Turning Violence Against Women Into a Spectator Sport

There’s a new sport at the Olympics: violence against women. Yes, biological males laying hands on women might be a crime in the real world, but at Paris 2024 it’s a must-see event. Leave your feminist morals at the door, park your petty worries about male power, and enjoy the sight of two people with XY chromosomes punching women in the face for 10 minutes straight.

This is the news that both semi-finals in the women’s boxing at the Olympics feature fighters who are thought to be biologically male. There’s Imane Khelif from Algeria and Lin Yu-ting from Taiwan. The pair of them were disqualified from the Women’s World Championships last year after failing gender-eligibility tests carried out by the International Boxing Association (IBA). The tests discovered, in the curt words of IBA president Umar Kremlev, that Khelif and Lin ‘were men’. And yet here they are in Paris in the ring with women.

Khelif will fight Janjaem Suwannapheng of Thailand today. Ms Suwannapheng says she is ‘not afraid’ of Khelif, which is admirable. I hope she wins. Lin will face Esra Yildiz Kahraman of Turkey on Wednesday. Here’s hoping Kahraman wins, too. Call me old-fashioned, but I always prefer it when women win in women’s sports. At the very least, we should hope that neither Suwannapheng nor Kahraman suffer the grotesque indignity inflicted on Italy’s Angela Carini, who withdrew from her clash with Khelif after just 46 seconds, later saying she had been ‘hit so hard she couldn’t breathe’.

We need to talk about this. That before the eyes of the world, at the literal Olympics, a woman was whacked so forcefully by a biological male that she struggled to catch her breath is an outrage. It is a testament to the irrationalism of the new elites. These people have tumbled so hard down the rabbit hole of gender ideology that even the sight of a male hitting a female fails to stir their conscience or make them recall their GCSE biology. Their devotion to the religion of gender is unflinching – so much so, they’ll happily sacrifice a woman or two at its altar.

Khelif and Lin’s cases are complicated, for sure. These aren’t ‘transwomen’. They’re not normal blokes who suddenly decided to ‘change sex’ and invade women’s sports for an easy win and undeserved medal. They’re not like Lia Thomas, the huge fella who competed (let’s say it: cheated) against women in US collegiate swimming. They’re not like Laurel Hubbard, the big dude from New Zealand who competed in the women’s weightlifting at the Tokyo Olympics. And they’re not like those people with penises who insist on swimming in the ladies’ pond at Hampstead Heath or parading around bollock-naked in ladies’ changing rooms, presumably for some cheap thrill of power.

No, their cases are more sad than outrageous, more likely to induce pity than fury. It would appear that both suffer from some kind of disorder of sex development (DSD). This might mean that they were born with abnormal genitalia. It might mean they were believed to be girls at birth and were raised as such. However, it seems clear, from the evidence we have, that their lives will have changed dramatically when they reached puberty. Then, their underlying male characteristics would have become apparent. Their innate maleness will have surged through their bodies.

For here’s the most important thing about the IBA tests on Khelif and Lin: they were not testosterone tests but genetic tests. The tests found, ‘conclusively’, says the IBA, that ‘both athletes did not meet required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors’. IBA officials say the tests found that Khelif and Lin have ‘XY chromosomes’. In the mammal world, including the human world, only one sex has XY chromosomes: the male sex. Khelif and Lin are males.

Strikingly, Lin did not appeal the IBA’s decision. Khelif did, briefly, but later withdrew the appeal. This means the IBA’s findings are legally binding. It is a legally enforceable observation, in the world of sport, that Khelif and Lin have genetic benefits that make them unsuitable for women’s boxing.

So why are they at Paris 2024 punching women? Shockingly – or perhaps not – the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was informed in June 2023 that Khelif had failed her IBA gender-eligibility testing. It was told that the tests ‘concluded the boxer’s DNA was that of a male consisting of XY chromosomes’. It doesn’t get any clearer than that. And yet still the IOC flung open the doors of Paris 2024 to this genetic male who fights women. The IBA’s British chief executive, Chris Roberts, says this is down to the IOC using its ‘own criteria’, which is basically a passport test: Khelif and Lin presumably have female passports, so they’re female, right? That’s the IOC’s post-truth attitude.

The IOC has betrayed women. And not for the first time. At the Rio Olympics in 2016, the three fastest runners in the ‘women’s’ 800-metres final were all DSD athletes. They included Caster Semenya from South Africa, who won. So gold, silver and bronze in a women’s event went to athletes who, at some level, are male, or who at least have benefited from very high levels of natural testosterone. What a vile snub to the natural-born women who had trained for years to excel at the 800 metres. Changes to the World Athletics rules mean runners like Semenya cannot compete anymore, unless they agree to dramatically reduce their testosterone levels. And yet in boxing – where the male advantage is not only unfair but outright dangerous – biological males can compete? Make it make sense, IOC.

This isn’t only a smack in the face – literally – to womankind. It’s an assault on reason, too. We live under cultural elites who damn every opinion they don’t like as ‘misinformation’ and yet they will straight up look you in the face and say: ‘This person with testes is a woman.’ The new ruling class loses sleep over ‘fake news’ and then comes out with literal gobbledygook like ‘her penis’. They wail about our ‘post-truth’ era and then say ‘transwomen are women’. They mock what they view as the backward beliefs of rednecks and other little people and then insist you can have a cock and be a lesbian. They seem hypnotised by a cranky neo-religious belief system. They are the West’s worst purveyors of misinformation, if not actual hysteria, right now.

Worse, they will hunt down any blasphemer who refuses to genuflect to their post-science lunacy. Witness the harassment in recent days of gender-critical women and others who’ve challenged the inclusion of Khelif and Lin in the women’s boxing at Paris 2024. No dissent is permitted under their regime of untruth. No defence of women’s rights is allowed. No expression of biological reality will go unpunished. The person who refuses to accept that a man can become a woman is to 2024 what the person who refused to believe that a wafer of bread became the Body of Christ was to 1524. Especially if that person is female. Every world religion has rained terror on women who speak out of turn – why would woke be different?

This is why the Olympics boxing scandal matters – because women could potentially be hurt and truth will definitely be hurt. We now know, beyond doubt, that our societies are run by people who value ideological conformity more than truth, correct-think more than women’s rights and male feelings more than female safety. Women are being hit and we’re all being gaslit.