Sex matters in many obvious ways and places. Words, the very language that explains difference and the meaning of Safe and Fair Play, matter, too. In Sport, both sex and words matter greatly.

It's why we find the word sex, not gender, writ large in an Olympic Charter the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has ripped to shreds these past eight years, culminating in women's boxing final at the Paris 2024 'parity' Olympics in which, is widely believed and suspected, featured two athletes with male advantage.

The reason we cannot say "we know" is because the only tests claimed to prove the finalists - Imane Khelif, of Algeria, and Lin Yu-ting, of Taiwan -  are both biologically male were conducted by folk hatred by an International Boxing Association boss linked to former KGB spy and warmonger Vladimir Putin.

Putin, you will recall, was deemed persona non grata by the IOC not for invading and then stealing land from a sovereign country (2014 and 2022), murdering her citizens, including a large number of athletes and coaches in Olympic sport, and destroying vast swathes of infrastructure in Ukraine, a large number of sports venues flattened in the process. 

No, not for any of that. Putin was stripped of the Olympic Order, the highest prize in the Olympic realm, for breaking the "Olympic Truce" when he started "a special military operation", the Kremlin's definition of war in its book of propaganda too soon after the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. It all led to a lot of innocent lives being lost and the Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court issuing warrants of arrest for Putin on March 17, 2023.

Stripped of a sports prize he should never have been granted, given the IOC's Charter obligation to exercise political 'neutrality' alone, Putin and anyone associated with him were now seen as 'rogue' by Olympic leaders who, assuming they may well be right, surely should have noticed a lot sooner. Of course, we assume they can read their own Charter, which includes: "Recognising that sport occurs within the framework of society, sports organisations within the Olympic Movement shall apply political neutrality."

Uncomfortably is among the softer words one might choose to define how those Charter provisions sit alongside all the quaffing with and granting awards to members of regimes such as those in Russia, China and the Middle East called out by Human Rights organisations and western Governments over matters that do indeed belong to that "framework of society" recognised by the IOC.

Female Athletes Caught In A Trap 

It's against that backdrop that we find ourselves in the Paris ring, an Italian woman boxed out in 40-seconds or so and other females dispatched with relative ease by the two fighters who make the final as the furore over their biological reality drips from every bead of sweat, blood and tears cascading on to the canvas.

If the atmosphere was difficult for the two who made the final, spare a thought for the female athletes caught in a lose-lose trap surrounded by Olympic politicians and even some media commentators who have seen enough sport to know better. From beyond the ropes, we heard cheers for the feelings of the two finalists and something worse than booing for the feelings of female athletes: a ripple of 'stop whinging' was accompanied by a wave of silence, a sort of ultimate and official "out for the count". Here's the nature of that trap:   

• On the one hand, questions over the integrity and transparency of the "tests" conducted on the boxers and a lack of proof from Umar Kremlev, Putin associate and Russian president of the IBA, to back up his statements about the gender of both Paris finalists, left many struggling to trust anything they were being told by folk deemed to have a very low credibility score. [One set of folk deemed 'unacceptable' by the IOC (among many others) took over the IBA from another group similarly declared 'unacceptable' (for a brief tour of that woeful history, see the foot of this article]. 
• On the other hand, there appeared not to be a single man in a leading role at the IOC prepared to stand up and call for the obvious: an easy, painless cheek swab test that would provide trustworthy truth and bring an end to the debate. The question the Olympic Charter obliges the IOC to ask is simple: do any athletes wishing to compete among females have male advantage or do they not?

As Dr. Emma Hilton notes:

The answer a swab can give is critical if the Olympic Charter means anything at all. No 1 on the IOC's Mission and Role in that code of fundamental principles reads as follows:

"...to encourage and support the promotion of ethics and good governance in sport as well as education of youth through sport and to dedicate its efforts to ensuring that, in sport, the spirit of fair play prevails and violence is banned."

That's backed up by this, at No6:

"The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Olympic Charter shall be secured without discrimination of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status."

The only time the word gender appears, it refers specifically to "masculine and feminine" gender and then solely in the context of roles specified in the Charter, such as 'president', 'athlete', 'judge' etc, and even "pronouns such as he, they or them": all such terminology is equally applicable to the "masculine gender" and the "feminine gender".

