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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 live in a society where high school football is a very big deal.
Now the law in Texas says that, theoretically, any high schooler who wants to play American football can do so. There not being enough interest for a girl's division, that means that girls who want to badly enough, and whose parents have taken leave of their senses, get to compete on the boys team. This is discouraged but it happens. There are periodic news stories about a- usually junior varsity, these girls tend not to make the cut for a varsity team- high school football team forfeiting a match rather than expect their players to tackle a girl. Functionally football is an open sport, and I think most men's sports are like this in general- as long as there's no doping, anyone who wants to compete in that league gets to. Women's athletics is the restricted one.
"Production" and "Open". It's possible to beat Open competitors with Production equipment but Open is its own division because the equipment is specifically designed to be more capable (and less practical).
Ex-men are trying to win Production division by bringing Open hardware into Production via a bunch of bad-faith arguments and the judges are too captured by politics to notice the intent. So it goes.
Are these actual categories of football equipment, or is this a metaphor? The usage here reminds me particularly of competitive shooting, or perhaps also auto racing.
Yeah, these are competitive shooting divisions.
But then that's the thing- the reason they're like that is that sure, you can get an advantage by buying the meta gun, but you can't strap a bunch of other bullshit that doesn't fit in the general spirit of the category and then claim it's balanced (yeah, I'm sure that high-end 2011 with a comp and a dot identifies as a stock Glock 17).
I guess the difference is that even if I had a 2011 I don't want to compete against people running stock Glock 17s, because it's not really even a measure of skill at that point, it's also a question of how hard you can game the gun itself (because in that division, if you're the first guy to come up with putting a red dot on your handgun you deserve the win you're going to get by doing so because that's what that division is for).
It's poor sportsmanship to be intentionally trying to break the categories, which is the reason the entirety of the men's division isn't doing this even though at the end of the day they're passing up another chance to win. And once you lose that concept you don't have a game any more.
I feel like the solution is usually to have a bunch of categories/divisions (see Le Mans racing and 2-Gun shooting), though maybe this doesn't work so well when it comes to humans vs. machines.
If you don't have the ability or the willingness to give poor sports the boot it's not going to work regardless.
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