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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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This assumption probably won’t count as anything new, but it seems to me that the overall leftist strategy in the current culture war over (in essence) MtF transsexual boxers in the Olympic games hinges entirely on the following unstated assumptions: a) TV viewers generally aren’t that interested in women’s sports in the first place b) the sort of sports where these particular MtF athletes seem to predominantly want to excel at are generally seen as low-status in the eyes of suburban middle-class Blue Tribe normies c) the relative number of cissexual women genuinely interested in such sports is insignificantly low.

there are many other possibilities there:

  • they may genuinely believe that MtF gives you female body and FtM gives you male body, and based strategy on that
  • they may genuinely believe that woman and man are as strong among top performers
  • supposed transsexual boxers are not actually transsexual
  • they may consider it as acceptable side effect and do not care about woman sports

and so on

they may genuinely believe that woman and man are as strong among top performers

In this case it's true that there are women as strong as Imane Khelif (though to me that's more evidence that she's not a man). She's got 9 losses on her record, if it weren't for a difference in weight classes she would be facing one of the Irish boxers who beat her handily in the 2020 Olympics again.

if it weren't for a difference in weight classes she would be facing one of the Irish boxers who beat her handily in the 2020 Olympics again.

I'm not sure "cuts weight and loses, puts on a bunch of muscle and starts kicking ass" is exactly an argument in favour of 'khelif is not that great anyways' or whatever people are trying to argue here. I did watch part of the Broadhurst fight now, and Khelif is certainly visibly more muscled now.

favour of 'khelif is not that great anyways' or whatever people are trying to argue here.

'Khelif is not that great anyways' is a hard argument to make given that she's now fighting for a silver medal. 'Khelif handily beats everyone except for other medal winning boxers' just means she's a top contender.

I did watch part of the Broadhurst fight now, and Khelif is certainly visibly more muscled now.

I was talking about Kellie Harrington who once had a 32 fight winning streak and is fighting for gold tomorrow. Women's boxing isn't that big of a sport, you are going to have lots of skewed bouts until you get near the end of the tournament because the best fighters severely outmatch the rest.