AP
Forty-six seconds was all it took for Italian boxer Angela Carini to throw in the towel on her own fight during the Paris Olympics — and those 46 seconds have thrown gasoline on the firestorm over gender and fairness in women’s athletics.
“I’ve never been hit with such a powerful punch,” Carini said in a tearful post-bout interview, about facing Imane Khalif from Algeria, who was disqualified from another event the year before for failing a gender-idenity test.
This situation is a complicated one: Unlike the majority of male athletes competing against females in interscholastic and collegiate competitions here in the United States, who generally self-identify as transgender, Khalif is believed to suffer a disorder of sexual development.
DSD is an umbrella term for rare conditions involving genes, hormones and the reproductive organs. A person with DSD can appear female on the outside, but have the biology and XY chromosomes of a male.
In much of the world, this condition is often discovered soon after birth. But if it goes undetected, a family would have no reason to doubt the appearance of a child’s external anatomy — that is, until puberty, when massive amounts of testosterone turn that seemingly prepubescent girl into a post-pubescent male.
We don’t know Khelif’s medical condition, but we do know that the Algerian boxer failed a test at the World Boxing Championships in 2023.
So did another boxer, Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan, who on Friday won an Olympics bout against Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova, beating her in all three rounds.
The International Olympic Committee “won’t reveal the exact DSD due to privacy,” evolutionary biologist Colin Wright posted on X — but according to reports, both boxers’ 2023 disqualifications were not based on testosterone tests.
“It means they failed a genetic test,” Wright explained, “and the only way to do that is by having a Y chromosome” — that is, by being a biological male.
It’s virtually impossible to imagine the pain and psychological trauma of growing up as a girl, only to find that your chromosomes actually make you male. How much harder to discover that truth only because you have excelled in women’s athletics.
But our compassion cannot negate the unfairness and the very real danger of allowing athletes with these conditions to participate in the women’s division.
After two blows to the head, Carini knew she couldn’t safely go on. If the IOC doesn’t right this ship, someone will likely be killed.
That’s why other competitions test female boxers for testosterone levels, the same as they would check for other performance-enhancing drugs.
But the ramifications extend far beyond the Olympics and suffering of intersex athletes.
Here at home, on the same day the Olympics furor broke, the Biden-Harris administration’s rewrite of Title IX took effect in the 24 states that have not won preliminary injunctions to block the law’s implementation.
This new and completely gutted version of Title IX expands the definition of “sex” to include “gender identity” — and now, the only requirement to participate as a male in girls’ sports is to self-identity as a girl.
The words “I am a girl” or “I identify as female” now guarantee boys and men the right to spike volleyballs off girls’ faces, knock out their teeth in field hockey and steal their podium spots and scholarships in track and field — because, according to Biden and Harris, prohibiting any of that “causes harm.”
The new version of the law also permits these males to undress in the girls’ locker room (and watch their female teammates undress) and sleep in the same room as their female teammates on overnight field trips.
Didn’t we used to call that sexual harassment? Or harm?
Too often these stories are framed as what’s respectful for the transgender athlete. But showing them respect should not mean throwing out the rights of other athletes, of creating an unfair — or unsafe — competition.
Let’s hope her Angela Carini’s Olympic story becomes a catalyst for change here.
Erika Sanzi is director of outreach for Parents Defending Education.