The only reference to "identity" in the Charter relates to "The Olympic Identity and Accreditation". Meaning, credentials for access to events in whatever role a person may be performing, athlete, officials, coach, media, volunteer etc etc.

In the context of what is and what is not in the Charter, let's remind ourselves of the meaning of "spirit" of Fair Play means: 'in the attitude of, in the essence of'. It obliges all, including IOC members, as well as athletes, to accept nothing that could be deemed unfair play. 

Anti-doping rules and legislation that covers the in-competition environment and terms of engagement, as well as aspects of conduct both in and out of competition, are among the pillars of Fair Play that support the critical division bell at the gateway to sport: sex. 

No athlete with male advantage (denials belong in the vault of daftness alongside Flat Earth theory and appeasing Gods by chucking the odd citizen into a volcano from time to time) belongs in female sport.

And yet, the IOC issues guidelines that suggest male advantage is neither real nor relevant if an athlete identifies as or lives as a woman regardless of biology that provides the fact and truth of the matter, while at the same time telling us that female athletes are treated to the same principles and levels of Fair Play as male athletes.

Those two positions are incompatible, hypocritical and impossible. If Kafka's 'Watchman' offers words that scream of the injustice of anti-doping matters cheats are perceived to prosper, they are also apt when it comes to the IOC's role as guardian of safe and fair play in an era when biological males have been handed a ticket to female sport:

"I ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back again and said to the watchman: 'I ran through here while you were looking the other way.' The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. 'I suppose I really oughtn't to have done it,' I said. The watchman still said nothing. 'Does your silence indicate permission to pass?'

A Framework Unfit For Purpose

Beaten in the ring, they were also beaten by a governance system that wants us to believe it's been following a wholesome wedding of inclusion and "Portrayal Guidelines to help ensure gender-equal, fair and inclusive media coverage of Paris 2024", when in fact its been following a muck-cart of a policy fit for either compost heap or a bonfire of the trans lobby vanity project of discriminatory one-way demands.

If you want to know why I'm of that opinion when it comes to the "IOC Framework On Fairness, Inclusion and Non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variation".

I wholeheartedly guide you to the excellent response to the framework from a think-tank of experts who the IOC should have listened to long ago instead of listening to 'inclusion and diversity' voices keen to misuse language in their efforts to steer us all away from truth, facts, science and the reality of sports women's lives and experiences:

The International Olympic Committee framework on fairness, inclusion and nondiscrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations does not protect fairness for female athletes

... say Tommy R. Lundberg, Ross Tucker, Kerry McGawley, Alun G. Williams, Grégoire P. Millet, Øyvind Sandbakk, Glyn Howatson, Gregory A. Brown, Lara A. Carlson, Sarah Chantler, Mark A. Chen, Shane M. Heffernan, Neil Heron, Christopher Kirk, Marie H. Murphy, Noel Pollock, Jamie Pringle, Andrew Richardson, Jordan Santos-Concejero, Georgina K. Stebbings, Ask Vest Christiansen, Stuart M. Phillips, Cathy Devine, Carwyn Jones, Jon Pike and Emma N. Hilton - in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports.

Many of those names have had much to say about the Paris boxing debacle, which came about because the IOC has walked itself into a corner on inclusion since late 2015 and, forced to face the reality of boxing-governance rogues in corners red and blue, ended up throwing the baby (AKA female athletes) out with the bath water (AKA rogues). 

In Paris, IOC president Thomas Bach said it was “totally unacceptable” that the two boxers who made the final had faced what he called "hate speech" in a “politically motivated” uproar.

What he did not do was address the only questions that truly matters in an Olympic sport like boxing: do you know for sure that there is no male advantage in the ring? And if you don't know, should you not find out, because male advantage would raise serious questions about whether a bout would be fair, let alone safe?

Bach's grasp of the subject was called into question and an apology had to be issued after he confused the terms transgender and DSD (differences in sexual development).

“I will not confuse the two issues,” Bach said. And then he did.

