Hello friends, I jumped the gun on this story (mea culpa); it seems that it is still developing, with a number of news outlets asserting that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was born a woman. I had assumed from earlier reports I read that Khelif was intersex, with high testosterone and XY sex chromosomes, or even transgender. My argument about feminist flipflops on sex difference are valid, but the story is more complicated than I had assumed, and I wish I had waited before publishing. However, I will leave it stand despite its potential inaccuracies, and thank you all for your contributions.
Khelif is almost certainly male. The International Boxing Association gave him a medical test to see if he was eligible to box in the women's division, and he failed that test. He did not appeal the decision.
You can read the minutes of the IBA boxing association where they discuss the disqualification. Both boxers actually failed testing in 2022 as well but the results weren’t available until well after the competition which is why they were allowed to compete in 2023z. On top of that you can read the letter sent to the IOC by the IBA expressing the test results and the concerns therein. Which test was run may indeed be important when it comes to testosterone levels, which test is not important in establishing XY chromosomes. This is very black and white. It’s also important to note that the Taiwanese boxer did not bother to appeal the decision. The Algerian boxer filed an appeal but withdrew it. Why do that when the only thing necessary to win your appeal is a $100 23 and Me available on the internet? Especially when if you are XX you could easily sue the IBA for piles of money? Why not take your own test between 2023 and 2024? Why not take a test when this first kicked off (which was days before the first match)?
I suspect the boxer from Taiwan knew that he was XY which is why he didn’t appeal, I still think he’s intersex, just that he was aware of it. I suspect the Algerian boxer found out about his condition via the testing and that he probably did take some sort of test to appeal to the IBA but then when that test also showed he was XY he dropped the appeal. He can’t publicly acknowledged the situation because of the social, cultural, and political realities of Algeria. Neither boxer will submit to additional testing because they know the outcome.
No he was born with abdominal testes which started producing testosterone in puberty. That is why he passed for a girl when little but once puberty hit looked more and more masculine.
Having a female looking vulva does not make once a woman. He is a male, as determined by his chromosomes and supported by the presence of excessively high levels of testosterone and male secondary sec characteristics. He is a male with a tragic developmental condition, not a female with a genetic condition.
Khelif was born with an intersex condition. XY chromosomes and high testosterone levels. One can objectively SEE that. Carole Hooven, author of "The Story of Testosterone" writes on X: Carole Hooven
@hoovlet
Seems like a good time to re-post my older (now edited) post about athletes with XY DSDs (Disorder, or Difference of Sex Development). Lots of graphs and detail about the relevant biology at the end.
* * *
First: People living with DSDs should be treated with compassion and understanding, and receive any heath care they need. These can be challenging conditions for individuals and their families. But when male athletes have DSDs that give them an advantage over females, and they compete in the female category, this raises concerns about safety and fairness, and forces discussion of the relevant physical traits.
Athletes with XY DSDs who have testes (usually internal), XY sex chromosomes, male-typical levels of testosterone, and functional androgen receptors are often described as females with "hyperandrogenism," i.e., abnormally high levels of testosterone. They experience physical benefits of this high testosterone during puberty, which translate into athletic advantages over females. The issue for sports is that athletes with the XY DSD 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), may be socialized as female, may be legally female, and may live and identify as female; but they are male.
These individuals are usually born with female-appearing genitalia, which can lead to being sexed as female. Here's why. 5-ARD is caused by a mutation in the gene that codes for the enzyme 5-alpha reductase, which converts testosterone into a more potent androgen, DHT. This androgen interacts with the androgen receptor, like testosterone, and is necessary for the typical development of male external genitalia (penis and scrotum) and the prostate. Without DHT, female-typical external genitalia develop. At the end of this monster post is a graphic of the relevant steroid production pathway, from my book T: The story of Testosterone.
DHT is also responsible for male-pattern baldness and dark, coarse facial hair, which is why people with the condition have smooth skin that can give a feminine appearance.
