What do scientists tell us about boxing's gender row?
bbc.com
bbc.com
I reviewed an all comers track meet a few months ago. The overall woman 100m winner, in her 20s, would have barely beat the 70 year old guy--whose testosterone is probably close to double the woman.
All the younger men (e.g., 60s) with fewer miles and more testosterone left the woman in their dust
Which scientists say that???
The article features a scientist talking about a genetic mutation on the Y chromosome which affects the production of testosterone, and another scientist talking about another genetic mutation that prevents testosterone from being processed in the body. In both cases the individuals with these mutations have XY chromosome, yet female phenotypes. Individuals with the second mutation would have high testosterone without the performance enhancement. Those mutations are rare and would certainly not be picked up by comparing the racing time of men vs women.
No scientist in the article or any other that I've read makes the bold claim thar testosterone doesn't enhance performance in general.
Edit: in fact based on the estimate from the article of 1 in 300 people being affected by a DSD, you might expect that if a DSD enhances performance of women to the level of men (through increased testosterone for example) you might expect some women from your dataset to reach the middle of the pack of men performance. This is a hypothesis you can even test statistically, though that would be limited by the little we know of the many types of DSD.
But your comment does touch up on something else which is the fact that men and women very much have biological differences that are complimentary to our survival as a species and trying to ignore or say they don't exist smacks the face of reality hard.
But the linked article indeed touches upon a unique edge case and it's something that these games will need to address, the 3rd option. Unfortunately by genetics these "intersex" people are not men OR women, they are aberrations and unique which I would say should preclude them from competing entirely because they aren't technically men or women.
Sadly, we live in a cruel and unfair world and coming to acceptance of that is called growing up.
So, now comes the part of whose the best DESC. Want to know the top female, just see the highest ranking one? Top person over 50? Under 20? Top person who isn't taking performance drugs? Top person who is? etc. You can get whatever top ranking you want. All matches are fair. Everyone can play.
Key word: “feels”
That’s on the person/people doing the feeling
I think this is probably broadly true, but not always, maybe not even that commonly. Particularly in sports where raw power and endurance aren't the singular determining factor in the result. I'm optimistic that in some sports, if competition at a high-level started leaning into it, competitor performance from both would eventually converge in a way that makes the divide less clear. Some of those sports, by the nature of reduced exposure, just don't have remotely similar access or exposure among women, which is one of the factors that would change over time.
I'm thinking of climbing, skateboarding, where although speed, power, and endurance are factors, they're sort of relative factors compared to the person's bodyweight and how the routes/courses are set. Skateboard is much more divided for now than climbing as far as I can tell, but climbing is quite a lot closer, and the women's competition is generally more interesting to me to watch.
I feel like people aren't thinking enough about how much time each generation of new competitors has in terms of exposure to high-level athletes from the previous cohort, and how much of a compounding effect that can have. If you're clearly someone who'd be in the female category of sport, and you're divided into that category from the day you start, and the selection of people from the previous generation is 10% of the amount available among the other category, there's a very limited surface area for pushing harder.
In skateboarding, this pretty much meant anyone coming up 10 years ago had basically 2-5 notable figures who made anything of themselves skateboarding, and maybe half of them either stopped doing the sport or became reclusive. Ideally, you need to skate with the boys and compete with yourself and any other girl you can find. This period of time produced exactly what you'd expect; more women than in the previous generation got at least 50-75% better than the top competitors they would have looked up to. This compounds, and now those women are the inspiration for the current cohort, but they're only ever going to get as good or a bit better whichever rare individuals they have to compete with. Big fish, small pond.
In my opinion, we don't yet know how close those can get, and in some cases I'd like to see how that could change. In others, that possibility doesn't really come down to how driven or creative someone is, there's limited surface area for optimization and muscle growth, a clear dividing line where only mutant abnormalities would clear the gap at the highest level, since everyone on either side are already mutants.
But it would be completely unfair to have Phelps compete in the women's events, because he also has the male physical advantage, which female swimmers do not have.
Which we can see most starkly by comparing the record times of equivalent female and male events. The best of the best male swimmers are considerably faster than the best of the best female swimmers.
Sports is not the only problem. All public policy, as a consequence of some agreement between a large group of people, should be based on something objective rather than what a person thinks or feels. So how do we know when a person should be able to retire with benefits?
