The International Boxing Association said that Khelif and Lin competing in Paris Olympics were disqualified from the tournament for testing positive for XY chromosomes which give an unfair advantage in the women’s division. What do you think?
07.06.2025 13:24
So here is the science bit. At university, if you study medical science or another biomedical science, you might do some reproductive physiology heavily slanted to endocrinology. In that course, you will learn about hormones and what they do. No course will be complete without talking about hormone problems. This is where I encountered testicular feminisation. Today they call it androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) amongst other names. To cut a long story short, we can consider sex from a few ways. We can have genetic sex which is your chromosomes and genes. We can have gonadal sex which is determined by which gonads you have inside of you. Then we have hormonal sex which is the balance between testosterone (male hormone) versus oestragen (female hormone). How much you have typically determines if you are a developing male or female. Both hormones are present in both sexes but the difference is in the biochemical profile. Finally, we have the phenotypical sex which what people see of you when you are naked or otherwise. You can have a penis or a vagina (real or not) and that mostly determines what others will think of you although none of these is conclusive in isolation.
So why do I argue for more adherence towards a binary sex? Because it is also a biological thing. In other words, we should aim to have two categories, male and female and live with the imperfections when they arise. We cannot sweep them under the carpet. We cannot deny they exist or ignore them as a minority. We have to acknowledge them and deal with them. It also means we need more awareness. High (secondary) school biology might teach us that females have XX chromosomes but it does not explain when something else happens. The same class might make you realise that males are blessed with a Y chromosome but do not explain how that gives you a penis. In fact, in a minority of cases, it results in what looks like a vagina instead. It takes more advanced medical biology to understand why and how. That is the world of DSD (differences in sexual development). Most people have some awareness of intersex or hermaphrodites but few actually understand the scope of what that means.
Now over a decade ago, we had another furor. Caster Semenya was the South Africa Gold medalist but was diagnosed with 5-alpha reductase deficiency. This mirrors AIS. She lacks the enzyme that converts testosterone into anything active. So just like in AIS, testosterone is irrelevant to her body too so testosterone gave her zero advantage.
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Blume Kind (Australian musician/blogger)
Unfortunately, we live in societies that celebrate excessive diversity which allows everything under the sun and that is what many have reacted negatively to. My take on that is that it is wrong to have half-halfies. I don’t appreciate every other option. You cannot simply declare you are female and then go about your day looking like your typical bloke. You either express yourself as male or female and mostly it stems from biology. We need to remember that standards of femininity are also fluid as what passes as femaleness in one culture differs to others so what I am saying is that culturally speaking, you should reflect either as male or female in accordance with your culture. That said culture changes over time. The reason I make this argument is that we have official documents that need to be accurate. If your passport says you are male you cannot be like your average female etc. That is until we remove that requirement from ID, surveys, facilities, census and categories like sport. Not saying we can do this the other way around. For example, we can have genderless bathrooms by design. My workplace has it although it might not always be practical or even appreciated in Islamic countries for example where mixing is strictly prohibited.
Intersex is a broad spectrum category of issues. Obviously, not everyone is as extreme as the above three individuals. It was once estimated that intersex conditions are approximately 1.7% of the population but that is with a broad definition that includes conditions that present no blurring of sex. AIS itself is on a spectrum. You can be complete like the above three women or partial. That makes categorisation even more difficult. So if one of the above were to partake in the Olympics what sex would they be? Is it reliant on what their passport says? Is it reliant on their hormonal profile? Is it reliant on their identity? Is it reliant on their genetics? Is it reliant on their external anatomy? Without getting pretty invasive for every female athlete (and I really mean all female athletes), you have a raft of problems to consider. Obviously, the conditions are much rarer than 1.7% but many are only diagnosed late in life. Which definition do you apply, the starting point or the end point or a combination diagnosis, case by case? You never know, it might come to that in the future where each part is verified. Bear in mind, any diagnosis of AIS and 5-alpha reductase is not instantaneous or even routine. If you hear each of their testimonies, they never knew until they were on the cusp of becoming an adult. They each grew up thinking they were just like their friends in school who were girls because what they saw in the mirror was a female. What their families, friends, teachers, dentists, pastors and doctors saw was female. It would not be until they had specific blood testing or ultrasound or lower abdominal surgery would their diagnosis be revealed. You cannot see inside the body unless you purposely try to. It used to be the practice in America, that if doctors did discover this at a younger age, it was considered ethical to hide this from the patient until they couldn’t. Ethically, in America, they went with the phenotypical (outward) presentation.
