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A Carnival of Bad Sports Opinions
I'm sure by now everyone has seen the 43-second fight between Khelif and Carini. Full 43 seconds here and the money shot in slow-mo here.
What a ludicrous display. The bigoted opinion most supported by this farce of a fight isn't anything about Khelif's genital arrangement or chromosomes, it is that women's boxing shouldn't be in the olympics if this kind of crybaby shit is going down in there and no one is immediately calling it out. I spent some of my teen years being a weak, wimpy boxes (coincidentally at about that height and weight!) and this is just not how a fight goes when you realize that your opponent is much stronger than you and get scared when you realize you don't have a chance. You shell up and avoid leaving yourself open, you get on your bicycle and run away, you throw tentative tight jabs while keeping your hands up to keep them on the outside, if they get inside you immediately clinch to avoid further punishment. I was a teenager bad at boxing and working out with a lot of grown men much better than me, I was frequently in this position. What you don't do is what Carini did. You don't attack, extend yourself, drop your hands, get tagged, and tap out. I'm not an expert on Olympic boxing, but I've never in my life seen any male fighter, from the level of muay thai smokers up to the pros, surrender like that for no apparent reason. If a male fighter tried that, I would assume it was fixed.
Carini may have been outmatched, but she easily could have fought the round out defensively, run away, survived to the bell, and thrown in the towel between rounds. Minimal shame in that. I'd even be a little less judgmental if she truly took a dive and faked a "phantom punch" and just dropped to the ground to take a KO loss. But to give up not even halfway into the round after taking one punch, when she was clearly fully functional and unhurt? It makes a mockery of boxing. The majority of the felt force of that punch wasn't even relative to the strength of the boxer, it was the near perfect angle given by Carini with her hands low and her chin out.
One of Khelif's former opponents Irish boxer Amy Broadhurst has stepped up in her defense. In one of the funnier twitter exchanges I've ever seen, a random user asks Broadhurst how she would feel if she had to fight Khelif; Broadhurst has beaten Khelif in the ring multiple times in international competition. Here's footage of Khelif looking significantly less manly when someone has the guts to stand and bang. The mick keeps her hands up, gets inside, and punishes Khelif, who clearly gets gassed from the punishment taken from the stronger Broadhurst. This presumably settles the old North Jersey debate over whether Irish or Italians are tougher? Watching these fights I probably drop my opinion on women's boxing, Broadhurst is willing to tank a hit and get inside and go to the body hard, and wins the fight handily.
This is, in my mind, one of the great unsung tragedies of the rise of the trans movement. A woman, born female in a country where homosexuality and gender transition are illegal, raised as a woman, but born tall and with a face and body that is undeniably a bit masculine (especially by global and eurocentric standards), is now under constant suspicion of being secretly male. I have no idea what intersex condition Khelif might or might not have been born with, and no public statement has been made that confirms any testosterone testing. The presumption must be, absent testing, that a girl raised as a girl is a girl. There is probably an inappropriate level of testosterone at which a female competitor should be removed from competition or forced to suppress the level, but we still have yet to see evidence that Khelif is in that category. Further, there is a moral hazard created by normalizing edge cases, in that a competitor will accuse their opponent of gender-violations. Some of the more insane red-state laws allowed any parent of a competitor to require testing of any opponent, which I have to imagine would be abused constantly to try to demoralize one's competition by having a weird judge examine your vagina before the big game.
The takes on the "Defend Women's Sport" side of the debate have been degrading in quality, as TERFs like Rowling have risen in prominence. My problem with the pro-trans "there's no difference" side has long been that not one of them has any knowledge of or enthusiasm for sport. I feel like we're seeing more of that from the TERF side here, with the idea that Khelif is just SO MUCH STRONGER that Carini was forced to quit for her own safety being parotted across Twitter without any evidence. I'm embarrassed for my side of the debate, if this is made a serious test-case for trans bans it is going to harm the cause for reasonable restriction in sport.
At the end of the day, I don't really object to transwomen competing in women's sport, I object to them winning. If they lose, then clearly it was no big deal. It's only if they win that it presents a problem, we got the science wrong. Given that binary, it would benefit the trans movement if they avoided trans women in sport altogether. But alas, here we are, in the carnival of bad sports opinions.
ETA:
https://apnews.com/article/angela-carini-imane-khelif-boxing-63e9dbaa30f1e29196d4162c72c2babf
Poor girl. Doesn't deserve some fat asshole from Pennsylvania going off on her for something she says she regrets.
'Real women' being hurt by the trans movement is not an unsung tragedy. It's the fife and drums of transphobia everywhere. Especially when it's coming from women.
Sports in general and the Olympics in particular have always had a large gray area when it comes to innate physical differences between competitors. Doesn't matter if its male/female or, thick or thin, tall or short. Instead of going into these differences in more detail the Olympics decide to live in muddy waters, which allows for incidents such as these.
In a broader context I find it hard to sympathize with anyone even remotely attaching themselves to this nonsense. People want things to 'stay the same' and not change whilst society around them is in the process of ditching whatever quaint conservatism they still hold on to. Whatever purity or sanctity is imagined to live within the Olympics is long gone or in the process of being removed. I mean, who knew the Swedes had such a knack for the long jump?
To an extent I agree with you. If seeing women getting hurt activates some almonds and folks want the display to stop, that's fine. But to pretend this is about sports or the sanctity of categories or whatever is just inane at this point.
Fun fact: that argument works just as well for having trans people compete with men as it does for having them compete with women.
One thing missing here is an actual argument for doing things your way. Changing things for the sake of change doesn't strike me as particularly reasonable.
Not sure who you think you're owning with this one.
You're being antagonistic and argumentative to the point that you don't even understand what is being written. My guess is you saw the word 'transphobia' and your head went spinning.
What is "my way"? I don't particularly like the changes to western society, but I can observe that they have been and are happening. I can therefor also recognize that pretending that some 'sacred' bubble called 'the Olympics' can exist unaffected is dumb. Especially when most of the people who want the bubble to remain also cheer for the change in society.
The people who cooked shit in a pot and now don't want to eat it.
This is still too edgy and cool for me to understand. Why not just write in a clear way?
I can simplify it. The Olympics and some sort of spirit of them have already been violated by globalism and modern immigration.
Every country wins, largely, by importing the ethnicity that is best at a certain sport, slapping a nationality flag on their ass, and calling it a day. Running isn't a competition between those with extensive national heritage; it's just Kenyans all the way down.
So if we've already eliminated the spirit of national competition, why not gender?
Even with a cursory watch of the Olympics, this seems ridiculous on its face. Most athletes still look very much like natives.
Picking a random Euro country, here are France's current gold medalists:
Their best performer, Leon Marchand, is as French as you can get.
How on earth is this the point at which you give up on a 100+ years institution that glorifies all of individual excellence, team work, and national pride.
I think a lot of the wehraboos are still salty about '36.
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None of the track-and-field events - sprinting, marathon, long jump, etc. - have given out medals yet. Neither has basketball. Those are the sports that people are talking about when they point to the Summer Olympics specifically having lost a lot of its national specificity; that’s where you’re going to see a lot of people of obviously African ancestry competing under various non-African national flags.
Your point is valuable, though. Those of us on the racialist right often overstate the pervasiveness of the phenomenon we’re pointing to. There are, in fact, still a great many successful Olympians with deep ethnic roots in the respective countries they’re representing. We’re nowhere near the point where you turn on the Olympics and everyone is African, which is the impression one would get if one only follows Olympic commentary on right-wing Twitter.
Hear hear!
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