“We are not talking about the transgender issue here. This is about a woman taking part in a woman’s category and for all the rest. The IOC framework, which is scientifically based [highly debatable], applies to all federations [but has not been followed by all federations, World Aquatics and World Athletics both having adopted rules that ring-once the women's category for females only in so far as any athlete who experienced male puberty cannot compete as a woman] ... But I repeat here this is not a DSD case.” 

The IOC subsequently tweeted that Bach had meant 'this was not a transgender case'. Clearly, DSD was on Bach's mind, as it ought to have been. If you don't test for such things, you cannot possibly say whether male advantage has entered the female fight, while many believe it is both untrue and disingenuous, in the context of sport, to declare "This is about a woman taking part in a woman’s category." 

No, that is not what the debate is about. It's about whether athletes with male advantage were allowed to see off all the females and fight for Olympic gold and silver.

Bach was not the only one refusing to consider the impact on female athletes. Boris Van Der Vorst, the Dutch businessman leading World Boxing and who ran for the presidency of the IBA before his candidacy was, disputably, declared invalid, said people had misidentified Khelif and Lin as "men or transgender".

In fact, most serious commentators used terms such as "male" and "male advantage", ignoring the IOC thought-police document issued shortly before the Paris Games in favour of of using the correct language to describe the difference between those supplied by nature with male levels of 'male' hormones throughout their lives and those who are not (AKA, females)

Van Der Vorst said: “It’s not very respectful for the boxers who are competing here, to Chinese Taipei and Algeria, to speak about them in these terms. That’s what I’m trying to stress."

Women far and wide asked why he wasn't "trying to stress" the impact of male advantage on female sport at an Olympic Games where a simple sex test could have resolved the matter before a punch was swung.

The Case For Drawing A Line At Male Advantage

There is no point in lengthy explanations here on a matter so well covered elsewhere. So, with no further ado, here are a few places where you can find sage words and explanations:

1. Andrew Gold interviews Dr. Emma Hilton, developmental biologist, on the matter of male advantage in the Pais boxing ring:

2. BBC Radio 4: Across the Red Line - Transgender athletes in sport with Olympian Sharron Davies & racing driver & trans activist Charlie Martin in discussion with journalist Anne McElvoy and conflict resolution expert Louisa Weinstein.

An interesting and often excellent approach to trying to get those with opposing views to listen and perhaps learn something from one another. Of course, as Davies notes on several occasions, truth is the bottom line in sport. 

3. The Chauvinist/Gender Theorist Alliance - The boxing debacle in Paris has cast an embarrassing spotlight on the IOC’s willingness to embrace nonsensical gender theory - by Jon Pike at Quilette.

4. Books 

• I make no apology for directing you to a publication I co-authored with Sharron Davies: Unfair Play - The Battle For Women's Sport - published by Swift / Forum Press, tells the story of her experience as an Olympian in swimming at a time of East German doping and how that links the past to the present.

Biology and a woeful history of cheating in sport show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that testosterone, whether provided by nature or given in smaller dosages to girls at puberty to grant them male advantage over their female opponents, must be a permanent red line that cannot be crossed in the WADA Code and cannot be crossed by any athlete with male advantage seeking a ticket to female sport, under any circumstances. The outcome is the same for female athletes: they are rendered victims of deception.

• Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport - by Linda Blade and Barbara Kay  - Excellent.

"Radical gender activists are using a pseudoscientific theory of human biology to hijack sports and subvert the long-established concepts of fair play — forcing women and girls to risk their safety, pushing them aside for male athletes using the excuse of “inclusivity. Anyone who questions this dogma risks being branded as a transphobe and having their social and professional lives “cancelled”

• Socrates and the Gender Debate: How Gender Ideology Fails the Test of Common Sense - by Andrew Duncan
  
  This new book, just out and penned by author Andrew Duncan, is a great read and a fine listen on audible, too. His Socratic approach to the questions raised by the extreme trans lobby determined to colonise female spaces, races in sport and identity makes an excellent contribution to a debate that need not be toxic if truth be told.

The author's arguments are sound, logical and rely on the worst enemies of those who make 'do no harm' a one-way street: truth, transparency, facts, science and having language say what it means and mean what it says. As Duncan states:

"All but 0.0182% of the human race is unequivocally male or female. Yet that distinction is irrelevant in determining who we are attracted to, our public persona or what we can achieve. The last few decades have seen a welcome increase in tolerance, close to the liberal ideal of ‘do what you want as long as you do no harm’ ... Socrates demanded that one rationally explain one’s ideas and beliefs. The Trans Lobby prefers ‘no debate’. Its arguments are weak and often contradictory." 