The “decision makers” are aware that athletes with 5-ARD are male, and that they experience the benefits of male puberty. The requirement to reduce their testosterone to typical female levels isn’t discriminatory, since these are males who are asking to compete in the female category. But more significantly, all the relevant scientific evidence shows that reducing male T in adulthood does not undo the physical benefits of male puberty.
Here's more detail about T, DHT, and male advantage in strength and speed.
I've been asked if men with the DSD 5-ARD (in which ppl cannot convert testosterone into the more potent androgen DHT) experience the typical benefits of male puberty, that would give them an advantage in strength and speed relative to women. This is relevant to questions about whether male athletes with 5-ARD should be allowed to compete in the female category. This is an excellent question, because it could be the case that DHT is necessary for the development and maintenance of male-typical muscle, lean body mass and strength. If that were the case, then people with 5-ARD might not have a typical male advantage, because the lack of DHT would perhaps lead to a more feminine pattern of fat, lean body mass and strength. I've wondered about this myself and have looked into the evidence.
Perhaps the top researcher in this area, Shalendar Bhasin, who is scrupulous in his methods, has examined this very question. The answer appears to be: no, testosterone does not need to be converted to DHT to exert its typical anabolic effects. These findings are reported in his 2012 study, "Effect of Testosterone Supplementation With and Without a Dual 5α-Reductase Inhibitor on Fat-Free Mass in Men With Suppressed Testosterone Production, A Randomized Controlled Trial." (It is linked to below—and since it's paywalled, I've included the graphs that show comparisons between the placebo and DHT— inhibited conditions, with no difference on the various outcomes.)
For more detail, the investigators wanted to examine the effects of suppressing DHT on muscle mass, strength, and sexual function. This important because one of the treatments for benign prostatic hyperplasia and male-pattern baldness is to suppress DHT, but clinicians have been concerned about effects on other outcomes that affect health and quality of life. Participants (healthy men, 18 to 50, with normal T levels) had their T blocked, and were given graded doses of T, along with either placebo or a drug that blocked the conversion of T to DHT. So both groups had T, but only one, the placebo group, also had DHT. After 20 weeks of treatment, changes in lean body mass, muscle, and strength were assessed. There were no significant difference between the placebo and DHT-blocked groups in these outcomes.
For LOTS more detail, here's the relevant text from the results. Please don't ask me questions about the study. Just look at the abstract and results which you can find by Googling. The main point is that while there are predicted effects of the different doses of T received, there were no differences in the outcomes according to whether they had DHT blocked (with dutasteride) or not (placebo). "Fat-Free Mass Fat-free mass and lean body mass increased in a dose-dependent manner in the placebo and dutasteride [THIS IS THE DRUG THAT BLOCKS CONVERSION OF T TO DHT] groups (Figure 2).
The changes in fat-free mass were related to testosterone dose and changes in testosterone concentrations in the placebo and dutasteride groups but did not differ between groups; the dose-adjusted mean difference (placebo minus dutasteride) in fat-free mass was 0.50 kg (95% CI, −0.22 to 1.22 kg; P = .18). There was no significant interaction between testosterone dose and randomization to dutasteride or placebo, indicating a lack of evidence that the relationship of testosterone dose to change in fat-free mass differed between the dutasteride and placebo groups.
The model-based smoothed regression lines, obtained by generalized additive models, describing the relationship between changes in testosterone concentrations and changes in fat-free mass and lean body mass were similar in the placebo and dutasteride groups. Changes in fat mass were negatively related to testosterone dose and concentrations, but the relationship between change in fat mass and dose did not differ significantly between the placebo and dutasteride groups (P = .41; Figure 2)."
"Muscle strength Leg-press and chest-press strength increased dependently by dose in the placebo and dutasteride groups. Increases in leg-press and chest-press strength were greater with larger doses and higher concentrations of testosterone. These relationships did not differ between the placebo and dutasteride groups (Figure 2)."
