One of the most common arguments you’ll hear in defense of gender ideology is that some people are intersex, and therefore the gender binary is a myth. This is a non sequitur, as I’ve explained many times, and it’s usually accompanied by a series of lies. You’ll often hear wildly inflated numbers from gender activists about how many intersex people there are in the world. You’ll also hear various definitions for what it means to be intersex.
But here’s the only definition that has any meaning, as Leonard Sax framed it: being intersex means that your phenotypic sex — meaning your primary sex characteristics — is inconsistent with your chromosomal sex. For example, someone with Y chromosomes is biologically male and normally has male genitalia. But if that person develops female genitalia, then that person would be a biological male who suffers from intersexuality.
On the other hand, if someone is born with Y chromosomes and then chooses to remove his male genitalia through surgery, that individual would not suddenly become intersex. There’s no comparison whatsoever between being intersex and identifying as transgender. Being intersex is a medical condition, not a choice. And it’s a condition that a vanishingly small percentage of the population suffers from. It’s something like 0.018 percent of the population.
This is all considered basic biology — or at least it used to be. But because people still take gender activists seriously, there’s a lot of confusion in this area. And at the Olympics the other day, that confusion led to a male — someone with XY chromosomes — pummeling a woman in the face at a women’s boxing event on live television.
This male, an Algerian named Imane Khelif, was reportedly DNA tested at the Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi last year by an organization called IBA. And officials disqualified Khelif from the competition because testing confirmed a Y chromosome, which means that Khelif is a male.
There are reports of some sort of disorder affecting the primary sex characteristics, but I can’t verify those. Either way, the fact remains that, whatever condition this person may or may not suffer from — whether it’s an intersex condition or something else — Khelif is a male by definition. Intersex is just a word we have come up with to describe people who suffer from certain conditions and deformities. Intersex is not a third sex. It is not an exception to the rule of the sex binary. There are no exceptions. Everyone is either male or female. Everyone. A male that we call intersex may — because of his condition — appear female, but he is still a male.
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However the International Olympic Committee, which is overseeing the boxing competition at the Paris Olympics, apparently doesn’t care about chromosomes. According to The Washington Post, “The IOC … does not test for gender.” It’s not really clear what that means. Does that mean that they’d let LeBron James compete in the women’s basketball tournament? What it appears to mean, based on reporting I’ve found, is that the IOC allows different events to implement some testosterone “guidelines.” Not rules, but guidelines, which can vary event-by-event. And if that’s the case, it would obviously be completely useless for a few reasons. One of them is that, even if you have low levels of testosterone now, you might’ve had very high levels in the past — which would contribute to increased muscle strength, bone growth, et cetera. The other reason is that having high levels of testosterone doesn’t make you a man. Having a Y chromosome makes you a man. A man with low testosterone is a man with low testosterone. He is not a woman.
But sporting competitions, like the rest of society, have caved to gender activists on this point. That’s why the Algerian male’s fight with Italy’s female boxer Angela Carini ended in just 46 seconds:
One of the things about all of these “gender tests” and DNA tests is that everyone knows they’re not necessary. Looking at that footage, anyone can tell instantly that Angela Carini was fighting a male. Her opponent is obviously much stronger than she is. Clearly this is an unfair fight. There is no female on the planet who looks like this boxer from Algeria. And of course, it took just one hit to the face for Angela Carini to figure out that she was in danger.
After working her whole life to get to the Olympics and competing — something that obviously meant a lot to her, based on her interviews after-the-fact — she had to quit because the IOC put a male in the boxing ring with her. She didn’t want to quit, but reality quite literally hit her in the face. She had no choice.
Trans activists have claimed that the fact that this male boxer isn’t trans — the fact that Khelif is, allegedly, intersex — somehow proves their point about the women’s sports issue. But of course it does the opposite. Those of us on the side of common sense have always said that segregating sports based on sex has nothing to do with transgenderism. We are not trying to keep males out of women’s sports because we are engaged in some kind of plot against trans people. We don’t care if the male competing against women is trans or not. His self-identification is totally irrelevant. That is our point. It’s what we’ve been saying this whole time. Trans, intersex, or something else — it doesn’t matter. If someone is male — if they have a Y chromosome — they should not compete against women. When you ban males from women’s sports, you are not banning trans-identified people from women’s sports. You are banning males — no matter how they identify, or what genetic conditions they might have.