- biological gender is not binary
- there's more to it than XX and XY
Unless we embrace gender is - like many things - a spectrum, there will be debate.
I'll add, that equal is a high - perhaps unattainable - bar. It might make sense to first focus on fair / fairness, and that at times the many might have to take precedence over the few.
C'est la vie.
Honestly it seems like the easiest solution is eliminate sports groupings by their references to sex or gender, and just divide up by those sciencey things which are generally known to provide the athletic advantages.
Group 1 Above a testosterone baseline and/or if you have XY chromosomes
Group 2 Below a testosterone baseline.
If you don't feel binary grouping is fair, set up multiple groups to accommodate.
There is a female athlete who identifies as a man currently competing in the Olympics: Hergie Bacyadan, in women's boxing.
This doesn't seem to have caused any actual disadvantage. In fact, Bacyadan is reported as saying:
> I'm very thankful that I got to the Olympics. It's a big deal to me.
Why not just eliminate the gender/sex delineations and focus on benchmarks we know create competitive differences?
Additional criteria can be added to take care of the edge cases but sex is most important and impactful.
True equality can only be achieved by not considering if someone is a man, woman, or whatever they might want to classify as. Lump everyone together, equal opportunities given, and may the best man as in mankind win.
And no, don't give me "Women will almost always lose!". That is sexist bullshit. Equality is equality, we can't have our cake and eat it too. There is no line to be drawn.
If we want to remove gender from the equation, perhaps we should have "testosterone classes" where athletes compete against others with a similar testosterone level.
The past few weeks have seen men in droves mansplaining to women.. ‘what is a woman?’
XX or female is the default setting. If there is any deviation from the default, then there is a change or transformation. And the result is no longer female. It could be male. Or not. But it’s not ‘female’.
Putting equal aside (because it's not realistic) leaves "What is fair? To all?" and that's a different question.
Not to make light or sound snarky (but to make a point), if we use equal as the goal, then what's to stop those who are height-challenged from demanding to play basketball?
The opposite binary and other uncategorised versions are not the default female.
The genders are not equal. I lost my farm after 12 years because I was in ‘violation of farm management policy’ because I didn’t follow their list of 6 different PTO implement.
As a female, I don’t have the upper body strength to operate and change all those PTO implements. I spent not a small amount to fabricate and fashion my own small implement that was originally imported from Italy.
And yet.. even though my design was better..I was constantly compared to male farmers .. “why are you not following their methods and same equipment as the dudes? Well..because I have breasts, shorter arms and lesser upper body strength, you idiots!”
And this was the State of California public agency that controlled my land access that I lost and subsequently lost my farm due to lack of land access.
I am particularly depressed now because there is no way I expect a fair hearing ..the world has gone mad. Daft as a drunk duck, I am telling you.. and it’s just depressing. They have stolen 12 years of my life and my work(I was working on automating my farm equipment) because I am not a man.
I don’t want to be equal to a man. I want to be myself. I empathize with those training for female sports. We can’t win anywhere. Soon we will only be relegated for one job..for the one thing only we can do..and what only we possess: wombs. I don’t even want to live in this world anymore.
The question when it comes to competitive sports is, which of these DSDs confer male physical advantage onto the individual?
As an example, though we can speculate with some now quite strong evidence on these two Olympic boxers, perhaps it's best to look at an athlete whose DSD is already known and confirmed: Caster Semenya, who won gold in the Women's 800m of the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
Because of a ruling published by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, we know that Semenya has 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), a male-specific (XY) DSD that, due to a recessive gene mutation, impairs the conversion of testosterone to DHT such that the penis is underdeveloped and the testes typically remain internal to the body.
Newborns with 5-ARD may, in the absence of sex testing, be erroneously observed to be female, and have this written on their birth documentation. This is what happened with Semenya.
However, the testes are still functional. Individuals with 5-ARD go through male puberty, produce testosterone in the normal male range, and in athletic competition, will therefore have male physical advantage.
In response to Semenya's case, the IAAF (now World Athletics) instituted a rule change so that 5-ARD individuals, and others with DSDs that are known to confer male performance advantage, are by default deemed ineligible to compete in women's events.
That is: on the basis that being male is not a talent, they chose policy that does not reward male physical advantage in competitions that should be about celebrating female athletic excellence.
