Honest to god question: why bother with the gender divide in sports?
I'm prompted to write today because I was scrolling through reddit's main timeline, r/all. I was scrolling through reddit to get my dopamine drip-feed while on shift. I came across this on the very front page:
So that's how I got today's Olympic sports news. An inflammatory political compass meme off of reddit. I could write a whole lot about this rich text, but then I'd be taking it far and away more seriously than anybody else there. I'd reducing myself to the contemptible level of a soyjak.
Instead I want to pull some quotes from the AP article I linked above. Just some basic facts to start us off.
Imane Khelif of Algeria won her opening Olympic boxing bout on Thursday when opponent Angela Carini of Italy quit after just 46 seconds.
Khelif was disqualified from the 2023 world championships after failing an unspecified gender eligibility test, and her presence at the Paris Olympics has become a divisive issue.
Carini and Khelif exchanged only a few punches before Carini walked away and abandoned the bout, an extremely unusual occurrence in Olympic boxing.
Afterward, a still-tearful Carini said she quit because of intense pain in her nose after the opening punches. Carini, who had a spot of blood on her trunks, said she wasn’t making a political statement and was not refusing to fight Khelif.
Carini further said she is not qualified to decide whether Khelif should be allowed to compete.
And now a few excerpts from Imane Khelif's Wikipedia page. I'm allowed to cite Wikipedia because this is a personal blog with zero formal standards.
Khelif grew up in Tiaret, a rural village in northwestern Algeria. She originally played football before switching to boxing. In her early years, she had to commute to a neighboring village to attend training sessions, and sold scrap metal to afford the bus fare. Her father did not approve of boxing for girls.
In March 2023, Khelif was disqualified for failing to meet eligibility criteria shortly before her gold medal bout at the 2023 IBA Women's World Boxing Championships. The Algerian Olympic Committee said Khelif was disqualified for medical reasons. It was later reported that the disqualification was due to high levels of testosterone. International Boxing Association president Umar Kremlev said DNA testing of Khelif and other athletes "proved they had XY chromosomes and were thus excluded from the sports events". Khelif is not transgender, but has a disorder of sex development (DSD), which causes some females to have XY chromosomes and blood testosterone levels typical of a male. In Algeria, the country that Khelif represents, transgender identity is prohibited, changing gender or sex on identity documents is not permitted, nor are medical or hormonal treatments allowed to transition to another sex. Khelif made an appeal before the Court of Arbitration for Sport but later withdrew it, making the IBA decision legally binding. In 2024, the IBA said that Khelif and others "did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential".
Rules, rules, rules. This strikes me as both incredibly invasive and incredibly pointless.
She's not even transgender, but sometimes you need to make compromises in service of transphobia. That's just realpolitik.
Isn't the whole point of competitions like this to figure out who's the best? Just fucking punch each other in an orderly fashion regardless of gender. Why do we need doctors in the mix?
relatedly
I was also reading Ryan Broderick's Everything men do is cringe over at Garbage Day. He states:
As Derek Thompson in The Atlantic recently wrote, “The gender war is much weirder than it initially appears.” Yes, over the last three election cycles, young men have radicalized right, and young women, largely due to abortion laws, have moved left. But, as Thompson notes, that does not mean that we’ll see a simple binary of men voting for former President Donald Trump in November and women voting for Vice President Kamala Harris. Polling data actually suggests that the country’s two political factions are: an overwhelming amount of men, usually divorced, and some women who want a return to “traditional” gender roles, whatever those are, and an overwhelming amount of women and some men who don’t. College football Stanley cup couples vs. Harry Potter thigh tattoo throuples, a battle for the soul of America’s various microbreweries, etc.
And one could argue that this has really been the defining — possibly the only — American political story for literally the last decade. Gamergate turns 10 in a couple days. And this would have been a deeply difficult election for Democrats to win if they were still running President Joe “I’m Catholic so I can’t say abortion is good, but I won’t say abortion is bad” Biden as their candidate. In fact, there’s a way of looking at Biden’s entire administration as one giant failed political project aimed at finding economic distractions and impossible compromises meant to soothe the country’s political gender divide. Addressing the symptoms, never acknowledging there is was even a disease.
I would've quoted Thompson's article directly but I don't subscribe to The Atlantic.
Anyways, the deeply divided diseased democracy is having big-time gender trouble.
Gender is so damn important because you need a man and a woman if you want to make a baby. Sometimes it feels like everything is set up to be as oppressive as possible to make putting a round peg into a round hole as intuitive as possible.
as an aside, i don't actually care about the olympics
I recommend watching Jon Bois' video essay RAT POISON AND BRANDY: THE 1904 ST. LOUIS OLYMPIC MARATHON to explain how the modern Olympics which we're familiar with has always been stupid bullshit.
my point
I don't know. I guess if you get your news from soyjak memes and it makes you upset, try reading past the headlines if you'd like to be even more upset.
edit: i've figured it out! i need to stop reading reddit