A media meltdown of Olympian proportions

The IOC has doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on letting biological males compete in women’s sports, and the left-wing media has lost its mind trying to defend it.

The International Olympic Committee has ignored the growing global consensus around fairness and safety for female athletes, instead choosing to open up women’s Olympic sports to anyone who wants to compete in them. This comes at the same time that many global sporting authorities are moving in the opposite direction, taking steps to protect the category of women’s sports from being redefined to the point of meaninglessness by ever-more-absurd calls for “inclusivity.”

All around the world, sporting regulators are reaffirming that the raison d’être of women’s sports is rightful exclusion: they exist to be a separate category for athletes with female bodies — that is, to be very specific: women’s sports exclude bodies which have the undeniable physical advantages that male puberty gave them thanks to the abundance of testosterone produced by a functioning pair of testicles.

The IOC has instead kept in line with the radical identity politics of the social media-fuelled transgender movement, which seeks to suppress any acknowledgement of individuals’ inborn, immutable biology in favour of everyone’s self-declared “gender identity.”

This year, IOC officials took their position to an even further extreme, announcing that biological sex is entirely a “private” matter, and that any kind of test at all to verify athletes’ biological eligibility to compete in women’s sports would be “unfair” to male athletes who wish to compete against women. To the astonishment of sports & performance scientists, the IOC declared that the sole criterion for eligibility to compete against women is that the box on their passport is marked with an “F”.

(It should go without saying, but a passport is not a scientific document and the administration of passports varies significantly from country to country. In most countries it’s not at all difficult for males to get their passports marked “F”.)

The IOC’s policy against sex testing is blatantly in support of men cheating in women’s sports. They would never allow men to cheat in men’s sports.

This has put the IOC — as well as the trans activists and media outlets backing it — in an indefensible position. Things quickly spiraled out of control when two athletes entered the women’s Olympic boxing ring despite having been previously disqualified from women’s competitions after lab tests confirmed that they’re male. According to the IOC’s rules, this is perfectly fine — and this is to be expected, given that the IOC has been loudly advertising that anyone is welcome to compete against women in the Olympics, no questions asked. Of course males will turn up if you advertise that you won’t do anything to challenge them.

Lin Yu-Ting and Imane Khelif are males competing in women’s Olympic boxing in the featherweight and welterweight divisions, respectively.

But the optics of males punching women in the face live on television — even though this is entirely in accordance with the rules that trans extremists and their media sycophants have been lobbying for — are such an obvious violation not just of fairness but of women’s safety — and human decency — that a full-on meltdown has ensued. Once-respectable news outlets are lashing out at everyone in an attempt to distract us from the shameful mess that they themselves have made.

Italian welterweight boxer Angela Carini’s Olympic dreams were shattered after just 46 seconds in the ring with Algerian male Imane Khelif.

It’s utterly hypocritical, but with no better line of attack available, the media and the IOC have gone after the credibility of the genetic tests which showed the boxers, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting, to have male (XY) chromosomes.

Remember: the IOC and the media insist that there’s no need for sex verification tests in the first place, so it’s absurd for them to now confer so much importance on the supposed falsity of Khelif and Lin’s test results when they simultaneously insist that those test results have no relevance anyway. To the IOC and its media backers, sex is all in the eye of the beholder (of a passport). It’s a sign of desperation, and of an absence of moral grounds to defend their position, that they selectively decided to get involved in the matter of sex testing only now that the public is concerned about their laissez-faire policy toward males punching women in the face for sport, and only insofar as to try to muddy the legitimacy of the test results. The media cannot accept the validity of the tests, because they expose trans activists’ ideals as unfair, outrageous, and untenable in the real world.

Nevertheless, even though it does nothing to change the absurdity of the IOC’s policy one way or the other, it bears noting: there is absolutely no basis to contest the tests’ credibility — both boxers are indisputably male.

