VILLEPINTE, France — It is not new, this matter of endocrinology that has brought so many of us to the boxing hall in the industrial prairies of the Paris suburbs on a Friday afternoon.
It has been a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world for a very long time.
I spent the morning reading about the Galli of the Roman Empire, the male attendants of the Goddess Cybele who performed self-castration and whose gender identity, I read in one scholarly paper, “was somewhat ambiguous.”
But I did not find anything in my research that indicated that the Galli could win gold medals for punching other people in the face.
I read about Joseph-François Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary among the Haudenosaunee in the 1710s, who found “women with manly courage who prided themselves upon the profession of warrior.”
But the good Father never measured these warriors’ testosterone levels, since testosterone was not fully understood until the 1930s, when students at the University of Chicago squeezed a few drops out of a bushel of prairie oysters and injected it into some soprano mice.
I read about Stella Walsh, née Stanisława Walasiewicz, winner of the women’s 100-metre dash at Los Angeles and silver medalist in Berlin, and learned how, when she was murdered by a mugger in Cleveland in 1980, an autopsy found “ambiguous genitalia and abnormal sex chromosomes.”
“Nature is infinite in her manifestations,” said the Cuyahoga County coroner at the time.
“A proposal that all women entered in Olympic games be subject to an examination to determine their sex was advanced last week by Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee,” it was reported in 1936, as insinuations swirled that Stella Walsh really was a man.
Ten years later, Donald Trump was born.
On Thursday, we had The Donald barging in – “Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,” as Carl Sandburg once wrote of Chicago – and vowing “I will keep men out of women’s sports!”
A few months ago, Caitlyn Jenner endorsed a local ban on transgender athletes in Nassau County, New York and declared “The solution is simple: you have to compete in the biological sex in which you were born.”
But the women’s boxing competition at the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad has demonstrated that the solution isn’t really simple at all.
In the case of Imene Khalif, the fighter whom the French label la boxeuse algérienne hyperandrogène, it is not only about glandular chemistry, but about believing the Russians about jurisdiction and power in the billion-dollar business of organized battery, and about how much blood a lady should be allowed to lose in the name of sport.
It should be highlighted that the head of the International Boxing Association, which disqualified Khalif in 2023 after she had been allowed to box against women at the highest level – not always victoriously — for half a decade, is a man named Umar Kremlev who was awarded the Medal For Merit to the Fatherland by the Putin government “for a great contribution to the development of physical culture and sport and diligent work in Russia.”
On Thursday, the organization’s communications team put out this statement: “The IBA will never support any boxing bouts between the genders, as the organization puts the safety and well-being of our athletes first. We are protecting our women and their rights to compete in the ring against equal rivals, and we will defend and support them in all instances; their hopes and dreams must never be taken away by organizations unwilling to do the right thing under difficult circumstances.” By which the Russians meant the International Olympic Committee.
It was the same Kremlov who declared last year that “Based on DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to trick their colleagues into posing as women.” The IBA stopped short, however, of saying that the Galli gals had performed the act of self-castration.
On Friday, RIA Novosti, the Russian news agency, labelled the women’s boxing competition at the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad “a traveling cabaret with ‘bearded women.’”
“If there is a closed sect of worshipers of ‘gender-fluid’ gods, it is the IOC,” RIA Novosti said. So there is a back-story here.
Now, finally, to actual fisticuffs. It is three-thirty in the afternoon in Villepointe and entering the ring is Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan, or “Chinese Taipei” as the Taiwanese are required to designate themselves while the IOC performs the three prostrations and nine kowtows to the Communists in Beijing.
Lin Yu-Ting – the characters of her name can mean “lush, graceful forest” – is a 28-year-old two-time world champion who in her career has won forty bouts and lost fourteen times, which is hardly the record of a Haudenosaunee warrior who obliterates everyone in her path. She is the top seed in the 57-kilogram division. No Russian women are boxing here.
Lin’s opponent is a woman named Sitora Turdibekova from the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. Amid the lively crowd of fight fans are a half-dozen Uzbeks who are chanting “Ooo-oooo-oozbekistan!” One of these is wearing a big, fluffy white fur hat – in this weather!
There are lot more reporters and photographers in the house than there are Uzbeks.
The Taiwanese top-seed is roundly booed when she is introduced.
No matter. Lin is a good five inches taller than the other fighter, with the reach advantage of a giraffe. She circles and dances, sticks with accurate left and right jabs, and scores enough points for an easy, unanimous victory. It does not appear from the press box that Lin has landed any particularly devastating blows.
Turdibekova weeps when the decision is announced.
Second Boxer in Olympics Gender Row Wins Fight, headlines the New York Post.
Women are being sent “unforgivably into harm’s way by gutless IOC cowards,” says The Telegraph.
“The time for equivocation on this subject is over: women’s safety must be prioritised over the fashionable demands of activists,” it goes on.
Lin Yu-Ting is through to the quarterfinals. La boxeuse algérienne hyperandrogène will fight again on Saturday. And on we go in a competition that will be remembered for a very long time as a traveling cabaret of bloodwork, sweat, and tears.