Now the IBA which governs boxing, clearly chose the genetic route. Arguably, the IBA went political too. They used to be based in Switzerland, well known for neutrality, then to be headquartered in Russia and governed by Russian officials. Well hello, instantly, you will have suspicions of transphobic or gender bias. It did not help that they disqualified the two athletes concerned after they had won partly. They did not test them before and they did not test all females. It was arbitrary and targeted. Plus after the fact, they did not even reveal the actual details or results but just declared they had failed their gender test and became disqualified. These are women who have lived as women since birth and their disqualification came as a total surprise. They had been boxing as women before this. They were not newcomers. Plus they have also lost to others before. So already, the behaviour of IBA already strikes me as suspicious if not political. This is perhaps why the IOC stripped the IBA as the governing body for boxing in the Olympics citing corruption and other issues.
Transgender is an over-abused word that means everything and nothing. What I think of a transgender woman is a man who has undergone an extensive set of life-changing experiences. They have gone from having been born a man and transitioned fully into a lifestyle and appearance congruent with the opposite sex. This includes hormones, dressing up and MTF surgery. It is all or nothing. I don’t think there are in-betweens because this is the classical definition associated with gender dysphoria. I appreciate that there is some overlap between outward appearances between the sexes. You are either classed as male or female. I also appreciate this from a Christian perspective because the God I worship declared that he originally made man male and female.
Now it is likely that Khelif and Lin are really XY individuals. The question is then are they actually men? You now know more than you did at the start of this. Both have lived their whole lives from birth as females. They are not transgender women. They may have AIS or they might have 5-alpha reductase deficiency or they might be another form of intersex. Both AIS and 5-alpha reductase confer zero advantage so athletics is purely on training and strength from muscle building in training. On what basis do we consider them to be women or men? For there to be progress or acceptance we need to reach a consensus about the definition we are going to use. Like it or lump it, there needs to be absolute transparency and consistency too across the board.
So now we come to Khelif. The same transphobic bigots say she is a man. Their evidence is flimsy other than the IBA said she failed a genetic test as a woman and then banned her. That is not saying enough and want you to just trust them. Sorry, but that is not good enough. That is on a par with Putin invading Ukraine and him saying trust me, I’m only going after Nazis. They cite medical privacy but that is not good enough either. Evidence is evidence, public or not. These athletes are already in the public eye and the media write about them. They don’t enjoy much privacy as it is especially if they are contestants in the Olympics. Obviously, consent from the person involved is still paramount in this case.
In America, transgender is the subject of derision from right-wingers. They also currently are the ones who are aligning with Russia because Putin is also visibly transphobic. That is relevant. Putin is the poster child for fascism so the current trend for right-wingers is definitely towards fascism if they hold Putin as a good example to model over. Most of the transphobic rhetoric exists because there has been an increase in trans ideology that supports people who claim they are transgender but really aren’t. It is the broadening of the term such that anyone can declare themselves transgender without the slightest responsibility beyond it and allows them to behave as they please. Part of growing up is to realise that you cannot behave as you please and are subject to rules, norms, laws and regulations, especially in public. What you do in your own home is your business. I think that is wrong to allow people this kind of social freedom to this level of outcomes but it is also equally wrong to criticise it when you demand other social freedoms like free speech and carrying a gun. I am also against the perceived levels of freedom of those too. You cannot have it both ways because they are part of the same problem. No limits means no limits constitution or not.
So the normal development is that male chromosomes lead to male gonads that lead to a male hormone profile which leads to male external genitalia development. As with all things, life is not smoothly perfect. You have seen me summarise 4 stages so there are 3 connections where something can go wrong or change. For transgender women, the last stage is a fix so the hormone profile is artificially altered followed by surgery. However, there are other extreme conditions where this occurs naturally. One such, I have already mentioned is AIS and another is 5-alpha reductase deficiency or 5-ARD for short. These are quite rare conditions but for such people, testosterone does nothing in them. If you have an athlete who has this condition, they will test positive for the y chromosome but the circulating testosterone gives them zero advantage because it has been inactive in them for all their life. That is how they end up looking feminine or like your average woman. Here are 3 examples of people with AIS.
Emily Quinn (illustrator/artist from America)
What I think is a bit complicated but I will attempt to help see my take and why. Firstly, I think this is a watershed moment in world history about gender, sex and rights but I think it has far less to do with sport. Sport is the catalyst because it is high profile, especially in the Olympics with a very public argument. For a while now we have had the endless debate about transgender women in female bathrooms as if that is so wrong. It could be but it depends on what you mean and what definitions you use. Currently, there is no consensus. It has also migrated into sports and again, the debate has no consensus, yet because it is under development as it has always been.
