A bellicose quarrel over who should and shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s sports has erupted over the last few days following Imane Khelif’s Olympic boxing victory over the Italian contender Angela Carini. Sites like CNN, USA Today, AP, Reuters, and innumerable others with a pronounced left-wing bias are adamant that Imane Khelif, despite possessing “genetically male” attributes, is a woman in every possible sense of the term—even Ketanji Jackson would have no trouble identifying Khelif as a woman. This is to be expected. Khelif is not to be blamed for his decisive victory over a woman even if she/he is in some way “trans.” For the left, gender dysphoria is the way to go.
But nothing is as clear as the left professes it to be and whatever cause or phenomenon it may champion should be immediately treated with skepticism. The IOC’s justifications ring desperately hollow. The Hungarian Boxing Association was not impressed by the gender raffle and said it would send letters of protest to the International Olympic Committee. (Nonetheless, as of this writing, Khelif has defeated Hungary’s Luca Anna Hamori.)
The International Boxing Association deposes that Khelif failed to meet eligibility requirements for the women’s competition and—what is key—was not subject to a testosterone exam but put through a separate test that found “she” had competitive advantages over women athletes. “IBA president Umar Kremlev alleged to Russian news agency TASS last year that Khelif had XY chromosomes—a pair of chromosomes typically possessed by men.” The question will no doubt remain vexed for some time though the more important issue must be placed, as we will see, in the context of the feminist outcry over unfair male advantage.
We’ve all heard about the need for a “course correction” in the development of certain affairs, but rarely, especially when it comes to the most crucial aspects of a culture, of a “thought correction.” This is certainly true of one of the most damaging ideological deformities of the modern West, namely, feminism. When it comes to feminism, whether as a practice or a theory, even its most astute and honorable adversaries do not tend to think clearly, as I hope to show.
If it should turn out that Khelif is indeed female, then there is no argument. She is just a very big girl with a competitive advantage over others of her sex. If her chromosomal packet remains disputable and it turns out that Khelif is a bivalent creature, there is ample room for suspicion and disbelief of those who claim that Khelif is a woman. Khalif not only looks like a man, is built like a man, and may well possess x/y chromosomes, but is a man in effect and action and not a woman or a hermaphrodite. In which case, sympathy and concern for the young woman whose nose he broke in the ring is precisely what any decent person would feel—as many have. But caution is required about the real issue.
Forbes writes of the necessity to “protect the right of female athletes to be able to compete on equal terms." Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, a notorious feminist, blasted the Olympics as “a misogynist sporting establishment,” which in its current form it manifestly is not. Writing for the Western Standard, Nigel Hannaford issues “a plea for fair play and the protection of women. The whole thing is shameful from start to finish… the rest of us should be asking ourselves how long we’re going to put up with this kind of nonsense” Since “a lot of people are hating this”, the time has come for a “change in thinking.” Many other commentators and talking heads are in heartfelt agreement with the sentiment.
There is everything to be said for helping women who have been brutalized or unconscionably hurt. But the thinking is often, as in this case, wildly off the mark. If one really wishes to help victims like Angela Carini or to establish both a social and athletic arena of fairness in the matter, one must first put a check on one’s sentimental feelings and expressions of fury or indignation, and determine where the septicemia actually lies. And any objective assessment will reveal precisely where the fault is to be found. It’s called feminism.
People of good intention and even conservatives who have achieved any degree of public acclaim—Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Jordan Peterson and dozens of others—are often compelled, it seems, to express their feminist bona fides in some form or other, using the language of women’s rights, equality, women’s opportunities, and violence against women—all phrases with rich feminist resonances. And that is exactly the problem. For the reason a woman can be placed in the ring against a man is owing directly and unequivocally not to “toxic” male violence but to the feminist refusal to acknowledge that a woman is “inferior” to a man in any conceivable respect. It is feminism that put Angela Carini in the ring against Imane Khalif. The IOC was merely a feminist proxy, a medium through which feminist orthodoxy issued its cultural command.
Janice Fiamengo possesses a solid grasp of the nature of feminist cognitive dissonance and the inability even of those who wish the best for women, in sports as in all aspects of life, to see through the charade. As she writes in her Substack, “Feminist wisdom told us that sex differences in physical ability were predominantly caused by society, which convinced women they were less capable…Rowling and her ilk—and her many male defenders—do not admit that the ideology of women’s rights paved the way for the current situation. It did so in its stress on gender as a process whereby ‘members of a society construct their bodies in ways that comply with accepted views of masculinity and femininity’ (Judith Lorber and Patricia Yancey, The Socially Constructed Body).” Lorber and Martin, for example, claim that the reduction of the number of sets in women’s tennis was a patriarchal plot to make women think they are weak. And so on.
In other words, the feminist dogma proclaims that the presumed weakness of women in comparison with men is a socially constructed phenomenon that has nothing to do with biology. A patriarchal society has convinced women that they are inferior to men in bodily strength, competitive sports and in life’s inevitable agonistics as a ploy to impose and maintain male domination of the hapless and deluded female—the female who, if she only knew it, is actually equal to men in every possible respect.
Fiamengo concludes: “Arguments against the significance of sex differences have been used by women’s advocates for the past four decades to force the admission of women into frontline positions in soldiering, policing, and firefighting, with indifference to the consequences in lowered capacity and lives endangered. It was always a terrible feminist idea. It remains a terrible feminist idea. It would be helpful if the self-elected defenders of women could acknowledge that simple truth.” That is, compassion and solicitude on the one hand, or outrage and indignation on the other, are well and good, but regrettably beside the point.
As a commentator to Janice’s Substack writes, with reference to Carini’s tearful denouement, “Forgive me, but crying about it reinforces every negative stereotype about women that feminism claims to fight against.” His point is well taken. Men who are overmatched and beaten do not sit down and cry. That is not what men do (unless, of course, there is an intersex component in their make-up or an infusion of hormone repressors). A woman who sits down in the ring and weeps does so not because her sex (or “gender,” as feminists like to say) is the product of a social construct but because women are generally more emotional than men and less given to visceral restraint. The difference is manifest and biologically grounded.
The commenter goes on to object “to the whining about how the trans boxer's performance deprived a woman of her dreams. The male athletes, whose sports were cancelled to create programs for women under Title IX, by contrast CAN make this argument as their entire teams and opportunity to compete were removed to create opportunities for women which the women had not...and could not....secure by merit on the playing field.” Again, well taken. The victims of the feminist burlesque are not only females like Carini but skilled and qualified men who were not even allowed to compete in order to gerrymander space for “gender equity.”
Imane Khalif is not the perpetrator of the Olympic farce we are witnessing. Angela Carini was not, in the last analysis, pummeled and injured by a man. She was harmed and abused by the feminist sorority and its male enablers who put her there to be battered under the false pretense of physical equality. It is toward feminism that outrage and reprehension should be directed. It is the cause of the travesty that has occurred not only in the ring but occurs daily in society at large. And commiseration is due not only to Carini and those like her, who have been deceived by their “mother superiors,” but to men as well, both victims of a grotesque ideology called feminism. It is time for good people, sensible people, empathetic people to undergo a long-deferred thought correction and put the blame for the perversion where it belongs.
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