Really interesting commentary from the authors on the role of DHT in adult men: "Why then did the steroid 5α-reductase system evolve for androgens? Forty-six XY males with steroid 5α-reductase deficiency exhibited ambiguous or female external genitalia at birth and poor prostate development, but underwent normal muscle and bone development during pubertal transition. The phenotype of these patients suggests that steroid 5α-reductase plays an essential role in the development of prostate and phallus by providing local amplification of an androgenic signal without systemic hyperandrogenemia during critical periods of sexual differentiation, illustrating nature's extraordinary ingenuity in creating mechanisms for tissue-selective amplification during development.
We speculate that in adult men, in whom this tissue-specific amplification is not essential because the circulating testosterone concentrations are substantially higher than those in the fetus, testosterone and DHT can interchangeably subserve many androgenic functions. When circulating testosterone concentrations are low, intraprostatic DHT formation may become important in maintaining prostate growth, thus buffering the effects of decreasing testosterone levels, which has been suggested by Marks et al.
Our data are consistent with studies that have reported no effects of 5α-reductase inhibitors on muscle or bone mass. Inferences from these trials are limited by the fact that administration of 5α-reductase inhibitors increases testosterone levels, rendering it difficult to ascribe the outcomes to differences in DHT levels alone. In our trial, inhibition of endogenous testosterone by administration of a gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist eliminated this problem. Additionally, the high-dose dutasteride regimen effectively inhibited both steroid 5α-reductase isoenzymes."
Not to take the wind out of all those sails, but there’s a solid chance she’s just a big, tall, XX-chromosomed cis woman, and that Umar Kremlev made the whole thing up to justify disqualifying her.
But you don't actually "know it." You're just making a call based on prior beliefs and vibes, and copy-pasting a wall of text to make it sound less arbitrary.
Despite 'jumping the gun', in this instance, your essential points are valid; feminist claims are shown to be nonsense when the ceaseless quest for 'equality' that was started by them reaches the destination many predicted long ago. Hopefully the train will hit the buffers soon.
That aside, the quote from Lorber and Yancey reminds me of the rubbish I've read in literary criticism in which all sorts of specious nonsense is written about 'the author's intentions'.
I assume you think that an intelligent request. I'm always saddened, here, when I feel a commenter is so stupid that I have to be impolite, disrespectful, abusive, or whatever you choose to interpret my reply as, simply because framing a serious reply is so far beyond my tolerance levels the action has left the solar system. Were you even half as intelligent as you appear to think yourself, you'd know that, to use aphorisms our forebears coined to describe the processes they'd observed, 'nothing lasts forever' and 'for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction', 'you can fool some of the people some of ... ' and 'a pendulum swing like a pendulum do' and so on, etcetera ad infinitum. I'm sure that has flown over your head so fast you haven't yet felt the draught.
I hope you'll agree that was remarkably restrained and I hope others will see again how much time, effort and temper must be wasted treating £u*%ing $tu9i6 (u^"s like you with the respect and courtesy you delude yourselves you deserve.
A simple statement of what I hope for your future might well get me into some sort of warmer than desirable water so I'll simply say that, for the good of the human race, I hope you and all of those as stupid as you are up to date with your jabs.
You have increased to three the number of total fucking morons* I have had to deal with at the Fiamengo File, which shows that stupidity is so pervasive even a platform as elevated as this is not immune. That is how low the human race has sunk.
A very reasonable request for you to provide an example to explain your bland assertion. Your response was abusive. Did you think the request was some kind of implied criticism? It was just a request and I would also like to understand more of your argument. But your personally insulting responses are simply unpleasant and pollute civilized discussion on Prof. Fiamengo's essays. I would encourage her to block you from these discussions.
Ian Lambton, I have never seen such a long, verbose ad hominem used to avoid addressing a question. The Guiness Book of Records may well be interested.
