Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

The scandal in women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics is a reminder that we must stand up for women and girls in sport and advocate protections for women’s sporting events that previous generations worked so hard to establish.

If you’ve been following the Olympics, you’d be hard pressed to have missed the travesty that’s unfolded in women’s boxing.

In the absence of any sex screening for women’s events, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has allowed two male boxers to compete in the women’s competition. Both boxers have now advanced to the finals and will compete for gold in their respective categories.

This is not only patently unfair, it is incredibly dangerous in a contact sport like boxing.

While the IOC and others continue to obfuscate the issue, claiming the two boxers are women because they “have a passport as a woman”, the International Boxing Association has confirmed that they were disqualified from the world championships last year after a “series of DNA-tests… proved they had XY chromosomes”.

From the information available, it appears the two boxers have ‘differences of sexual development’ (DSDs), meaning they may have been raised female and not exhibited male traits until they began to go through male puberty.

While we can be sensitive to the hardships faced by those with DSDs, this does not excuse putting women’s safety — and their very lives — at risk. It is beyond insane that we are now allowing biological males to punch women in the head in front of the whole world and calling it ‘sport’.

And make no mistake — while the two boxers may not be ‘transgender’ as some people have claimed, it is the IOC’s unapologetic adherence to gender ideology and its commitment to inclusion over safety and fairness that has landed us in this mess in the first place.

Women’s Forum Australia Head of Advocacy Stephanie Bastiaan and I have consistently raised awareness about this issue online and in the media over the past week, including on Sky (here and here), 3AW, 7News and The Epoch Times.

We explained that the reason we even have single-sex sport in the first place is to preserve fairness and safety for female athletes, and that the IOC’s current rules — which effectively allow any male to self-identify into the female sporting category — are manifestly inadequate.

For a more detailed explanation of the biological considerations involved and the surrounding context, I highly recommend these excellent articles by evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, law professor Doriane Coleman, and sport performance coach Linda Blade, as well as these brilliant podcast episodes (here and here) by sports scientist Ross Tucker.

We will continue to stand up for women and girls in sport and to advocate protections for women’s sporting events that previous generations worked so hard to establish. It has been particularly encouraging to see some of the female boxers themselves bravely protesting the unfairness in this instance.

If you haven’t already, please join us is asking our own MPs to restore fairness and safety for women’s sport in Australia and get a FREE copy of our in-depth report, A Fair Playing Field: Protecting Women’s Single-Sex Sport, to help you speak out with confidence on this issue.

And before I sign off — some positive news!

Following immense pushback, independent MP Alex Greenwich’s ‘Equality’ Bill has been delayed again, almost a year after it was introduced. Among other harmful reforms, the Bill allows males to legally identify as female and further erodes protections for female-only spaces and sports in NSW.

So keep speaking out, your voices are being heard!

___

Republished from a Women’s Forum Australia email.