So I think this isn't really about if sex or gender can be thought of as a spectrum, but what policy decisions, regarding DSDs, need to be made to ensure fairness in women's sport. And in the case of contact sports like boxing, safety as well.
And remember we can't see chromosomes. You say this with apparent certainty:
>> Newborns with 5-ARD may, in the absence of sex testing, be erroneously observed to be female, and have this written on their birth documentation.
Who is to say that a baby born with female external genitalia is "erroneously" observed to be female? If we observed them to be male, how would that not be erroneous? Again: we don't observe chromosomes directly. The line between the categories of "male" and "female" we understand was drawn long before anyone knew anything about chromosomes and there is no reason why knowing that a majority but not all individuals in the male or female category have the same "chromosomes" (the same karyotype, really) should eliminate the criterion we used before that, i.e. external genitalia at birth.
In the same vein, who is to say that someone who was assigned female at birth, who grew up as a girl, socialised as a girl, grew up to be accepted as a woman by their entire society - was "erroneously" so?
I think that would be a very lazy attitude to adopt (no offense to you) and that we should instead be prepared to accept that sex determination is hard in the fringes where people are not like most of us and we shouldn't make absolute proclamations like "XY is male".
And we should not forget that telling a person who grew up as a woman that she is now a man, or that she is stripped of some of the natural rights of a woman, like competing in women's sports, is cruel and a form of violation. It's like a forced sex change, a forced intervention to a person's identity that they developed spontaneously by living the only life they have in the only body they have. We should tread very carefully when dealing with people with DSD, especially when it's all in the name of "fairness". Scientists certainly do and not for reasons of fairness but for reasons of accuracy.
>> Newborns with 5-ARD may, in the absence of sex testing, be erroneously observed to be female, and have this written on their birth documentation.
> Who is to say that a baby born with female external genitalia is "erroneously" observed to be female? If we observed them to be male, how would that not be erroneous? Again: we don't observe chromosomes directly. The line between the categories of "male" and "female" we understand was drawn long before anyone knew anything about chromosomes and there is no reason why knowing that a majority but not all individuals in the male or female category have the same "chromosomes" (the same karyotype, really) should eliminate the criterion we used before that, i.e. external genitalia at birth.
I would say it's erroneous because in the present day we have advanced testing and advanced research into developmental biology to much more completely understand the underlying process that builds female and male bodies.
Like we know that the only difference between males with 5-ARD and males who developed normally is they lack an enzyme needed to make the penis grow properly and the testes to descend. They have no female reproductive system: no ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus. With this knowledge, what reason is there to classify these individuals as female?
> In the same vein, who is to say that someone who was assigned female at birth, who grew up as a girl, socialised as a girl, grew up to be accepted as a woman by their entire society - was "erroneously" so?
I think that is more to do with socio-cultural views on women and men than anything else, and not so relevant in the narrower case of eligibility in women's sport, which has to be based around eliminating male physical advantage, otherwise there's no reason for the category to exist.
> And we should not forget that telling a person who grew up as a woman that she is now a man, or that she is stripped of some of the natural rights of a woman, like competing in women's sports, is cruel and a form of violation.
I agree it must come as a huge shock to find out that you're male when you'd believed you were female.
But isn't it also cruel to female athletes when they are being compelled to compete with a male? Is it not a violation for a female boxer to be punched in the skull by a male with significantly greater upper body strength?
My view is that sports organisations have a duty of care and a duty of fairness to all athletes, not just the ones who've received unwanted news about eligibility due to their sex.
We already do: we determine the sex of babies at birth, and each others' sex as adults, by looking at external genitalia and at secondary sex characteristics.
Why would knowledge of chromosomes now change that? Like I say above, we can't see chromosomes. And the people who can, i.e. biologists, have a much more nuanced view of what it means for an individual to be male or female, rather than their karyotype (and not their chromosomes) being male or female. The scientists interviewed for the BBC article all agree that whether an individual, a person, is male or female, is not clear cut and that detecting, or not, a Y chromosome is not enough of a criterion.
Keep in mind that "all X have Y" is not equivalent with "all who have Y are X". Or replace "all" with "most" and the same goes.
>> I think that is more to do with socio-cultural views on women and men than anything else, and not so relevant in the narrower case of eligibility in women's sport, which has to be based around eliminating male physical advantage, otherwise there's no reason for the category to exist.