We are bogging down with all these definitions Janice, so I am not sure you jumped any gun. Who ever is to make sense of all that? You cannot mix xx and xy chromosomes in one body, so that leaves hormones, which begs the question, where did all these "women" that look like "men" (or the reverse) come from? "There is something rotten in the state of Denmark" Perhaps the Olympics are the lens bringing it all into focus?
Should feminists champion them ..... or demand they also be banned from competing in women's boxing given that they pose even more of a threat to other female boxers than Khelif?
People come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and abilities. I am a5’ nothing female. At age 25, being extremely obese, low cardio capacity, no intense training, I benched 150 lbs. Several of my brother’s friends, male, late teens to early twenties, 5’ 10” and taller, average weight, etc could not bench that amount. It only proves that men and women can be of very different body types and therefore physical capabilities. Any person who meets the criteria and skills for a job and desire to do a particular job should be allowed to do it. There are small, slight men and tall, muscular women; each sex has a spectrum of personalities. To say that one’s genitalia is all that qualifies or disqualifies someone from a job is rather ignorant. Men can be compassionate caretakers and women can be aggressive soldiers. Who we are and what we can do, given the opportunity to maximize our physical, mental, emotional capabilities has jaw dropping implications for all of us and for society. We need embrace the possibilities, so we can each be all we can be, rather than limit them based on preconceived stereotypes.
Prove it. Show us. It's coarse and vulgar I know but we are at a place where we should be told if the punter is crested or cleaved as our Queen Elizabeth 1 put it.
You're all a bunch of reactionary loons. Is that what this movement is about? If so then it’s shit. You don’t have to be rightwing nutball to realize how awful snd insane feminism is.
That doesn't make you a woman. I have those and no one my whole life has ever mistaken me for a woman. I'm not talking about female. Yes I am biologically female.but being a woman is on another level,it comes from.a place of deep spirituality that I have not got.
She has testicles, female genitalia, and a uterus but she has no ovaries. She also definitely has breasts if you look closely. She doesn't have periods. She has little to no pubic or underarm hair. They also have a short vagina.
Ok well there is something wrong with her. She obviously has some sort of intersex condition. She has breasts and a vagina and uterus but otherwise she went through male sexual development in puberty in terms of body strengthl.
Interesting theory but it begs the question - if Khelif is actually a woman who is the victim of Russian disinformation, why would she not simply prove it by providing certified test results showing XX chromosomes and normal female testosterone levels. Such testing is readily available to anyone. Instead she complains about "gender scrutiny", suggesting she has something to hide. Unfortunately we'll probably never see the IBA or IOC test results due to privacy laws, and the IOC has denounced sex testing altogether: "We managed to do away with sex testing in the last century." (Mark Adams, IOC Spokesperson)
Liberal Democrat Zionist, for God's sake. Oh well, there's worse things to be.
You must be Jewish. No one else would post like that. Well, whatever, I have bigger demons to fight, like Trump, etc. and Republicans. I'd ask you to reconsider your views, but you're obviously hopeless. All you guys are.
That sounds like total bullshit. That man is president of the International Boxing Association. He's not going to make up a bunch of crap. His whole career at the IBA is on the line if he makes up lies. Plus Russians and Russian press don't really lie that much. The Western press lies vastly more than the Russian press does. He also said a Taiwanese boxer also failed the test and was found to be XY. Did he make up lies about her too. Saying someone is XY when they are XX is a very serious lie and his career would be over. He also said both women were disqualified for having excessive testosterone levels.
Are you one of those liberals or maybe conservatives who is a Russia-hater. This BS sounds like it's coming from the Russia-hating liberal lunatics. "Everything Russia says is a lie." Prove it.
Based on her appearance, Imane Khelif appears to have AIS with the male appearance and strength, XY chromosomes, female genitalia, and high testosterone. If she had AIS, she would be far stronger than an ordinary woman. She would also have very high circulating testosterone levels in the male range. AIS persons go through male sexual development past puberty. This involves the formation of muscle mass, etc. These individuals should not be allowed to compete against women. They should have to fight men.
