Lying is a new Olympic sport

Fear and loathing in Paris 2024

Photo: iStock

Not feeling much in the way of global fraternity lately, I had vowed to ignore Paris 2024. No chance. The Olympics have been a culture war spectacular right from the opening ceremony with its apparent parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper sprung to life with drag queens and assorted “queers.” My verdict on that: mocking religion has long been one of my favourite sports, to be sure. And I would have found the performance joyous and ribald if this were, dunno, 1989 when everyone knew drag queens were adult males with a very male schtick that disqualified them from reading to the kiddies at public libraries.

Delivering on its reputation for excess, Paris reels me in. Especially in the dead of night when I pace the house in a state of hyper-vigilance. If this piece reads weirdly it’s because I’m in every sense wobbly. I could fall over just watching Algerian Imane Khelif enter the boxing ring. As I write on Tuesday Khelif, one of two allegedly XY biological males in the women’s boxing competition, Taiwanese Lin Yu-ting being the other, is poised to compete in the semi-final. “I am female,” a tearful Khelif declared to a media scrum on the weekend. 

How much more intense can this drama get? On Thursday Italy’s Angela Carini unleashed a global firestorm when she threw a fight against Khelif after just 46 seconds claiming she had never before been punched so forcefully. On Monday, Lin’s just-vanquished opponent, Bulgarian Svetlana Staneva, pointed to herself and made an ‘X’ symbol with her fingers. Her coach held a piece of paper with the words “I only want to play with women I am XX” written on it. 

“I Am Woman,” Helen Reddy might have sung. “Hear my bones crack.” 

Promise I’ll come back to the boxers, their sex, the erasure of sex pursuant to the quasi-religious movement of gender identity ideology and the significance of that debate in Paris. 

Some other things first, starting with Lin. Lost in the legitimate furore over the boxer’s inclusion in the women’s competition is another travesty: the athlete represents not the embattled democracy of Taiwan but the fictitious “Chinese Taipei.” This is because the International Olympic Committee capitulated to the imperialist designs and sensitivities of the People’s Republic of China. And boy are people sensitive to China’s sensitivities; this zone is policed with a rigour unbecoming of the land of liberté, égalité .. and I forget what else. When a spectator at a badminton match on Friday held up a banner reading “Go Taiwan” — the banner green, a colour associated with the Taiwanese independence movement — security swooped, ejecting the man. 

“Dis is zee Olympics,” said a spokesman for the foetid entity otherwise known as the IOC, admittedly not in so many words, “vee don’t do green ‘Go Taiwan’ banners here!’” You should be hearing Siegfried from Get Smart, Vice President of Public Relations and Terror for KAOS. 

“And dis is zee Olympics,” Siegfried from the IOC continues, “vee don’t do yellow ribbons here!” The IOC had refused permission for the Israeli Olympic team to wear yellow ribbons advocating for the return of the hostages from Gaza. This being the same IOC that took 44 years to officially honour the 11 Israeli athletes and coaches massacred by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics. This being the same IOC that nonetheless allowed Palestinian boxer Waseem Abu Sal to wear a shirt depicting images of Israeli warplanes dropping missiles over children playing sport in Gaza. 

I guess the Jewish state should be grateful it’s in the Games full stop given the push for a boycott from the usual lynch squad of fanatics, racists and murderous regimes. In this effort, a medal should go to the Islamic Republic, which as we speak is reportedly preparing to attack what its Australian ambassador on the weekend charmingly described as “the Zionist plague.” Last week Iran’s state media disseminated computer-generated images bearing the logo of Amnesty International that it claimed were part of the human rights organisation’s campaign against Israel’s participation in Paris. The pictures are among the most libellous I’ve seen in our times, depicting athletes in uniforms bearing the Israeli flag murdering children; a fencer thrusts a sword at a child’s neck, a swimmer drowns a young girl. 