The BBC article points out that there is no test that can determine "male physical advantage" as you put it. Also note that some athletic associations, e.g. World Athletics, consider athletes with Y-chromosome DSDs to be eligible for competition in women's categories as long as they reduce their testosterone to male levels medically. See:
https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/65051900
As an aside, note in the same article that World Athletics now completely bans transgendered women _who have gone through male puberty_ from competing in the women's category so even having one's sex determined as male as birth is not recognised as an absolute advantage in women's sports; the cutoff is having gone through a male puberty, which a genetic test alone cannot determine.
To be clear, I do think that banning trans women who have gone through male puberty from sports is _on balance_ the fair choice, although it means transgendered women cannot reasonably compete in any category, since it would be unfair for them to compete in the male category and there is no special third category. End aside.
>> But isn't it also cruel to female athletes when they are being compelled to compete with a male?
Yes, but I'm claiming that someone whose sex was determined to be female at birth, and lived their whole life as a woman, and experienced everything that every other woman experiences, is not a male.
>> My view is that sports organisations have a duty of care and a duty of fairness to all athletes, not just the ones who've received unwanted news about eligibility due to their sex.
Of course, but those athletes also deserve a fair treatment. And ruling that they can't compete as women, when they are recognised as women in every other aspect of their lives since birth, is very hard to see as fair. Should we start to treat those women as men in their everyday lives also? That sounds even more unfair.
> Why would knowledge of chromosomes now change that?
If we look again at the case of Caster Semenya, who was reportedly assigned female at birth, with a birth certificate to match, but for whom later tests showed XY chromosomes, this was a strong indication of Semenya actually being male. Then further investigation revealed that Semenya has 5-ARD, a male-only DSD condition in which the penis does not develop as normal due to a mutation in an enzyme responsible for transforming testosterone to DHT. The testes are present and caused Semenya to go through male puberty. There is no female reproductive system: no uterus, no cervix, no fallopian tubes, no ovaries. But there is a male reproductive system, albeit a broken one: testes and an underdeveloped penis. On this basis, Semenya is male, not female.
Knowledge of sex chromosomes was the starting point for confirming that Semenya is a male.
> Also note that some athletic associations, e.g. World Athletics, consider athletes with Y-chromosome DSDs to be eligible for competition in women's categories as long as they reduce their testosterone to [fe]male levels medically.
That's true but it's also controversial. The female category can only coherently exist if the eligibility criteria excludes the male physical advantage acquired by males during male sexual development. And there's no evidence that this advantage is wholly removed when these males suppress testosterone. Only evidence of some weakening. The male body remains.
> As an aside, note in the same article that World Athletics now completely bans transgendered women _who have gone through male puberty_ from competing in the women's category so even having one's sex determined as male as birth is not recognised as an absolute advantage in women's sports; the cutoff is having gone through a male puberty, which a genetic test alone cannot determine.
I think this is an important aside to mention. The male physical advantage is equivalent between the cohorts of males with a trans identity and males with an androgen-sensitive DSD (like 5-ARD). In terms of fair competition, it doesn't really make sense to permit eligibility via testosterone suppression for one group but not the other.
> Yes, but I'm claiming that someone whose sex was determined to be female at birth, and lived their whole life as a woman, and experienced everything that every other woman experiences, is not a male.
Does this apply to the athletes we're discussing though? Having testes and going through male puberty, as Caster Semenya did, is not a female experience.
Whether it’s fair or not is for the armchair philosophers.
What all the available evidence so far indicates is that Khelif is male, most likely with a difference of sex development (DSD).
Biologist Richard Dawkins agrees (though his argument is much better stated than mine): https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/07/biological-sex-bi...
Note that this doesn’t really “solve” all parts of the debate around gender and sports, but it’s a good starting point.
Dawkins knows better and knows that that humans are born that are not clearly male, not clearly female, and also very clearly neither male nor female.
That's actual empirical observed science. There are peer reviewed medical papers in respected journals that look at hundreds of thousands of birth records and break the numbers down on distributions of chromosonal variations at birth.
He understands genetics and these days, when talking to the likes of Piers Morgan et al. he plays a cagey game and talks about reproductive sex, what is required to make a baby outside of a lab the good old fashioned way, when a sperm fertilises an egg.
