Five-ring circus: The Thread of the XXXIII Olympiad

And considering IBF is the clubhouse leader when it comes to corrupt sports organizations ...

 

I demand to see his birth certificate!

 

Hugequiz dot com > Sporcle

 

This should not have been a shock.

 

24 hours later, a correction

 

Given the complexity of the science and biology here, I won't know what to think until I hear from a US senator wearing eyeliner.

 

this fucking guy

 

The root of all of this, going back to gay-bashers like Anita Bryant, is that conservatives believe that anyone whose sexuality doesn't conform to a traditional heterosexual orientation is somehow running an elaborate, probably Satanic, deception. Recruiting, "protect women's sports," etc., is all one big attempt to justify their condemnation on the grounds of fraud. Because we're talking about a women's combat sport, they disingenuously couch it in the guise of violence against women. That's why one of the most effective ways for LGBTQ people to get acceptance into the public sphere is to simply present them as ordinary people who wish to live their lives like their neighbors.

We've had it out on a lot of this on the Lia Thomas thread, but it just seems unlikely that a man of any kind would put themselves through the social, physical and probably biological discomfort necessary to compete in high-level Olympic athletics as a woman. Hell, even Lia Thomas put herself through all that shit to win one NCAA championship for Penn in a non-Olympic event in a non-revenue sport? It just seems like a lot of effort for, well, what? And that's a situation of transgenderism, which is absolutely not in play here. Like Dutee Chand or Caster Semenya before them, without knowing highly personal information such as menstrual cycles and the composition of their internal organs, there is no readily apparent information that either of these boxers have had any doubts that they are not women. I would have to consult a geneticist and perhaps other medical experts, but it seems likely that they would have still passed the "nude parade" that female athletes were once subjected to so as to confirm their femininity.

Alan Abrahamson, who I'd say is as much of a pan-Olympic expert as exists, reports that both boxers were genetically tested before the 2022 (in Turkey) and 2023 (in India) world championship by real labs in the areas near those competitions and found to have Y chromosomes, and that he's seen the test results. I think that is at least more clarity than we've had, though Abrahamson does something of a 2,000-word salad after that.

https://www.3wiresports.com/articles/2024/8/3/0d4ucn50bmvbndhhqjohaneccoqueq

Abrahamson says it fairly high up, and I think this is ground we covered in Lia Thomas, but to set aside the social stigma, the battle line we're looking at here is the right of the individual athlete to privacy regarding their personal medical information and status, and the ability to participate and compete in a way that affirms their identity without discrimination vs. the fact that certain characteristics of gender confer immutable and irreversible physical advantage that influence fairness and safety for the collective, violating their right to compete on what they perceive as equal terms. As many of the TERFs have noted, it is probably not a statistical accident that all three medalists in the Rio women's 800 have since been diagnosed with DSDs (differences in sex development)

Where we have forged new ground since the Lia Thomas thread is the question of athletes who are intersex (in many cases without knowledge). In their rush to have a proof for their transphobia, some of our loudest transphobes seem to be arguing (and their repeated use of "he" pronouns for the boxers seems to betray), is that one can qualify as a woman only if they can convincingly prove they are fully sexually "intact" (if I may crudely slip into the equine), which seems like a slippery slope to quickly start pointing fingers at gay women or even women who do not present themselves in a traditionally feminine way.

Some have argued this week that Michael Phelps had certain physical advantages (an unusually long torso, huge hands and feet, low lactic acid production). Up until fairly recently, it was considered advantageous to delay puberty as long as possible in female gymnasts and figure skaters. Is that unfair? If a woman has an elective (say for endometriosis) or emergency hysterectomy or had to have an ovary or two removed because it was cancerous, is that unfair to the rest of the women? To me, policing femininity in athletics is such an entirely futile exercise, but sadly, a lot of people feel obliged to do it to either justify their own bigotry or their lack of results.

 

That doesn’t appear to be a legit account.

 

Both the tone, and to a lesser extent, the syntax, give strong Iron Sheik vibes, and I'm here for it.