July 30, 2024 - 12:00pm

For the past decade, “Is sex binary?” has become one of those questions to which one is not supposed to know the correct answer. Like “What is a woman?”, or “Is the Emperor naked?”, it functions as a test: the smarter you are, the more effort you will make to feign confusion.

As countless “enlightening” articles have taught us, it is gauche, unsophisticated, perhaps even a little bit racist to believe there are only two sexes. It’s like thinking only men can do maths, or only women can look after children.

This argument might be amusing to careerist academics, but it is less fun, one imagines, if the consequences of claiming there are no sex boundaries mean getting your head caved in by someone with 2.6 times greater punching power than you. Nonetheless, the International Olympic Committee has decided that two boxers who are biologically male shall be permitted to fight in the women’s categories in Paris.

Both Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Chinese Tapei’s Lin Yu-ting have previously failed biochemical tests for gender eligibility. Both were removed from last year’s Women’s World Boxing Championships for having XY chromosomes. It is not altogether clear whether their claims to be female constitute a deliberate act of deception or relate to differences in sex development (DSD), as neither boxer claims to be transgender. Nonetheless, it is not just unfair but unsafe for female boxers to have to compete against them. This is a moment when one might expect the sex denialists to admit that they’ve gone too far, but such a course of action is highly unlikely.

The inclusion of male people in female sporting categories might have started out as a complex, delicate question. One can feel great sympathy for those with DSD, who may have been raised as female only to be told they are biologically male. In recent years, particularly in the wake of increasingly aggressive trans activism, male inclusion in female sports has started to feel more like plain old entitlement. Unambiguously male competitors such as Lia Thomas, Laurel Hubbard, and Veronica Ivy have dared observers to point out the obvious. They have taken women’s places and prizes with the smug air of those who aren’t even trying to convince anyone that this is fair.

Those of us who expected male sports journalists not to stand for this — on the basis that women’s prisons and refuges might be unimportant when it comes to setting sex-based boundaries, but sport is sacred — have been sorely disappointed. Some have seemed to actively want male inclusion in female sports, a category they might not have seen as particularly authentic in its own right. Perhaps it has felt like payback for women wanting in on sports as a male domain. It’s that familiar anti-feminist argument: “you wanted to be the same as the men? Well, then, we’re only taking you at your word”.

This is, surely, the point at which we say enough is enough. You’re not smashing the gender binary; you’re putting male fists in female faces and smashing them instead.


Victoria Smith is a writer and creator of the Glosswitch newsletter.

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