Sucker punched (Part 1)

Why I suddenly became interested in boxing

In the days since my last post on the Olympic Games opening ceremony, the furore about women’s boxing has taken on—yes, I’ll do it, I’ll use the pun—Olympian proportions. I am speaking not of the basic question about whether males—DSD or not, gender identity or not—should compete in women’s sports. For me, I can easily deliver the answer to that question straight from the shoulder (yes, dear readers, I will mercilessly torment you with boxing metaphors in this post). My answer is a resounding NO, for all the reasons we should damn well know by now, including: greater male muscle mass and bone density, larger chest cavity and greater cardiovascular and lung capacity, greater skeletal resistance to whiplash, all of which significantly advantage men in terms of strength, speed and resistance to injury. Artificially lowering levels of testosterone in male athletes may slightly reduce this advantage but in no circumstances removes it, including in the case of males with DSD, once they have been through the process of androgenisation in puberty. So, I’m firmly in Angela Carini’s, Anna Luca Camori’s and Svetlana Kamenova Staneva’s corner—all the more because, as sports scientist Ross Tucker points out in his podcast on this issue, boxing is the most dangerous place for males to compete in women’s sports.

It is truly tedious to keep having to make these arguments when the science is so comprehensive.

Clearly, however, the tedium is not at an end for me, because these things keep on happening, and they constitute both discrimination and violence against women. So guess what the rest of this post will be about. The current furore around Lin and (particularly) Khelif also leads me into discussing another of my pet themes: fallacies. The ones I will be concerned with in Part 2 of this post later this week are those abounding in groupthink, whether institutionally mandated or more up-from-below.

I mentioned above the names of three boxers beaten by, in the first two cases, Imane Khelif (although technically, Carini forfeited the match rather than losing it through the usual process: she went down, but not down-for-the-count), and in the third, by Lin Yu-ting. You have surely by now committed at least Khelif’s and Carini’s names to memory, due to the frequency with which they have been mentioned in both mainstream and social media. You may perhaps also have become more familiar with that of Lin (which is his surname). However, it is likely that you would have to look up Camori and Staneva: I had to! This is one of the major problems I have come across when discussing males in women’s sports: it is relatively easy to find the names of the men who pushed women off the podium, but far more difficult to find those of the women they unfairly beat, notwithstanding the excellent work done by the group who set up the site She Won. Not only are the women disappeared in the competition, they are generally disappeared in contemporaneous and subsequent reporting of it as well.

For my part, I do not understand why women want to compete in boxing at all. Although it is not the worst sport for risk of injury including head injury (American football is apparently the worst, followed by rugby), the risk of chronic brain injury from boxing is nonetheless high, notably Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). This is par for the course in a sport in which the very objective is to beat your opponent about the head until she or he falls down. For that reason, the World Medical Association believes boxing should be banned. In Ancient Greece, boxing, which of course females were not allowed to play because kept out of all sports, was considered the most injurious sport. There are martial arts that are much safer, relatively speaking, such as judo, and far less directly associated with a history of male aggression.

So I do ask myself why would any sane woman would want to do this. No, settle down, readers, I am not suggesting all female boxers today are insane. It is a rhetorical question I ask myself as I find boxing unimaginable as a desirable physical pursuit and repugnant as a spectator sport. However, this distaste for boxing remains somewhat beside the point because women threw their collective hat into the ring some 300 years ago in England, when the first written records of women boxing appeared in the modern West. In short, women in boxing is, now and in the foreseeable future, a done deal.

Boxing, but not women. Actually, not human (just in case anyone was in doubt)

Pugilism (boxing) actually has a rather fascinating history: even if I mostly dislike sport in general and have a particular aversion to boxing, I do like history. So in the last week I have been finding out about the history of pugilism. The potted version is that boxing, of which Christian-era records appear to have begun in England around the 17^th century, was an either unregulated or outlawed pursuit for much of its modern history, and brawls outside the ring were as common as fights within it. It became regulated, and more prestigious, in 1867 with the introduction of the Marquess of Queensberry rules. Among other things, those rules regulated the use of gloves, which many boxing and medical experts suggest has actually rendered boxing more dangerous as boxers aim their now well-protected fists more frequently at the head. Long outlawed as a violent sport in the US, boxing morphed into a source of upward mobility for working class and racialised males following the World War I US war effort, where pugilism gained legitimacy as a training regime for combat. (Which, I would suggest, is an entirely logical deployment of the sport, all the more because the military is also a source of employment and training for more marginalised men, as statistics from, for example, the US and UK—and more often than not their recruitment campaigns— demonstrate.)   

To return to the furore of the moment. I am somewhat bemused by the plethora of social media posts by gender critical women expressing outrage that Khelif punched Carini, and in addition attributing him violent motives to beat her to a pulp, sexually assault her and so on. As noted above, in boxing, punching is precisely what is supposed to happen, so it is pointless to be coming out swinging against Khelif personally for that. As to his motivations, we cannot possibly know this, for we are not inside his head. What is outrageous is that he was competing with women in the first place. A heavyweight would not be allowed to compete with a featherweight: everyone would understand the unfair competitive advantage there. It is puzzling that people have such difficulty in understanding the competitive advantage males have over females.

But, we are told, Khelif is a woman. I have even seen several statements online, expressed with absolute and quasi-zealous certainty (and sadly, mostly by women), that he has a uterus. I am amazed that so many people have been able to witness a medical examination of Khelif’s internal organs. And look look look, we are told: Khelif was raised female, has always lived as a female. Ergo: female. In Australian parlance: yeah, nah.

In short, I am reading the most outrageous claims made in that cesspit we call social media, by otherwise (one would hope) rational people on both sides of the “gender” divide. In Part 2 of this post I will look into some of those claims and the groupthink informing them, a great deal of which stems from a sketchy (or non-)understanding of DSDs (differences in sexual development). I am still in the process of getting a full grasp on this area myself, and there is a great deal about both Khelif and Lin that we do not know.

What we do know, however, from all reliable evidence and scientific analysis, is that Khelif and Lin are almost certainly males with a particular form of DSD (more on this in Part 2). We also know that the International Boxing Association (IBA) tested both boxers in 2023 and found them to be chromosomally male, banning them from women’s competitions as a result (Tucker’s above-cited podcast comments on the IBA’s report, which he notes that regrettably uses the terms “gender” and “sex” as interchangeable: this does not detract, however, from the finding.) Subsequently, due to alleged corruption with the IBA because of largely Russian control, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) excluded the IBA from the 2024 Olympic Games and chose to disregard the IBA’s 2023 findings on Khelif and Lin. The IOC deemed the IBA’s tests to be “impossibly flawed” (albeit not stating any reasons for making this claim), and further claimed that the two boxers were female because their passports declared them to be so. IOC chief Thomas Bach went as far as saying that “some want to own a definition of who is a women”. Apparently the definition is up for grabs and anyone can weigh in to it in a duking-it-out semantic free-for-all. Again, Oz parlance helps me out: yeah, nah.

In Part 2 of this post, I will look into all the claims and counterclaims made about Khelif (in particular) and Lin, and explore in more detail what I have understood about DSDs.

Till then, we can be sure of one thing: Carini, Camori and Staneva were all sucker punched (received unexpected and illegitimate blows). And it was Thomas Bach and the IOC who delivered the KO.

What some of us feel like doing to Thomas Bach and the IOC