Some photos show what appears to be a penis under his clothing. I don't for one second believe he was born with female reproductive organs. Regardless, even if his sex was indeterminate his chromosomes are male and his body, bearing and strength are male characteristics.
Identified as female at birth, raised female, ID's as female all means that she obviously has female genitalia. If she has AIS, which seems likely, then she has female genitalia. However, she sure looks like a man in photos.
This emerging story, with all its flip-flops, highlights the that IOC and international/national sporting bodies do not have consistent rules as to "what is a man" in their sport. Clarification of the Algerian boxers real sex and sexual identification needed to be disclosed prior to his first fight.
Hi Janice, you article is solid and well written and based on what you knew up to the moment. I enjoyed it and take it in context that, the whole world is still developing ... just wish it would always be in the positive.
Josh Slocum I refer to Khelif as "she" because she identifies and lives as a woman, despite her XY chromosomes. I respect her right to do so because she was assigned female at birth, and would not have suspected any different until puberty, when menstruation failed to occur like other girls. That does NOT mean I respect her right to COMPETE IN SPORT as a woman. She has an unfair advantage over XX women, due to much higher testosterone levels.
No, she was banned by Umar Kremlev for beating a Russian boxer. The IBA has not released its report, methodology, or tests, and should not be considered a reliable source.
As always Janice the highest quality of writing and ethics. I honestly don’t believe we will ever know definitively the gender of Imane Khelif because they are now managing the situation and don’t want us to have certainty. If we had certainty it only validates your article and the argument against their policies. In my opinion Imane appears masculine, moves in a masculine manner and appears to have a strength advantage in line with masculinity.
What is this 'assigned sex at birth' business? It has long been medically possible to detect the sex of a child even while it is still in the womb. Sex is therefore not 'assigned' at birth. It may be officially recorded at time of birth, as fuller examination of the baby becomes possible then, but the foetus has been developing as a male or female body for months before that.
"The identification as a female could have been a mistake if this person suffers from a DSD."
In which case it would be MISIDENTIFICATION and the hospital may be liable. Which is precisely why the word "assigned" is used rather than "identified". It recognizes the possibility of error, and the existence of indeterminate sex at birth. As such it leaves the door open for "reassignment" in later life.
Like Caster Semenya both boxers have always been girls, coming from societies without the "nuance" and technology we are "blessed" with here in the uber sensitive west. Having been always girls and then women in their societies they are (sadly for them) an experiment in that idea of social construction. And clearly the biology was not negligible in their development. It both points out the nonsense of feminist theory and in addition the hatred of males. For these are not boys or men who decided to change sex, but girls whose participation in sport forced the uncovering of their very rare conditions. You'd expect that such "marginalised women" who in other ages would live their lives as women would be part of the "diversity" of womanhood and supported through what must be a traumatic situation. But no. the mere hint they may have some maleness in their bodies makes them fair game and a target. And that of course is the game of Rowling et al. All males or even those with some male traits contain an original evil. I feel sorry for these boxers and indeed any other people with such rare conditions, now so likely to bring the hatred of feminists, for the "accepting difference and diversity" mantra doesn't apply to them. Without the enlightenment of feminism such people may have been able to continued in their societies to live lives as rather "butch" women (or for others as soft men) without the secrets within their chromosomes or hormones rendering them targets.
There is also no such thing as being "in between sexes"
this word has been resurfacing due to the trans-lobby meddling but people suffering a DSD, which you wrongly call "intersex" have a accurately definable sex.
No they don't. Intersex is an old term which usage has come back due to the translobby.
You can accurately define a person sex based on sexual dimorphisms. Sex is defined no on a single aspect but function in reproduction, therefore the gametes (or the potential gametes) of a person are highly relevant in defining their sex.
There have been no known males with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS). CAIS is characterized by a 46,XY karyotype and the presence of male gonads (testes) but with complete resistance to androgens, leading to the development of female external genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics. Despite having male chromosomes and internal testes, individuals with CAIS are recognized as female based on their physical characteristics.
