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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.
I just want to know: how much of a biological advantage is too much, such that it's unfair to have people who don't have that advantage compete against people who do have it. That's the motivation for having some kind of testosterone limit for women's competitions right? That it would be unfair to have those women with less testosterone compete against those with more. I can't help but Notice this ostensibly general objection about biological fairness seems to only exist in the context of how much testosterone women's bodies produce. Is it fair for other men's swimmers to have to compete against Michael Phelps with all his biological advantages? What about Usain Bolt? Are the advantages Khalif might have due to her biology greater than the advantages others have due to their biology?
I thought I'd seen someone on the Motte making this silly attempt at a "gotcha!" argument before, and what do I know - it was you! Rather than rephrasing my point, I'll just reiterate exactly what I said to you the last time you made this lame argument:
You didn't respond to my counter-argument then, but now however many months later you're trotting out the exact same argument again almost word-for-word, treating it as self-evident that there is no other aspect of the sporting ethos which displays the remotest concern about fairness and pairing like athletes with like, except when trying to make trans people feel excluded.
In this case, Carini and Khelif were competing in the welterweight division. Simple question - would it be fair to expect Khelif to fight against a heavyweight opponent? If I was hypothetically concerned about athletes trying to circumvent weight class guidelines, couldn't you just as easily argue that I don't really care about fairness in sports and I'm just using this issue as another stick with which to beat overweight people? Sincerely - why couldn't a heavyweight "identify as" a welterweight? Why couldn't one have a "weight identity" known and knowable only to oneself, wholly distinct from the "biological mass" which was "assigned" to you? (FAHAWI - "forcibly assigned heavyweight at weigh-in"?)
If a featherweight was asked to compete against a heavyweight, the appropriate response from the featherweight is "that's completely unfair, he's twice my size". If the boxing commission replied "no you don't understand, this heavyweight is taking a regimen of drugs which reduce his performance to within two standard deviations of the expected performance of the typical featherweight boxer", the appropriate response from the featherweight is still "that's completely unfair, he's twice my size".
Please stop with the juvenile argument that no one really cares about fairness in sports and are just using the issue as a stalking horse to persecute trans women. It's tiresome and trivial to refute.
My point then and now is that it's not obvious how much of an advantage Khalif actually has. She was eliminated in the Olympic semi-finals in the Tokyo Olympics. She lost the welterweight IBA championship in 2022 to a cis-woman. The idea that she has the kind of advantage over other women the same way a heavyweight has an advantage over a featherweight is exactly what's in dispute. It is not something you can just assume, as your comment does.
No, your point then and now is that anyone claiming to care about fairness in sports is doing so in bad faith as a stick with which to beat trans women. I resent this characterisation of my opinion that it's unfair for unambiguously male athletes to compete in female sporting events. I remain agnostic on the question of whether Khalif is unambiguously female, unambiguously male, or a female with a DSD which gives them a competitive advantage.
Then let me clarify. I do not think literally everyone who talks about fairness in sports is only using it as a stick to beat trans women. But I do think there are a lot of people out there who do see fairness in sports as a stick to beat trans women.
Sure. Doesn't mean they're wrong though - that's Bulverism.
And please stop doing this unbelievably dumb thing of saying "wow, isn't it interesting how this debate about fairness in sports only comes up in the context of allowing trans women to compete? I wonder why that would be!" The very existence of weight classes, age classes etc. demonstrates, with zero room for ambiguity, that you are simply wrong.
Right now the only reason this debate only comes up in the context of sex-segregation in sports is because sex-segregation is a contested category, while weight classes are a settled matter: currently there's no broad social movement demanding that heavyweights be permitted to compete alongside welter- or feather-weights, on the grounds that they "identify" as a body mass different from their objective bodily mass. Any heavyweight who demanded such a thing would rightfully be laughed out of the room; but when a six-foot tall swimmer who has never been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and who has been competing as a male for years, suddenly "discovers" that he is actually a woman (barely even hiding that he is doing so to fulfil an autogynephiliac sexual fantasy) and demands to be included in female sporting events on that basis - for some reason society at large (and sporting bodies in particular) react with "of course, right this way
sirma'am".When the transfats in sports movement arrives (when, not if), I want it known both that I foresaw it, and that I promised in advance to fight against it just as stridently as I am currently fighting against the "right" of unambiguously male people to compete in female sporting events.
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