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I think this is addressed in the OP. The absurd beliefs of today (there is no difference in peak athletic performance between males and females, and all observable differences are the product of socialisation) are an overcorrection to the absurd beliefs of yesterday (men are physically superior to women on every axis, and women are so physically weak that they cannot even safely compete in long-distance running events). We're now belatedly arriving at a Hegelian synthesis, in which we acknowledge that men are stronger and faster than women for reasons that have nothing to do with socialisation, while still recognising that women can be plenty strong and fast on their own terms. While "the establishment" was once pushing the "men and women are the same" angle and are now pushing the Hegelian synthesis, the use of the collective noun disguises what a hard-fought battle it was to get them to sit up and take notice. Gender-critical activists spent innumerable thankless years trying to draw attention to the higher rate of injury when male athletes were permitted to compete in female sporting events, and were rewarded for it by being harassed, doxxed and called bigoted and even racist (?). It's only very recently that the Hegelian synthesis has undergone a respectability cascade and the establishment is starting to recognise just how absurd the "men and women are the same" framework is. It'd be curious to see what the catalyst was - I think Lia Thomas started to make a lot of people sit up and take notice, but "swimming speed" is too abstract a metric for a lot of people to care about. Imane Khelif, however, seemed to have really redpilled a lot of people. The sight of an obviously male person punching a female person and being rewarded for doing so triggers an intense emotional reaction which probably has a long standing evolutionary basis.
I think you and the OP are making pretty different claims. Maybe the OP, in their TLDR uses dialectic terms, but the problem is you can make a just so dialectical story about anything as they do. If you see the HBDers as wrong so the Yarvinites aren't on the synthesis edge but instead the regressive edge. If you see HBD as right then they're a synthesis of the older pure racism with modern science. This structure can't actually do anything but affirm your priors. You could take this structure and decide that women really are physically the equals of men. And the application to Gaza? What is that even supposed to mean? What is the Thesis and Antithesis of Gaza? It a quagmire, a lose lose situation, not some kind of dialectical question.
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Nah, way before that there was Fallon Fox, an actual transgender, rather than male with DSD like Khalif, literally cracking an opponents skull.
You're not going to find a neat explanation, why this incident and not another. They just ran out of mana.
True. I suspect it's because MMA is a comparatively niche sport compared to the Olympics, female MMA even more so. A cursory Google suggests that as many as 5 billion people watched at least some of the 2024 Olympics: if even 1% of those watched the Khelif vs. Carini match, that's 50 million people around the world watching a presumably male person punching a female. I'd be surprised if as many as 10 million people watched the Fox vs. Brents match.
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