Each of the boxers took two DNA tests: the first while participating in championships in Turkey in 2022, and the second in India in 2023. (The results of the 2022 tests were delayed and didn’t come out until after the championship was over. They came back ‘male’ but it was too late to halt that year’s event. As soon as the athletes returned to compete the next year, a new set of tests was immediately ordered — and this time the results came back in time to expel the men from the ring.) The tests were handled by their respective countries’ independent national laboratories, all fully certified and accredited by the international Court of Arbitration for Sport — the same body that oversees drug testing for the Olympics. Tellingly, the boxers both declined to appeal the results, and both dispatched letters from their lawyers refusing permission to release the details to the public, citing medical privacy. Nevertheless, the full lab reports have leaked, and they’ve been seen, vouched for, and described in detail by highly respected journalists, including here by Alan Abrahamson, formerly of the LA Times and NBC Sports.

The test results are ironclad and conclusive: the boxers are male. This has been a matter of public record for over a year, and it was given widespread media coverage when the athletes were disqualified from the New Delhi championships last year. The Algerian ambassador even got involved, but ultimately failed to persuade anyone that his athlete’s disqualification was unjust. For good measure, a formal letter was sent to the IOC, giving it a year’s warning in advance of the Paris Olympics that these two male boxers were likely to try to compete in them as women.

And remember: the test results aren’t supposed to matter anyway because according to the logic of trans activists, the IOC, and the media outlets that back them, biological sex is irrelevant in women’s sports.

The sole basis of the media’s attempt to discredit the genetic sex tests is the fact that they happened during competitions that were organized by the International Boxing Association, whose current president is Russian, and an ally of Vladimir Putin. The IBA is admittedly a mess. It’s caught up in a number of unrelated controversies, and it’s locked in a bitter dispute with the IOC over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So the strained logic implied by the media is that the tests were staged as part of a Russian-orchestrated plot that has been playing out since 2022, a massive conspiracy to reputationally damage the IOC and of course to (supposedly) put vulnerable transgender people in danger.

Left-wing outlet Mother Jones is just one of many that has gone all-in on a deranged Russian Transphobia Plot conspiracy theory.

None of which makes a lick of sense, considering that nobody but the IOC is to blame for its own stubborn policy of refusing to acknowledge that biological sex matters in women’s sports, and eschewing screening tests in favour of what amounts to taking people at their word, even in dangerous combat sports like boxing.

(FYI: both Khelif and Lin have advanced to the point that they’re guaranteed medals at the time of this writing.)

It’s important to note that neither Khelif nor Lin claims to be transgender. (Khelif is in fact a conservative Muslim who is outspokenly hostile to transgender-identifying individuals.) So transgender beliefs aren’t directly involved in this case anyway. Typically in cases of transgender identity in women’s sport, there is no question that the competitor is biologically male and went through a typical male puberty with the athletic advantages that result from it. In those cases, trans activists lobby for them to compete in women’s sports purely for inclusion’s sake — naked identity politics: it’s unfair to exclude them and it will hurt their feelings and invalidate their identities. They scream and shout and make noise and threats until everybody’s intimidated or exhausted into silent acquiescence.

Laurel (né Gavin) Hubbard competed in women’s Olympic weightlifting in Tokyo. In that case, the fact that Hubbard is male was not in question. The IOC, activists, and the media hounded anyone who complained, calling us all “transphobes.”

Take Laurel Hubbard, for example, who competed in 2020 Tokyo women’s weightlifting. Born Gavin Hubbard, Laurel is the child and heir of New Zealand’s Dick Hubbard, the breakfast cereal magnate of Hubbard Foods and former mayor of Auckland. Hubbard was firmly established among the Who’s Who in New Zealand, one of the richest and most powerful men in the Pacific Islands, long before announcing a transgender identity and “she/her” pronouns. There has never been any question that Laurel Hubbard is biologically male. Pronouns and name changes and newfound “identities” have never been taken as scientific evidence of a literal change of sex or a biological mixup-at-birth by anyone except the truly delusional. Hubbard was 43, over a decade older than any other competitor in weightlifting, and still displaced a female athlete to take a spot at the Olympics.

The government of nearby Samoa, an island nation with a rich cultural history of diverse gender expression, strongly protested the situation. In Samoa, gay males are raised to wear women’s clothing and are designated as “fa’afafine,” a gender role distinct from other men. Despite this cultural practice, Samoa adheres strictly to sex-based divisions in athletics, even for its most gender-diverse citizens. Which is to say, the Samoans haven’t been deranged by Western activists’ sex denialism despite being very on board with gender diversity, and they view the Olympic transgender policy as an outrage.