He's well aware there are more than two types of human birth, he glosses over what he knows to keep things simple to avoid contraversy or something.
If this is all news to you, rather than something you might have read, as I did, some 40+ years ago, then you might choose to start with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
IIRC it links to medical papers and meta papers.
There are several people here in Australia that were born neither male nor female. That's a fact. One took a valid complaint through the Australian courts that they would be lying on an official document if they checked either [F] or [M] on an Australian passport.
Doctors and genetics experts gave evidence, the Australian passport system was changed.
This wasn't some "cultural gender" thing based on someone's feelings about gender, it was stone cold genetic reality about "sex" at birth .. which in reality is a lot more complicated than many Fox cable hosts claim it to be on camera.
Do you have a reference for or link to the details of the court case? It would be very interesting to understand the details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex_rights_in_Australia sketches out a framework, the details can be extracted from the public records for the Department, the State of Victoria, and the decisions of the Family Court.
> Though I'm surprised he managed to convince them
Would you be equally suprised that Perry Mason won a case concerning a woman? Do you require that a fully limbed wheelchair bound lawyer be disqualified in a disability case about a blind amputee?
The key result here is that people of unambiguously indeterminate sex actually exist and government forms in Australia now recognise that.
A wider realisation that some may not reach is that various syndrome might not unambiguously define male or female for the people borm with such syndromes or be clear to the parents that raise them.
If you have specific examples to the contrary, I'd be interested to read about them.
There's a weird thing that occurs in Australia, civil servants tend to respect citizens right to privacy. Not always, of course, but by and large identities are preserved and hefty fines come into play when privacy is violated.
Hansards and Court transcripts, as you would have found, obfuscate identities in various contexts and reporters that attend are aware of guidelines to follow.
> Seems to me that this system of marking passports with an "X" is flawed by being overly broad, including people who are unambiguously male or female.
Do you or do you not accept as fact that people are born who are neither unambiguously male nor unambiguously female?
It's a very simple Yes or No.
Regardless of your personal belief here, expert testimony in multiple court cases adjudicated by various seperate judges, along with a federal department and a state tribunal all aligned together to agree that Yes was the case in the world in which we live.
Yes, some people are born who have differences of sex development, and this might require further investigation as to what abnormal event has actually happened in their development, and the root cause. This is for clinicians and developmental biologists to understand and elucidate for the rest of us.
However my point is this "X" marker tells us nothing much useful about this at all, as it's being applied to individuals who are unambiguously of one sex or the other even with DSDs, as with the Klinefelter syndrome cases.
The "X" is even being given to people whose sex is unambiguous, who don't have any DSD condition, but for some reason have come to believe that they are neither a woman or a man. A wholly psychological condition.
[3] is Selma Feldman Witchel (2018). "Disorders of Sex Development". Best Practice & Research. Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology. 48: 90–102. doi:10.1016/j.bpobgyn.2017.11.005. PMC 5866176. PMID 29503125. The estimated frequency of genital ambiguity is reported to be in the range of 1:2000–1:4500
Those referencess of the 218 references provided are the ones that mainly focus on various aspects of distribution frequency.
For example, XXY (Klinefelter syndrome) is a male condition, X0 (Turner syndrome) is a female condition, XYY (Jacobs syndrome) is male, and so on.
This is the spectrum of human physical and genetic birth presentations as described by peer reviewed medical papers (a number linked in the intersex wikipedia link).
Venn diagrams are not difficult to grasp and anyone taking issue with the categorisation in the field is more than welcome to submit their work and arguments to the relevant journals.
Though for competitive sports, and protecting the women's category in particular, it is only a smaller set of DSDs that eligibility policymakers need to be concerned with: those that confer male physical advantage.
This might be a good model for younger kids, but by the time kids reach high school the biological gap is too great. See https://boysvswomen.com/#/ This is a problem because high school is the time when college scholarships become a thing, performance in competitive high school sports matters. Also, you now need three leagues instead of two, which could get expensive depending on the sport.
Did you friend say why he advocated for these arbitrary tiers rather than separating by sex?
I guess your friend was aiming more towards not upsetting male athletes who identify as women and who desire to compete in the female category, by abolishing the category altogether, rather than these male athletes being told "no".