But if you think violent episodes like this are going to make the trans activists admit that, actually, their whole ideology is based on a lie — to the point that they’re endangering actual women — you should know that there’s precisely zero chance of that. These people have assumed such a degree of power that even their victims don’t want to criticize them, for fear of losing their livelihoods. And that’s true in this case as well.
In a post-fight statement, Angela Carini stated:
I felt a severe pain in my nose, and with the maturity of a boxer, I said ‘enough,’ because I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to, I couldn’t finish the match. I am not here to judge or pass judgment. If an athlete is this way, and in that sense it’s not right or it is right, it’s not up to me to decide. I just did my job as a boxer. I got into the ring and fought. I did it with my head held high and with a broken heart for not having finished the last kilometer.
What’s interesting about this statement is how common this sort of thing is. She says “it’s not up to me to decide” whether a male can compete in a women’s event. That may be technically true, but it doesn’t mean she can’t have an opinion on it. And if enough female athletes started sharing that opinion — and stopped participating in this charade — it would end very quickly.
Some brave female athletes have been quite vocal about this — Riley Gaines for example. But still most remain silent, for fear of the consequences of speaking out.
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It’s worth mentioning something else, too. Some of the women who are vocal opponents of gender ideology still feel the need to frame this conversation in the terms of Left-wing victimology. Yesterday, in response to this story, the children’s author JK Rowling wrote:
Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better? The smirk of a male who knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.
The problem with Rowling’s attempt to blame this on the “men’s rights movement,” whatever that is, is that there is no men’s rights movement, at least not one with any degree of power right now. There certainly isn’t a men’s rights movement that’s pushing trans ideology. Instead, what we saw in Paris this week is a natural consequence of the ideology that feminists have been pushing for decades. It was feminists who argued that sex differences are mostly social constructs that are exploited by patriarchal oppressors. Feminists are the ones who laid the groundwork for the idea that there’s no job a man can do that a woman can’t do better. Once you believe that lie, then you get women in the boxing ring with men, getting violently assaulted.
And it’s precisely because of feminists that this insanity will continue. By refusing to identify the problem and how we got here, they’re making it impossible to solve it.
This Algerian male is scheduled to fight Hungary’s first Olympic women’s boxer, Anna Luca Hamori, on Saturday. What’s Hamori’s reaction? She said:
I don’t care about the press story and social media. If she or he is a man, it will be a bigger victory for me if I win.
Again, this is stock feminist rhetoric. It sounds great on posters. It sounds great in the classroom. But when you’re getting punched in the face, suddenly, none of the rhetoric matters. All that matters is reality. And right now, a lot of people are choosing to ignore what we all just saw.
Even after what happened at the fight on Thursday, BBC’s boxing commentator, Steve Bunce, suggested that Carini wasn’t actually hit that severely:
She didn’t have a mark on her. Everyone’s just “pontificating.” That’s the BBC’s boxing expert. These people do not care about the safety of women. They are mocking women even after they take the worst hit of their lives to the face from an opponent who’s clearly a male in a women’s competition.
And this appears to be the prevailing attitude. Right now there are no indications that the IOC is going to take any additional steps to protect the women in these competitions. And there’s another male boxer, Lin Yu Ting of Taiwan, who’s set to go up against a woman at another event.
We seem to be at the point that it’s going to take a woman to die in one of these events for the powers that be to wake up to the fact that concepts like “sex” and “chromosomes” are real. In fact, if something that horrible should happen, it’s quite possible at this point that the expert class will pretend to be shocked by it. “Who could have seen this coming?” They’ll say. But the thing about reality is that it’s not political. It asserts itself whether we like it or not.
And based on what’s happening right now in Paris, we appear to be rapidly approaching the moment when reality asserts itself with tragic consequences.
