By Maren Behrensen
1) The entire “discourse” about “biological men” in the women’s boxing tournament at the Olympics came from a certain social media platform. This platform belongs to a fascist billionaire who bought it in order to conduct information warfare against people he doesn’t like, his own trans daughter among them.
2) There are no trans women competing in the 2024 Summer Olympics. None. Zero. That’s how successful the international campaign against trans inclusion in sports has been so far.
2a) Transvestigators will switch from accusing someone of being trans to accusing someone of being intersex, as if the near-complete exclusion and erasure of intersex athletes hadn’t preceded the current trans panic in sports.
2b) Some of these transvestigators may honestly believe that they are “fighting” to preserve the integrity of women’s sport. That doesn’t change the fact that if they got their way, we’d be less than one step away from requiring “appropriately feminine appearance and demeanor in women’s sports,” or some such nonsense. All anti-trans garbage will sooner or later be used against queer people and women.
3) The reason the two boxers from Algeria and Taiwan came into the focus of Terfs – apart from the transvestigator’s natural eye for spotting “biological men” – is their ad hoc disqualification from events run by the International Boxing Association (IBA) for unclear, but allegedly gender-related reasons. The IBA has no actual rules and procedures to determine eligibility to box in the women’s class. The decision to disqualify the two boxers was taken by the head dude of the IBA alone.
3a) Also, the IBA is so ridiculously corrupt that the corrupt IOC has banned them from organizing the Olympic boxing tournament and all qualifying tournaments.
3b) If you want to get upset about something related to the Olympic boxing tournament, may I suggest the fact that the scoring system is still messed up, even though the IBA no longer runs the show? So messed up that, for instance, utterly dominant Irish boxers will lose their bouts, just because they happen to have been drawn against a French boxer…
See Joint Paris 2024 Boxing Unit/IOC Statement
Maren Behrensen is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Twente, Netherlands. Their most recent (forthcoming) papers are on video conferencing technology and the ethics of pronoun sharing, and abuses of power and epistemic injustice in academia and the Catholic Church.
