Angela Carini - remember her name

Two athletes have been cleared to compete at the women's boxing at the Paris Olympics having been disqualified from last year's World Championships for failing to meet eligibility criteria.

Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting was stripped of a bronze medal in the March 2023 event after failing a gender eligibility test.

Information from the International Olympic Committee also showed Algeria's Imane Khelif was disqualified in New Delhi for failing a testosterone level test.

- BBC.co.uk

Today we watched Imane Khelif of Algeria hit Italy’s Angela Carini hard enough to stop their fight after just 46 seconds. We also witnessed her anguish at having to pull out of the fight before she suffered any serious damage. It was brutal.

The reason given for allowing a man to box in the women’s competition was that he satisfied all the eligibility criteria and so we must conclude that sex – which should be the principal criterion – is not one of them. IOC spokesman Mark Adams defended the inclusion of Khelif on the grounds that the sex marker in Khelif’s passport is female. Despite him failing a gender test last year.

Khelif is not claiming a transgender identity, and neither is anyone stating for sure that he has a DSD. Although it wouldn’t make any difference: those who want women’s sports to be protected do not believe that a DSD makes a man eligible, and the IOC are not claiming that Khelif is eligible for that reason. The claim is that he is a woman with XY chromosomes and unusually high testosterone.

But if Khelif is eligible for the women’s boxing competition on the basis of his documentation, any man is eligible for the women’s Olympic boxing competition as long as his papers are in order. And any other competition that has no sex-based eligibility criteria.

This is just the logical conclusion of gender identity ideology. If people are the sex they say they are, and sex is not fixed by chromosomes and physical bodies, then men should be allowed change their documentation and compete as a women. There’s no need to grow your hair, wear makeup or “live as a woman” – whatever than means.

This is exactly where the claims made by the likes of Ed Davey (“clearly some women can have a penis”), Keir Starmer (“99.9% of women don’t have a penis”), and now Mark Adams of the International Olympics Committee (“it’s all about the documentation”) take us. They’re all of the opinion that sex is not an objective, measurable criterion for competition. Unlike the new gold standard – passports.

Because nobody has ever held a falsified passport. Right?

So, what’s next?  

It’s certainly a very dark day for the Olympic movement, and with Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting competing tomorrow, there’s more to come. If either or both men should medal, the Olympic sized hole they’ve dug will be all the more difficult to climb out from. Public awareness is so much greater than in previous years that this cannot now be swept under the carpet. I’m sure the discussions about how to save face are well under way, and I hope that eligibility criteria for all women’s sport will in future include the sex of the competitors as a result. If Olympic competition requires verifiable sex testing, then maybe it will be that much easier to implement elsewhere – ideally all the way down to grassroots.

Those who said that gender identity ideology was an existential threat for women’s sport have been proven right today.

But if we can carve out this one thing that women are allowed to keep for ourselves, then maybe women’s sport will prove to be an existential threat to gender identity ideology.