Contrast this to:
This statement, however, ignores that the history of women’s sport, from tennis to weightlifting to shot put, and yes to boxing, is peppered with athletes who did not conform to stereotypical, European standards of womanhood, including, ironically, European athletes.
Whereas we previously accepted that some women were indeed bigger, stronger or faster, than others, now it appears that many of us expect female athletes to be cookie-cutter images of each other and seek to punish those who do not conform. For all the growing awareness of non-binary gender, it seems we are growing less tolerant of any deviation from the stereotypical norm.
As many others have already pointed out, Khelif has been boxing in women’s competitions for many years, including at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics without these accusations arising. She has produced pictures of herself as a young girl, spoken of the challenges of boxing as a female in her Algerian culture, and has been defended by the IOC and Algerian officials.
Which leaves the Colin Wright's and others playing the maybe trans card with not much other than a vivid imagination and an apparent lack of exposure to female body types about the globe.
Barring all males from women's sport opens up opportunities for female athletes from the same ethnic and/or cultural background who had been excluded from competition by the privileging of a male.
> 3 Wire Sports has seen the letter and the tests.
> The documents shed new light on the controversy enveloping Khelif and, as well, Yu Ting Lin of Chinese Taipei that has erupted at these Paris 2024 Games.
> [...]
> In New Delhi, another test for each, "to reconfirm the findings of the initial test, which it did," according to the June 2023 letter the IBA sent to the IOC.
> The New Delhi lab reports for both Khelif and Lin say the same thing:
> Result Summary: "Abnormal"
> Interpretation: "Chromosomal analysis reveals Male karyotype."
> A karyotype means an individual's complete set of chromosomes. Females have XX chromosomes, males XY.
> The lab results for each athlete depict the XY chromosomes photographically.
As these were analysed in an independent laboratory, I think at the very least we can be confident that both athletes have a male (XY) sex chromosomes, even if the IBA itself may be of questionable trustworthiness.
Many things are possible when charged events spark contraversy, as evidenced by decades of history of reporting.
You may be "confident" in your leaps to a conclusion but you don't speak for a greater "we" and you should refrain from claiming to.
On balance it's just as probable that Abrahamson has seen documents that were presented to him as "test results from a New Delhi lab" but were fabricated, or genuine but flawed, or that Abrahamson is stretching the truth for the gain of his own website 3wiresports.
In the greater political picture, much of this contraversy stems from the IBA.
The IOC suspended the IBA in 2019 over governance, finance, refereeing and ethical issues and did not involve it in running the boxing events at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, before stripping it of recognition in 2023.
Any genuine lab results that exist will have been seen by the IOC, at the most recent press conference the IOC position on this was:
"Women have the right to participate in women’s [events], and we will not rely on — which test? I have been seeing a transcript of this very interesting press conference of this organization (IBA) where it was not even clear which tests have been performed, which results they have been produced.
With respect to the greater picture here, he expanded:
When asked if the IOC would be willing to review its policies ahead of the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, Bach said the organization would be open to it.
"That’s what we have said from the very beginning. If somebody is presenting us a scientifically solid system – how to identify man and woman – we’re the first ones to do it. We do not like this uncertainty. We do not like it for the overall situation for nobody. So, we would be more than pleased to look into it. But what is not possible is that somebody saying that ‘this is not a woman’ just by looking at somebody or by falling prey to a defamation campaign by not a credible organization with highly political interests."
Not really, no. It would require a conspiracy of far too many people and organisations, including the two labs independent of the IBA who analysed both boxers' blood samples.
Plus if these lab results were incorrect, Khelif and Lin could pursue a case in the Court of Arbitration for Sport and present medical evidence to the contrary. Or even just have an independent body do sex tests and make these results public. Nether of them chose to do so.
Yes, really, yes.
You and I apparently live in different realities, there have been many past contraverseries in the press and many events in politics, sport, defence, celebrity gossip, etc, etc in which all the possible scenarios have played out; documents have been flasified and fed to reporters, sketchy lab results have been misinterpreted, etc.
I'm not advocating that any specific outcome has occurred, I'm merely reiterating what is an actual truth we should all remember; when money and reputation is at stake mistakes are made by accident and evidence is misrepresented through malfeasence or overenthusiasm.
I'm adopting the same neutral stance here as I've taken when reporting mineral and energy intelligence to clients who've paid substantial subscriptions for balanced summaries; it is often the case that reports differ and various actors adopt positions that don't mutually align.