Spot on. Well worth a read or listen.

And Over In The United States - The Battle Rages On

Over in the United States, the work of Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a Democrat on many issues but a strong critic of the Biden Administration when it comes to its attempts to erode the provisions of Title IX legislation beyond recognition.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court declined to let the Biden administration enforce portions of a new rule that includes protections from discrimination for transgender students that clash with discrimination laws and rules that protect women in key areas of life, such as sports and its safe- and fair-play provisions, stretching to essential rights to privacy and safe spaces. Legal proceedings on proposed changes to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which was signed into law on June 23 (Olympic Day), 1972 by President Richard Nixon. 

Women's rights campaigners note the hypocrisy and irony in the position of a Biden Administration that calls its approach 'progressive', when in fact its highly regressive to give biological males a ticket to female sport. There's another pernicious aspect to side to  and fails to acknowledge the lessons of the past century on a trail of tears    

Read more here: Supreme Court maintains block on entirety of Biden administration's new Title IX rule

And the verdict from Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a civil rights lawyer who back in 1984 claimed three gold medals in swimming at a home Olympics in Los Angeles...

In Her Words at Champion Women, the organisation that does what the title suggests:

It’s a win …& a loss 

Win: All 9 Supreme Court justices today granted the request to block the new Title IX regulations that equate “sex discrimination” with “gender identity discrimination.”

Loss: Unfortunately, sexual orientation (gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual) was included - it will not be protected by Title IX. …and more losses.

- The Biden Administration asked the Supreme Court to carve off 3 parts of the new Title IX regulations, and let the rest of the regs go into effect. They wanted the carve-out to include: 
1) The idea that Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination also covers gender identity discrimination;
2) The idea that “hostile-environment harassment” would include harassment based on gender identity; and 
3) The part of the regulation that would require schools to allow transgender students to use the restrooms and other facilities [like Childrens changing rooms] consistent with their gender identity.
- besides those explicit protections for LGB students, what else was lost? The part of the regulations that would have allowed new mothers to breastfeed or express breast milk, or pregnant students to attend to health needs of their pregnancies. 
Another provision would prevent schools from making pre-employment inquiries about an applicant’s marital status. 
These provisions, Justice Sotomayor wrote, “do not reference gender identity discrimination or hostile environment harassment.” Therefore, she wrote, the department of Education should be able to enforce any other part of the rule. It “needlessly impairs the Government from enforcing Title IX and deprives potential claimants of protections against forms of sex discrimination not at issue in respondents’ suit.” 

I’m thrilled & relieved that biological “Female” is still a protected category - particularly in womens sports & women’s spaces … but the trans movement and gender ideology cost women dearly in other areas. 

And, by way of balance, a couple of pieces that make points I simply disagree with, for the reasons stated, among others:

1. This piece by Martin Samuel in The Times, headlined "Dehumanised, dispossessed – who considered Imane Khelif’s life beyond boxing?" is an opinion, and we are all entitled to those. 

My view: The trouble is obvious: when opinion is based on a false premise, then it is bound to result in serious kickback from a vast population of women, and those who stand with them on the matter of indisputable male advantage and its impact in female sport.

The “it” and "Dehumanised, dispossessed", Samuel refers to ignores the "it, dehumanised, dispossessed" feeling that generations of women over many decades have felt as a result of wilful discrimination, coupled with wilful blindness, aimed specifically at female athletes who have just one request: a category of their own in which the three most fundamental requirements of eligibility are: females only, safe place, fair play. 

No sex discrimination allowed. 

That's it. Precisely what is already written into the Olympic Charter and the rules of many Olympic sports in words that have been bypassed and even washed away by the wilful contradiction of every attempt to replace the word sex with gender, the lines between male and female blurred by a victory of feelings over facts.

Samuel hangs his arguments on feelings and facts that ought to have no bearing on safe and fair play for all female athletes in the world, regardless of their nationality and the state of home politics.