Caster Semenya
You can see that there seems to be governance from different sports bodies and testosterone is also sport dependent. For some, it is more of a factor than others. I also know that size is not always a determining factor within reason. That is why in boxing, there are weight categories. Weight for weight though, I am aware that smaller women can be equally as powerful as a bigger person if they have the right technique or relevant martial art, not that it is meant to apply here. So my take is to leave it to the IOC. They have a lot of things to juggle here. They need proper experts in sports science. What they don’t need are armchair doctorates, people who read conservative Facebook or X posts and think they have the educational equivalence of medical specialists who really do know their stuff. Right now, there isn’t enough world consensus on the issue and in part that requires a deeper understanding beyond high school biology about intersex and DSDs. Whilst I might have above-average knowledge in human physiology and biochemistry and even DSDs, I would still stay out of it and leave this to those whose profession is in sports science research. This is also why I think it is a watershed moment because these particular DSDs I believe are going to become far more in the public awareness. Indeed, they have already garnered a significant presence on YouTube and other media during the last 2 years.
All three look like women to me and all are NOT transgender. They all have XY chromosomes but because of the insensitivity to testosterone, they develop looking like a female would because that is the preprogrammed biochemical pathway of hormones for body development. It is the presence of testosterone that makes any changes in development towards male characteristics but if your cells cannot interact with testosterone, then you cannot develop male features. Transphobic bigots will call the above men because they have XY chromosomes because that is what they learned in high school. Do you seriously want those three women to only be allowed to use a male bathroom? What purpose does it serve? They have no penises, they have vaginas. Is it just to “out” them as transgender women even though they are not?
Eden Atwood (jazz musician from America)
Caster found out about her diagnosis at the same time the rest of the world did. She too grew up thinking she was a girl and again it was the image she saw in the mirror. Everyone around her thought so too. Many years later after her initial storm, in 2018, World Athletics, the organisation that governs athletics (like IBA for boxing) decided to introduce testosterone limits. So it appears that World Athletics chose the hormonal route. This means the contestants could actually be transgender as well. So in 2018 and beyond, people like Caster or any genuine XX female athlete with male-like hormonal profiles (and there are some) would be forced to take testosterone blockers to get to an agreed level before they could compete. You cannot imagine what the additional burden would be in this setup not to mention that it is also a technical challenge too. It is only through modern medicine that we can even know this. In a previous generation, you could have had AIS or 5-ARD women go through their whole lives without ever knowing. They might have gotten married but were never able to bear children. No one would have ever known unless a post-mortem was done upon their death. This could have been true of some other previous athletes too. We will never know.
Now why have I talked so far about a different problem? The problem stems from the same source and it is a misunderstanding. Many transphobic bigots are now very hostile to anything that looks like it is. I have said this long ago about the similarities and the same transphobic have argued that I was wrong. What we are seeing is exactly what I have been arguing about for a while. The definition of a woman has been subject to intense debate of late. There are conservative voices who seem to define it in terms of only genetics and think it is piss easy, many of who also identify as Christian and used the same biblical reference I cited earlier. I disagree with them. Why? It is not because I am not conservative. It isn’t even because I’m a liberal Christian or “woke”, it is because I take into account all scripture and also live as an educated scientist. Whilst what they say is actually true in scripture, their application is not. They cite that God has only ever made us male and female and that is the end of their reference. That is not fully scriptural and it is not faithful to Christianity. These conservative evangelicals are picking and choosing. It is cherry-picking what they read. They accept that after Adam and Eve disobeyed God, the world became imperfect yet when it comes to sex, they expect things to be perfect. Why so? That is not the world I live in and see and it isn’t what Genesis 3 describes, a world marred by imperfections because it was fallen. I see this in the world we live in from biology. Why is everything imperfect but sex isn’t? That is the problem I have highlighted. I see that there are cases that tell us that sex (gender to most people) is not perfect or even easy to disseminate. Thus I understand that sex categorisation will contain difficulties, not a perfect binary classification. Sexual development is a process that takes place over about up to 16 years. It is like looking at an acorn and announcing that it is an oak tree in 20 years. Or seeing a sperm and saying that is your next child. It could be, but equally, it might not be. That sperm could be one of the millions that end up nowhere apart from your toilet and that acorn could the a squirrel's next bite.
If you are transgender, then you are pursuing a lifestyle not congruent to your own gender. However, I think that this also sets up a straw man to revile. Whilst they exist, it isn’t everyone and that is what has encouraged the transphobia. It is also because they are easily seen targets. It is easy to spot a bloke in a dress because they literally are a bloke in a dress. They are not in any obvious pathway to transitioning. It is not so easy to spot a fully transitioned transwoman. Of course that is not something that happens overnight. Relevant hormone therapy takes months to effect any obvious changes congruent to transitioning and the whole process can be years depending on your age and health. So for me, I think those men should only dress up after a milestone in their transition with hormones. The process ought to come with relevant supervision from doctors to psychologists to psychiatrists.