(In Hubbard’s case the IOC got lucky: due to a torn arm ligament, Hubbard did not win a medal. The image of a male middle-aged playboy millionaire bodybuilder taking a woman’s spot on the podium would surely have drawn further outrage.)

One has to wonder, if the boxers Khelif and Lin did claim to be transgender, as weightlifter Laurel Hubbard had in the previous Games, would the IOC and the media still be questioning the results of the sex tests? Or would they instead be wailing that the sex tests themselves are an affront to athletes’ sacred “gender identities”?

Hergie Bacyadan is a transgender boxer competing in women’s Olympic boxing. Bacyadan goes by “he/him” pronouns, but also acknowledges being biologically female, and does not use anabolic steroids or synthetic testosterone. Hergie plays by the same rules as everyone else — an honest athlete.

Ironically, there is another transgender athlete competing in women’s Olympic boxing this year, and no one is bothered by it. Hergie Bacyadan is a transman — a female who goes by “he/him” pronouns. Bacyadan, a martial artist from the Philippines, does not take anabolic steroids or testosterone, and acknowledges being biologically female. Absolutely no one objects to Bacyadan competing in women’s boxing because Bacyadan plays by the same rules as everyone else. This puts the lie to the claim that “transphobia” is at the heart of people’s objections to Khelif and Lin’s participation in the women’s ring. The media is completely ignoring the many transgender athletes competing at the Olympics who absolutely no one objects to, for the simple reason that they aren’t cheating! They’re competing in the biological sex class that aligns with their bodies, and rightly leaving their feelings about personal expression, internal sense of identity, and spiritual sense of “gender” to domains outside the physical sports arena.

Many media outlets have also stooped to perpetuating the sexist and racist canard that opposing males in women’s sports is analagous to enforcing outdated standards of femininity. They put up pictures of strong Black women athletes with muscular features alongside headlines that imply we’ll be coming for them next. It’s a disgusting tactic, but scaremongering is the only arrow remaining in the transactivist-left’s quiver.

PBS is one of many outlets that attempt to frame the male boxer controversy as a case of racism and sexism. This in itself is racist and sexist.

It’s boxing, for god’s sake — all the women competing in Olympic boxing have strong, muscular features; none of them look like Megan Fox or Kim Kardashian. And ironically, the only people suggesting that busty-curves-equals-real-woman are the trans activists and the media.

The criteria for eligibility to compete in women’s sports should not be appearing to be female, it should simply be actually being biologically female. This contravenes the central tenet of trans ideology, which is that when it comes to sex, appearances matter more than biological facts.

But what about edge cases, you might ask. Aren’t there some circumstances where someone’s biological sex might be ambiguous? Shouldn’t we try to be fair and inclusive to them?

Yes, we should. And we are. There is a small number of males and females whose genetics give them atypical traits for their sex. They were formerly called “intersex.” But transgender activists exploited this term to sow confusion and imply that some people are born in between the sexes male and female — which is completely untrue — so the preferred, less misleading term in use today is DSD, or difference/disorder of sexual development. It’s perfectly possible to have universally enforceable rules and medical tests that also take people with DSDs into account.

For the purpose of athletic competition, the most relevant advantage that divides bodies into two very different performance classes is the presence of testicles. Typical males are born with a pair of functioning (testosterone-producing) testes which flood the body with testosterone beginning in puberty, leading to a host of irreversible body changes that massively improve the body’s athletic performance: stronger bones, denser and faster muscles, larger heart, bigger lung capacity, longer limbs, etc.

In essence, men’s and women’s sex classes in sport are meant to separate bodies that were enhanced by functional testicles during puberty (men’s sports) from bodies that weren’t (women’s sports).

Chromosome tests, which require from their subjects only a quick, painless cheek swab, are a very reliable proxy for the presence of functional testicles during puberty, because the vast majority of males have functional testicles, and precisely zero females do.

