When British swimmer Sharron Davies missed out on an Olympic gold in the 1980s, it was due to blatant doping among the East Germans. Now she thinks a new issue is keeping women like her from winning medals at the Olympics: biological males being allowed to compete against women.
As the boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting punched their way to gold medals, Davies said she thought a woman might soon be killed in the boxing ring. The two boxers had been banned by the International Boxing Association. They carry male chromosomes.
Males punch 162 per cent harder than females — but the question remains unresolved: who is which?
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has decided to go by what the passport says. By leaning towards inclusion, fair sport for women might be threatened. And we don’t need to wait for a death in the ring before a more research-based approach is used.
READ MORE | Paris Olympics: Taiwan leader praises boxing champion Lin Yu-ting in gender row
Dr. Emma Hilton, the biologist whose research established how much harder a man could punch when compared to a woman, was quoted in the Daily Telegraph as saying, “They (the IOC) are trying to balance fairness, inclusion, and safety. But safety isn’t about balance. Safety is a cut-off. If it’s not safe, nobody cares if it’s fair or inclusive.”
Both Khelif and Yu-ting have been victims of social media abuse, mainly from those outside their countries (Algeria and Taiwan, respectively). They are the victims of two separate strains: the politics of the IOC (which neither endorsed the IBA testing nor did its own), and the belief by the average person that they can distinguish between sexes without any need for science or tests. The gold medal might be compensation, but the system has certainly let them down.
Khelif was quoted as saying, “I’m a woman like any other woman. I was born a woman, I have lived as a woman, and I competed as a woman; there’s no doubt about that. [The detractors] are enemies of success. And that also gives my success a special taste because of these attacks.” You cannot help but sympathise.
The president of World Athletics (and possibly the next head of the IOC), Sebastian Coe, said last year, “If we ever get pushed into a corner to the point where we’re making a judgement about fairness or inclusion, I will always fall on the side of fairness.” The problem with Khelif and Yu-ting is not that they are transgender nor are their testosterone levels abnormally high (there is a system that allows them to participate, imperfect as it stands, but with a nod to science). They are biologically male.
The Olympics have struggled with the definition of “female,” one that should be readily available given that all competition is divided into two groups, “male” being the other. We have moved on from parading women athletes in the nude to chromosome testing, threshold of functional testosterone testing to self-identifying, but there is no all-encompassing and foolproof system. Ironically, we just don’t know enough about something so fundamental.
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