"Algeria is not the most free-thinking country in its attitude to gender issues. Homosexuality is a crime and the law does not allow people to change their gender medically, surgically or even on official documentation, such as a passport."

All true. Yet entirely irrelevant to this simple question: does Imane Khelif's biology confer male advantage? That question may well be irrelevant if the boxer was to apply for a job as a librarian - or head of NASA. In sport? The question is essential, unavoidable, a matter of harm/do no harm.

2. Fair Competition - Mireia Garcés de Marcilla - at London Review of Books

After offering a balanced argument, the author writes: 

All the same, those of us who are concerned about the reactionary weaponisation of gender might do better to rethink rather than cement our commitment to the category of womanhood. We should ask what being a woman means, how womanhood is defined, and against what (and whom) womanhood is ‘defended’. Instead of insisting that Khelif is a ‘real’ woman, we should ask how dichotomous ideas of gender have been solidified in the discourse that is being mobilised against her. We should interrogate the colonial roots of medical accounts of female and male embodiment, and the construction of femininity through (and conflation with) whiteness.

We should listen to athletes whose womanhood is doubted not only because of their outstanding athletic performance, but because their bodies are at odds with Western notions of femininity. In 2009, when Semenya was banned from competing for eleven months after winning the 800m at the World Championships in Berlin, the head of South African athletics asked: ‘Who are white people to question the make-up of an African girl?’

A serious commitment to fairness and equality has to resist the drive to read bodies along racialised gendered lines. Instead, we ought to expand our understanding of embodiment and athletic ability, which depends on a lot more than the features which have been read as determinants of gender (genitals, chromosomes, hormones). Boxing already acknowledges this: there’s a reason that fighters compete in different weight categories.

My View: lines like "reactionary weaponisation of gender". "We should interrogate the colonial roots of medical accounts of female and male embodiment, and the construction of femininity through (and conflation with) whiteness" and "racialised gendered lines" belong on the biggest, sharpest spike out there (in old newspaper days, a literal spike on which an article and the paper it was typed on would meet its end if it did not make the edit or final cut for publication, for whatever reason).

By all means have those academic arguments, write whole thesis on the subject if you must, but don't try to point such poison into the chalice of competitive sport, which has had categories and rules for     over a century for excellent reasons, many of them coming down to one aspect or another of safe and fair play.

There are two gates at the entrance to Olympic sports in which the biggest division bell must be male and female because nature, not feelings or misidentification of biology at birth or any other circumstance, is the guiding force at work if safe and fair play is to be delivered in line with pledges in the Olympic Charter and the accompanying rules of the sports it guides.

Footnote on Boxing Governance/IOC:

Almost 17 months ago in New Delhi, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was disqualified from the International Boxing Association’s world championships three days after she won an early-round bout with Azalia Amineva, a previously unbeaten Russian boxer, who through the DQ, remained unbeaten.

The IBA said Khelif and fellow boxer Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan had failed “to meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.” The governing body claimed the fighters had failed unspecified eligibility tests.

The same two boxers were at the centre of controversy in Paris. In the midst of debate, IOC spokesman Mark Adams said: “These two athletes were the victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA. Such an approach is contrary to good governance.”

In other words, the IOC overruled its own framework, a guideline that allows federations to decide matters of inclusion.

The AIBA’s Olympic downfall was triggered about six years ago when it elected president Gafur Rakhimov. The Uzbek businessman was described by the U.S. Treasury Department as an "organized crime boss". Rakhimov denies those allegations but he resigned from the boxing g federation in July 2019, a month after the IOC suspended ties.

The IBA was born and it elected Kremlev, an acquaintance of Putin. The IBA is said to have received financial support from Russia despite the ban on such arrangements at a time when Russia is suspended from the Olympic movement as a member nation.

Kremlev introduced Russian state-controlled Gazprom as the IBA's biggest sponsor and moved much of the IBA’s operations to Russia after he took over in late 2020. That and an avoidance of IOC instruction not to allow Russian athletes to compete under their national flag and colours, led the IOC to permanently strip the IBA’s Olympic credentials in 2023.

The Paris tournament was run by the IOC and it disregarded any 'evidence' of male advantage suggested by the IBA for the two boxers who made the final in the City of Lights.