It's a fool that chooses one as the truth merely because it aligns with the outcome that fits their preconception.
Besides that, there's additional evidence in this case that indicates XY sex chromosomes and male physical advantage.
For Khelif, perhaps the most revealing evidence is this interview with Khelif's trainer: https://www.lepoint.fr/sport/exclusif-jo-2024-imane-khelif-a...
> Après les championnats du monde 2023, où elle a été disqualifiée, j'ai pris les devants en contactant un endocrinologue de renom du CHU parisien, Kremlin-Bicêtre, qui l'a examinée. Celui-ci a confirmé qu'Imane est bien une femme, malgré son caryotype et son taux de testostérone. Il a dit : « Il y a un problème avec ses hormones, avec ses chromosomes, mais c'est une femme. » C'est tout ce qui nous importait. Nous avons ensuite travaillé avec une médecin basée en Algérie pour contrôler et réguler le taux de testostérone d'Imane, qui est actuellement dans la norme féminine. Des tests montrent très bien que toutes ses qualités musculaires et autres s'amoindrissent depuis. Actuellement, elle peut être comparée au niveau musculaire et au niveau biologique à une femme-femme-femme.
Here, he states that Khelif was medically assessed after the disqualification from the 2023 World Championships, and that this investigation revealed "a problem with chromosomes and hormones", and that as a consequence Khelif received medical interventions to artificially lower testosterone levels.
Also, the coach of the Spanish national team, Rafael Lozano, revealed that when the Algerian team visited to train with them, Khelif had to spar against a male boxer (José Quiles), as Khelif's strength was too great to safely spar against any of the female boxers: https://x.com/AlbertOrtegaES1/status/1819317673576030501
We can consider the results of both of these boxers in the Olympics as well. Both won gold in their weight class, and both won each round 5-0, which none of their competitors did. Isn't it an interesting coincidence that the two XY boxers happened to be the two that achieved such remarkable success in the women's tournament?
>> Interpretation: "Chromosomal analysis reveals Male karyotype."
>> A karyotype means an individual's complete set of chromosomes. Females have XX chromosomes, males XY.
The last line is an oversimplification that the author, as many others, uses to jump to conclusions. As the BBC article reports, quoting Alun Williams:
>> “It’s obviously a very good marker, as most people with a Y chromosome are male… but it’s not a perfect indicator.”
>> For some people with DSD, the Y chromosome is not a fully formed typical male Y chromosome. It may have some genetic material missing, damaged or swapped with the X chromosome, depending on the variation.
Also, something that's been a bit annoying throughout this affair: a "male karyotype" is not "XY", it's "46, XY" and a female karyotype is "46, XX". At least that's the normal male/ female karyotypes and some people with DSDs have variations thereof, like the 47, XXY karyotype of Kleineflter's Syndrome (a "trisomy").
In any eventuality, as the BBC article says, a male karyotype does not a male make, let alone a man. As a for instance, this is an article that reports natural birth in a woman with predominantly 46, XY karyotype:
Report of Fertility in a Woman with a Predominantly 46,XY Karyotype in a Family with Multiple Disorders of Sexual Development
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190741/
This was a case of a woman with mosaicism, which means some of her cells had one set of chromosomes and other cells another. The karyotype of her ovaries was predominantly 46, XY, i.e. what the pundits keep calling "male" and less than 1% 46, XX, i.e. "female", by the pundits. And yet, not only did she menstruate regularly, she had two unassisted pregnancies and gave birth to a daughter. Imagine now if this woman was an athlete who had failed a gender test for having "XY chromosomes" as widely reported for the two Olympic boxers. A woman who has given birth is a male and should be competing in a men's category? How does that square with anything anyone knows or believes about gender or sex?
It is because of this kind of situation that is not unheard of and is not that rare in the grand scheme of things that the scientists in the BBC article, as well as the IOC, find it so difficult to say with certainty what is a man and what is a woman. Because despite what we all think we know, when we reach the limits of physical conditions, as is common in sports, the limits begin to become a blur.
Like for example, Swyer syndrome is an XY DSD where the individual has a female phenotype (including uterus, fallopian tubes, and vagina) but complete gonadal dysgenesis. No ovaries or testes. Because of oestrogen deficiency, such individuals end up with a very high risk of bone defects including osteopenia and osteoporosis - which is not compatible with competitive sport.