There are, however, edge cases in which males do not develop functional testicles, or are born with a genetic condition which prevents the body from processing testosterone (this is called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome). Arguments can be made that some of these people should be allowed to compete in women’s sports; I and many others find them convincing. Some athletes would fail a genetic (XY chromosome) sex screening test, but if they can prove that they don’t have functioning testicles now and didn’t have them during puberty, they might be permitted into women’s sports on appeal.

Did you have a working set of balls growing up? Yes or no. See? This isn’t actually complicated at all, despite the endless hand-wringing about edge cases and genetic anomalies from the trans activists, the IOC, and the media. If you had functional testicles during puberty, you compete in Formula One. If you didn’t, you compete in NASCAR. They’re both great sports with their own unique, positive aspects, and neither is inherently superior to the other, but they run on fundamentally incompatible hardware. It’s as simple as that. Many people in my camp would even offer certain males with intact testicles a chance to compete in women’s sports as long as the circumstances can be shown to be biologically fair (i.e., their bodies somehow didn’t benefit from high levels of testosterone during puberty), and still we’re called evil, hate-filled “transphobes.”

One thing that does complicate the matter is that some males born with functional testicles are misidentified at birth and presumed to be female, at least during their childhoods. Some males are born with a genetic condition that stops the penis from developing properly, and it ends up resembling a vulva. Their functioning testicles sometimes remain inside the abdomen (they don’t descend into the scrotum as would typically occur) and sometimes they descend normally, but nevertheless, confusion about their sex results from the atypical initial appearance of their genitals. The technical name for this is 5-ARD. In the Dominican Republic they’re poetically called “güevedoces” — roughly, “huevos [‘balls’] at age twelve,” because even though they are often presumed to be girls in childhood, once puberty kicks in it becomes clear that they’re male, and have fully functional testicles. Their voices deepen, their physiques become unmistakably masculine, and their micropenises increase in size enough to dispel any ambiguity about their biological function.

Caster Semenya is a male who won two Olympic gold medals in women’s running.

This is the condition that South African runner Caster Semenya has. Semenya has won two Olympic gold medals in the women’s 800 metre track race. It was later proven that Semenya is a male, born with a malformed penis and fully functional internal testicles, and Semenya knew it all along. Therefore most people now agree that Semenya cheated, and denied medals to Alysia Johnson Montaño of the USA at the London Games in 2012, and Melissa Bishop of Canada at Rio in 2016.

Alysia Johnson-Montaño and Melissa Bishop were cheated out of Olympic medals at the 2012 and 2016 games by Caster Semenya. Still, the media continues to treat Semenya as a hero, and casts Semenya’s critics as racist bigots.

There’s speculation that Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting might also be 5-ARD “güevedoces” like Caster Semenya is. So far there’s no concrete evidence for or against the conjecture. But circumstantial evidence suggests these two have been identifying as women for a while, and it’s often the case when males identify as women for reasons not related to the transgender subculture, it’s because they were mistaken as girls in childhood due to malformed genitals. Khelif’s father insists he raised Khelif as a girl but other than a birth certificate which was suspiciously only issued just a few years ago, there’s so far no hard evidence of this. Of course it doesn’t change the fact that Khelif is male one way or the other, but it does add to the speculation that he was born with a DSD, and that atypical genital appearance in early childhood was what initially instigated his family’s pretence that he’s female.

Imane Khelif’s father showed Reuters a birth certificate as the sole piece of evidence that his son is female. Complicating matters, the document is clearly signed and dated to 2018, just before Khelif turned 19.

The only hard evidence of anything that we have are the certified laboratory tests. The only thing we know for certain is that Khelif and Lin are male.

In the upside-down world of the 2024 media landscape, the one thing that we know for certain — those boxers are male — is the one thing we are being told we must not believe.

After losing to Taiwanese male Lin Yu-Ting, Turkish featherweight Yildiz Kahraman defiantly makes an X gesture with her fingers, in reference to her XX chromosomes. It’s quickly becoming a sign of protest by women athletes at the Paris Olympics.

Here’s a little gallery of some of the distortions, lies, racism, sexism, derangement and delusion that’s being put out across the centre and centre-left media. It’s a damning indictment of the state of our society right now. Our trust networks have collapsed to the point that once-reliable news sources are openly spreading lies to buttress their own political biases.