For female boxers the bad old days are now

cent years, individual sport federations have tightened up eligibility rules regarding trans athletes and those with male DSDs. (These are totally separate, although conflated by trans activists who use DSDs to “prove” sex is not binary but a spectrum.)…

What we see in Paris women’s boxing is the IOC’s ludicrous, dangerous, misogynistic principles given full rein. Since it banished the International Boxing Association (IBA) for unrelated corruption issues, the IOC has run Olympic boxing itself. After being disqualified from IBA world championships for failing gender tests Khelif and Lin, tellingly, did not appeal.

They knew the Olympics beckoned where there was neither sex testing nor testosterone rules. Mark Adams said it was enough they had female passports, a document anyone can change. In other words, the IOC allowed eligibility to women’s boxing — a sport that for safety reasons never stopped being sex-based — to be based purely on self-ID.

This calamity is not merely the IOC’s fault — it is precisely what it wants. This is sport run according to its stated principles of gender inclusion and the obliteration of sex classes. For Paris it even issued a glossary for journalists of “terms to avoid”, including “born female” and “biologically male”.

Yet fewer people will now be censored. The IOC is not just at odds with sport federations but many current female athletes, including female boxing champions who are refusing to fight Khelif and Lin. As the tide goes out on pernicious gender ideology, why does the IOC still deny science? Perhaps to court US sponsors or stay “relevant”.

But mainly because it is profoundly institutionally sexist. In 2015, it allowed any male who reduced testosterone (to a rate still ten times the female average) into female sports without consulting a single woman. It discriminates against female athletes by denying their biology where once it used it against them, banning women from the ski jump until 2014 because it might damage their wombs.

And it abolished a simple test that would have stopped Paris being remembered for televising male violence. Bring back the cheek swab: for female boxers the bad old days are now.