Even with CAIS, an XY DSD where the body cannot process testosterone at all so despite presence of testes the individual develops an otherwise female phenotype, has a curiously higher incidence in athletes competing at an elite level, compared to the average within the general population: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5643412
> although they are likely to be taller than the average 46,XX woman given some height-determining genes on the Y chromosome and perhaps some that increase lean body mass. Mutation of this gene is found in fewer than 1 in 20,000 in the general population but is relatively common in elite female athletes [noted as 1/421 and 1/423 at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games].
The case of mosaicism you linked is fascinating but also incredibly rare, even more so than other DSDs. Also it almost certainly doesn't apply to these two boxers because it would have been picked up on the karyotyping, as it was in that paper.
I feel that the BBC article was quite enlightening on the topic of DSDs in general, but not so much on the impact of and presence of specific male DSDs in women's sport at an elite level. Sport provides a selection filter so these skew towards the subset that confer performance advantage. Like, 5-ARD has dominated entire podiums: in the Women's 800m of the 2016 Olympics, every medal was taken by a male.
That said, I see this as a policy failure more than anything. The IOC's policy fails women by not attempting to exclude male physical advantage at all, instead just going by whatever an athlete's identity documents say. They prioritise inclusion of male athletes in the women's category more than fairness and safety for female athletes.
This is in contrast with how they police their other eligibility criteria, like weight classes where this is verified at the event by weigh-ins. It's strict, too: an athlete was disqualified in this Olympics for being 100 grams over.
I believe the IBA's process, even though they prioritised the safety of their female athletes and fairness in competition, was also flawed. They should have taken the XY karyotype results as the start of their investigation instead of the end. Though, neither Khelif nor Lin pursued a case against the the IBA's decision at the CAS. Which says a lot too.
The purpose of the press conference was to double down on the IBA’s claim that the IOC, led by Kremlev’s bete noire, Thomas Bach, is a danger to women’s boxing, among other things.
It had been believed making public the chromosome tests of the boxers would place serious pressure on the Olympic organisers’ position that the fighters were eligible having been registered as women at birth and holding passports as such. But that morning legal letters came in from the Algerian and Taiwanese organising committees warning them not to breach non-disclosure agreements.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/aug/11/gender...
So all we have to go by is, frankly, dodgy tactics by the IBA that seems more interested in kicking up a storm to discredit the IOC, than to protect women's sports. I suggest caution in accepting anything the IBA says.
Abrahamson also reported that the XY chromosomes were depicted photographically. So we know it must have been a karyotype test because that's what those tests show.
Here's an example from Wikipedia: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NHGRI_human_male_k...
We can see in this how the sex chromosomes make an asymmetrically sized pair, indicating XY. It's clear from the description of the lab reports that the same was observed for Khelif and Lin.
It may very well be that after this Olympics, the IOC will have to draw some arbitrary line (e.g., if you are a female with testosterone-sensitive Y chromosome, then you can't compete with females).
It is possible that the top athletes in many sports have a yet to be discovered rare genetic condition that allows their body to recover faster, gives them faster twitch muscles and supreme mental focus. That's certainly a genetic advantage.
I understand the BBC article to also make it clear that there is no test for "genetic advantage". If there were such a test then we could separate athletes to "advantage categories" so that all the athletes with the same kind of advantage compete with each other. Rather what we have is broad categories of weight and gender where different athletes have different strengths and weaknesses, where the majority of them have some kind of genetic advantage over the average non-athlete of their gender and weight, and where there are very often athletes who are clearly head and shoulders above the competition in every which way; and probably without doping.
Take the typical female (XX) and typical male (XY) one rep max on say a squat, bench press and deadlift (could/should also compare cardio, etc) vs someone with this condition. Who are these individuals closer to when untrained? That's who they should compete against.
It isn't, they can't lift that much because they are untrained so it's difficult for them to hurt themselves. Many other exercises would also work, 50 yard dash? Rucking with a backpack for a few miles? Anything where a gender difference exists today that is large enough to be statistically significant.
They do this sort of thing all the time: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34873221/
Flawed logic when applied in a domain that is selecting for high performing women.
This isn't a "all things being equal" draw of marbles from a bag.
In the real world that we live in there are woman that don't look like Barbie.