right’s weird obsession with “masculine women,” isn’t a black vs white issue. It’s a “whatever we don’t like is wrong” vs “what are you even talking about.”
Yeah, it’s still a two-sided issue, because absolutely everything is. That’s just how we’ve been conditioned (in the US, that is. Our two party system is particularly vitriolic and stupid). But hat doesn’t necessarily make it a black/white issue.
There not only two sides though...
Obviously women are only allowed to compete if they have six children and do the fundie baby voice just right.
I don't think it's on purpose really, it's just that sports is like the only case where being a trans woman could be a benefit, so it's a critical part of the right wing attacks on trans people.
But then they just look crazy when they see there are more CIS child molesters than trans women in the Olympics, like surely if it was appropriate to be so mad about trans women dominating in sports you would have them showing up in the Olympics.
So they just had to invent a situation, and if it wasn't the CIS woman they decided on, they would have found someone else.
Nobody claimed they were smart.
Who cares, Djokovic is the GOAT :)
Why isn't this labeled as an opinion piece? There's nothing in here to substantiate the headline and almost no journalism. I'm not used to work like this from The Intercept.
Can you explain a bit more? I just finished the article and I came to the opposite conclusion.
There's a single quote of half a sentence from the New York Post, other than that where is the "right wing campaign"? Referencing Twitter and quoting other journalists does not equal journalism. Moreover, I see no reference at all to women being "purged" from women's sports. This story is 98% opinion and 2% facts.
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This is stupid. There's no "far right" to purge women.. the outcry is whether or not women's sports are being treated fairly. The whole controversy about this boxing issue started when information was released that this female has failed gender tests in the past. Of course there's going to be an outcry from people.
Would it make a difference to you if the controversy kicked off because the org that disqualified these two fighters was banned by the IOC from participating in the Olympics for shady stuff? Or if the org has never said why they were disqualified? Or if the guy making the wild claims is the head of the org and a friend of Putin, and the DQ for one fighter happened after she beat an until then undefeated Russian fighter?
You really should look into the background of it. Here's an AP News link
If they were doing it to help, you'd think they'd actually look into if what they were doing was helping... when you care about someone or something, you put in the effort.
Inane Khelif never 'failed a gender test'. A single test of unspecified nature and undisclosed method conducted by an unreliable sports governing body has purportedly either revealed higher testosterone levels or XY chromosomes. But due to the unspecified nature the result is neither reproducible nor reliable.
The right is notoriously known for the stauch stance of treating women fairly.
Lemmy doesn't care about fairness. Only about ideology.
According to Lemmy it's only fair to remove gender based competitions as gender is only a social construct. Fuck all the women who worked hard and dedicated their lives to a single event. Fuck them brutally because we want our ideology to stand victory.
An extended result of the view is that unaltered women does belong in the home pursuing more domestic tasks.
Exactly. And the outcry over unfairness in women's sports is an effort to save it, not destroy it.
Imane Khelif was disqualified for not meeting gender criteria from world championship.
Edit to all: I am not against LGBT+ or anything. I just post news, take what you want.
By already disqualified IBA which was disqualified for corruption and pro Russia slant.
They claim they have evidence, but never provide it, they disqualified her after she beat a Russian boxer. Why didn't they disqualify her earlier fight after she won against the Nigerian (IIRC) boxer.
Not to mention 9 fights she lost to other women.
She was suspended for naturally high testosterone levels by the IBA, a governing body that has since itself been suspended and had it’s recognition revoked due to corruption scandals. (Imagine what it takes for the famously corrupt IOC to say, “No, that’s too corrupt.”) No matter how you want to define gender, biological sex, identity, etc., she’s a woman. She’s just a freak athlete and that’s what the Olympics are about. No one would be all up in arms if her hands had a naturally high score on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. You’d put on your gloves and catch her topaz-hard hands.
she wasn't even disqualified for having high T. they disqualified her first and then did tests and later announced that she supposedly had XY chromosomes, which I don't believe. I recommend reading through these sources and watching the official statement from the IOC spokesperson (time code added so you don't have to watch the whole video):
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/world/olympics/boxer-quits-gender-angela-carini-imane-khelif.html
https://olympics.com/ioc/news/joint-paris-2024-boxing-unit-ioc-statement
https://youtu.be/https://youtube.com/live/QxeIRI2Qcag?t=1912
I personally believe that IBA was butthurt about her beating a Russian boxer or got bribed into disqualifying her, and then made up the gender test bullshit to justify it. now the transphobes used this opportunity to pretend to care about women's sports and attack trans people, even though imane khelif is definitely 100% not trans:
EDIT: the livestream i linked to was taken down. i looked on their youtube channel and theres a video with only the relevant part. you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/D4HiUIX9o00?si=UWz3uqCDXBhg98cI
EDIT EDIT: nvm I'm stupid, I fucked up the link lmao. here is the working link to the Livestream: https://youtube.com/live/QxeIRI2Qcag?t=1912
While it may be true that IBA is corrupt, let's not use the logical reasoning that IOC's reputation for corruption adds more credibility to their claim. Imagine if Trump called someone corrupt, would his own corrupt reputation leads you to believe his accusation more? I don't believe so.
We should avoid using bad logic to support a correct opinion because it only damages the perception of your other arguments.