Israel haters such as feminist Clementine Ford lapped up and shared the images, attributing them to Amnesty. But they’re fakes. Amnesty says it has nothing to do with the images and has not called for Israel’s exclusion from the Olympics, which is a relief. (Having put this one to rest, the venerable organisation can return to the defence of sacred liberties at Paris 2024 such as the right of France’s female volleyballers to wear hijab and full covering in the heat.)

And so we could have closed our eyes and counted backwards from 10 in the time it took for someone, in this instance Algerian Olympic and Sports Committees director Yassine Arab, to declare that the questions about Khelif’s eligibility on the grounds of sex were merely a Zionist conspiracy to deny gold to a Muslim/Arab girl. 

“The Zionist lobby, they want to break the mind of Imane (Khelif),” Arab told the Nine papers.

World Zionist Conspiracy to-do list: 

1. Kill Arab children.

2. Control international finance.

3. Get Antoinette Lattouf sacked from the ABC.

4. Scam Khelif out of gold at Paris.

**

The Khelif scandal is vindication of sorts for those among us who’ve been sounding the alarm about “inclusion” policies threatening the sanctity of women’s sport and women’s spaces more broadly. It was awful to watch a distraught Carini, the Italian boxer, throwing away in seconds under Khelif’s seemingly effortless blows her years of hard work, and carefully nurtured dreams. I can understand why many women, and more than a few men, responded with a visceral anger. The whole thing was ..ah, do I give in and use the term “triggering”?

But I also found myself upset when, after a later bout with a Hungarian, Khelif broke down, more in distress than in joy. In that moment Khelif resembled a bullied child, perhaps the young Khelif who, the story goes, took up boxing to hit back at the village boys, the mob that picked on what they saw as a girl outside the mould. 

At the risk of letting down team TERF, I see in this theatre of war shades of nuance. Not the kind of nuance, mind you, that the trans activists and their allies want us to believe exists around the biology of sex. So terribly complicated this male/female caper, ain’t it? Except for when a teenage girl with an eating disorder comes out of her bedroom for the first time in two years to declare she’s actually a boy. That’s not complicated at all, apparently. No, that’s a pure expression of authentic self.

My discomfort with the boxing scandal starts with the fact that we don’t have many facts. And the more the seriously foetid Russia-led International Boxing Association tries to explain matters the less I understand what’s what. It seems the IBA disqualified the boxers from last year’s world championships in Delhi after DNA tests showed they had XY male chromosomes bequeathing “competitive advantages” over other female competitors.

IBA president Umar Kremlev last year said the test results exposed the boxers as “trying to fool their colleagues and pretend to be women.” Nice guy that Kremlev. After the opening ceremony at Paris he called IOC President Thomas Bach “a chief sodomite.” He’s a feminist hero in all this: let that sink in for a moment.

The IOC, having wrested control of boxing from the IBA, decries the tests on the boxers as “arbitrary” and done without due process but declines to substitute its own tests to determine athletes’ sex arguing the procedures are intrusive and discriminatory. Spokesman Mark Adams literally described sex testing as “last century.” According to the IOC the boxers are female because their passports say so. As The Times’ Janice Turner puts it, the IOC allowed eligibility to women’s boxing “to be based purely on self-ID.”

The boxers appear to have a disorder of sexual development (DSD), an umbrella term for various conditions, or in the old designation are “intersex.”  In this case, the experts, by which I mean the reality-based, non-agenda driven scientists, tell us the boxers are most likely biological males with a DSD that means they have internal testes producing testosterone to male levels and have undergone male puberty, hence their lasting competitive advantage over women in certain sports. Born without obvious male genitalia they’re often “assigned female at birth” — the phrase is accurate here — and raised female.

Bookmark here that according to reality-based non-agenda driven scientists the incidence of true intersex conditions, in which an individual’s sex is ambiguous, is exceedingly rare — less than 0.02 per cent. Nowhere near the number of redheads, which is one of the claims getting about. People with a DSD are overrepresented in women’s sport for the obvious reason that they enjoy natural advantages. 

