What the women's Olympic boxing controversy tells us

 

 

To use a sports metaphor the controversies over two women boxers at the Olympics, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting have a world of "tells" attached to them.

The first of these "tells" comes from handling of the tests which the International Boxing Association claims to have had done on both women to determine their eligibility. The association insists they did the tests, and the tests prove the women ineligible for boxing competition, but they refused to disclose what exactly they tested for, what process they used to test, how they administered the tests or who processed them. As of this writing, I have yet to see any reports the IBA has made these disclosures. In the world of science and medicine, a refusal, or even a failure, to disclose, to operate in a transparent manner, is a tell, a clear indication of some problem. A health textbook from middle school I still remember clearly put it this way: if someone tells you they have a "secret" cure for cancer, find yourself a real oncologist without delay. The IBA has attempted to justify their withholding on vague grounds of "confidentiality, yet the public spectacle of these women has profoundly violated the spirit, if not the letter of medical confidentiality. At the very least, the failure to disclose the details of the tests IBA claims to have run on these two women means we do not know what these tests consisted of, or what level of reliability they can claim.

This brings us to the second "tell": the analyses found everywhere on social media and based on assumptions about what the tests the International Boxing Association would show if only the association had made them public. People with claims to expertise recite multiple genetic differences these women might have, while others on social media who claim no expertise list the organs these women supposedly do or do not have. Based on nothing but assumptions stacked on top of guesses, multiple commentators have misgendered both women.

This leads to the third "tell": the profoundly contradictory political conclusions drawn from the situation these women find themselves in. Radical feminists and religious conservatives, for very different reasons, have repeatedly denounced efforts to support transgender people. Radical feminists object to the inclusion of transgender women as women or their admission to women only spaces, usually on the grounds that only "women born women" can genuinely qualify as women. The argument assumes both the importance of the shared experience of growing up female in a patriarchal society and the value of a single basis for classifying any given person as a woman. Under those criteria, both Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are women. All the reliable evidence we have so far indicates both presented as girl infants at birth and the doctors identified them as such. They grew up from girls to women. Nothing posted in the controversy provides any grounds whatever to seriously dispute that. If the identity of a woman is threatened by a few self-identified transgender women, does the claim that an undisclosed test by a sketchy sports organization can cancel a woman's whole life and identity not threaten it a lot more?

The Christian opponents of any consideration for gay or transgender people have reacted with a complete about face while resolutely not acknowledging they have changed anything at all. After years of claiming gender is binary, regularly citing Genesis 1 ("male and female he created them"), leading lights of the conservative movement seem to have switched over to writing about "biological males" as if there was some other kind or gender could actually be complicated. After Matt Walsh made an entire feature film based on insinuating that gender is simple, obvious, and anyone but a corrupt western elitist can instantly distinguish between a woman and a man. He switched over to talking about "biological males" while still blaming "woke ideology". 

A few people have kept their heads and remembered the people at the center of this: two women who trained to excel at their chosen sport, competed as women because their birth certificates said they are women, and are now caught in the middle of a pissing contest between a profoundly sketchy boxing federation and a the International Olympic Committee. Having ideologues embarrass themselves by making grand statements about test results that have never been published is helping nobody.