The crucial point being: there’s no evidence these boxers are trans, meaning regular men who want to be women. Such men sometimes assert their “womanhood” with an outsized sense of male entitlement and narcissism. And while I prefer to critique the institutions and political leaders that privilege the rights of such men rather than the men who take advantage of such privileges, I’m left breathless at the likes of US swimmer Lia Thomas, a 1.85 metre fully intact bloke who not only hoovers up the medals in the women’s swimming but joins his helpless competitors in the changing room because he’s a woman, a feminist hero, no less, breaking records in women’s swimming. 

These boxers fall into a different category. We know very little about their conditions or the extent of their knowledge or understanding of their conditions. They have endured hard times through no fault of their own. In the past days Khelif has been shredded and demonised on an epic scale including from good people who ought to know better. 

There’s another reason why I’m uncomfortable with the pile-on against these boxers, which I alluded to earlier. It has to do with the way gender ideologues use the existence of intersex conditions to advance their radical, sex-denying cause. 

The intersex is the “I” that’s been press-ganged into the LGBTQI. Even IOC president Thomas Bach has trouble distinguishing one group from another. “This is not a DSD case,” he said of the decision to allow Khelif to compete. The IOC subsequently clarified that he’d meant to say “this is not a transgender case.” 

It’s not surprising Bach was confused. This stuff is confusing. It is confusing because the trans activist movement has been sowing confusion. In the main these activists aren’t sowing confusion out of sinister intent — they’re trying to bring marginalised sexual minorities into the mainstream — but their efforts have produced sinister outcomes for women in sport and beyond. 

The trans movement argues the fact that a vanishingly small number of people are born with ambiguous sex shows that biological sex is not a binary but a spectrum. “Humans aren’t black and white; they’re not just male and female,” Melbourne University endocrinologist Ada Cheung told The Age — although The Age did not tell us that Cheung is a researcher in trans healthcare. “There are many ways to be intersex.”

Gender ideologues often say this: if male and female are ultimately unpindownable, with no clear border delineating the two, then the categories themselves are arbitrary and little more than linguistic fictions. So if a teenager with blue hair announces “they” are “non-binary” our minds should be open to the possibility that they’re describing something scientifically real or real enough. And nor is sex immutable in the natural world, say trans activists. After all, clownfish change sex. 

Such ideas are at the very least contested. (Am I pulling my punches?) Leading evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins writes that genuine intersex conditions “are way too rare to challenge the statement that sex is binary.” Fellow evolutionary biologist Colin Wrights points out that even people born with ambiguous sex do not constitute a third sex.

“This desire to extrapolate a small blur at a boundary (intersex) to the entire picture is rooted in the postmodern impulse to “queer,” and thereby eliminate, natural categories,” he writes. “In the queer-theory worldview, categories are themselves oppressive, and human liberation requires the “troubling” of categories (to borrow Judith Butler’s term), including those of sex.” 

So given the likes of Khelif and Lin are already carrying the weight of others’ ideological agendas on their broad shoulders, I wish people would stop playing the man and lay off on the personal abuse.

Instead, we ought to reserve the venom for the IOC, another powerful institution cowed by the sex-denying lobby. At least now all the world gets to see the toxic dynamic at work when women’s sex-based rights are in play. How women’s safety, not to mention the integrity of the competition, gets subordinated to the cult of “inclusion.” How anyone who dares question the insane, circular logic is accused of bigotry. “Dial it down,” the IOC’s Mark Adam’s loftily chides us. It is unhelpful to be “stigmatising these women”, he deflects. 

The IOC’s president, Bach, thunders that “some want to own a definition of who is a woman.” His institution would prefer to cancel women entirely. The IOC’s Orwellian style guide, provided to journalists in Paris, urges the avoidance of “problematic” and “harmful” terms such as “biological male” and “biological female” and “born male” and “born female.” Makes sense. Eliminating such terms enables the IOC to vanish the controversy about males participating in women’s sports. 

Surely no journalist worth their salt would acquiesce to such a directive?