A mutation, lack of certain aspects of sexual dimorphisms or the existence of divergence or untypical sex dimorphism aspects do not change ones sex.
The word intersex is simply biologically wrong, there is nothing "in between" the sexes there is only male and female as that is the only relevant factor in sexual reproduction. Even a true hermaphrodite, which in humans does not exist is Intersex, it simply has both sexes,
"a number of news outlets asserting that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was born a woman."
That simply means Khelif was assigned female at birth, based on external genitalia. The presence of XY chromosomes would not become evident until puberty, due to Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome: "One in 15,000 males is born and grows up as a girl. And neither these girls nor their parents know it. These girls do not discover anything different until puberty. These people have an extremely high level of testosterone and other male sex hormones, but the testosterone does not affect the foetal cells that usually develop into male sexual organs because of a mutation in the androgen receptor gene. These people therefore have male chromosomes but are women socially and in external appearance. They do not have internal female sexual organs, and they form testicles that remain concealed in the abdominal cavity.”
Khelif was disqualified last year due to XY chromosomes, as reported by TASS:
MOSCOW, March 25. /TASS/. The International Boxing Association (IBA) leadership has excluded athletes who tried to pass themselves off as women from the list of participants in the Women's World Championship in India. This was announced to TASS on Saturday by the organization's president Umar Kremlev. "Based on the results of DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to deceive their colleagues and pretended to be women. Based on the results of the tests, it was proven that they have XY chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from the competition," Kremlev said.
Personally I'm disappointed with the IBA ruling, I wanna see more boxers like Khelif beat the shit out of crybaby women like Carini, until they dominate the sport and drive feminist scum like Rowling into terminal apoplexy. Apparently the IOC feels the same way!
In general the intersex phenomenon is far more evident in poor countries where folks can't afford to have the condition medically "corrected" in childhood/adolescence. Unlike in the affluent West, where we generally intervene in childhood to "correct" any abnormalities. Not just intersex conditions. Even tall girls are given stilboestrol to deliberately stunt their growth, despite potentially dangerous side effects.
My husband wrote a follow-up article based on this piece, and pointing out, amongst innumerable other oddities, that the same elites who cannot define a woman are now quite certain that Imane Khelif IS one:
Very well said. While I do not question that the Italian boxer had the right, and may have been wise, to withdraw from her match as she did...it is somewhat absurd when you claim to be an Olympic boxer that you were not prepared to take a few really hard punches and start crying about it. Forgive me, but crying about it reinforces every negative stereotype about women that feminism claims to fight against. A man who withdrew when discovering he was over matched would not receive sympathy were he to start crying about how unfair it is.
Ironically, the trans movement is doing society a great service by exposing the foolishness of the feminist arguments here. This is best seen in sports like running or swimming where individual athletes regardless of sex ARE competing on a level playing field against the course and time. If the top 500 college swimmers on a level playing field result in 498 men and 2 women as the Riley Gaines situation reveals, then we must conclude that women are indeed physically inferior to men and we should stop pretending otherwise even if it means an end to all the affirmative action preferences for women for positions they probably are underqualified for.
I also must object to the whining about how the trans boxer's performance deprived a woman of her dreams. She was deprived of nothing...she lost her match. 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 without creation of separate protected leagues. Just my thoughts.
"The male athletes whose sports were cancelled to create programs for women under Title IX ..." Great point, my friend. What a disgrace in the name of gender equality, and no feminist gives a damn.
"Ironically, the trans movement is doing society a great service by exposing the foolishness of the feminist arguments here."
Exactly. The feminists declared that "gender is a social construct", so men simply took them at their word and began identifying as women. And now the feminists are crying foul because their bluff has been called and they have egg all over their faces.
Transsexual men's domination of women's sports is irony of the most delicious sort --- the ideological chickens have well and truly come home to roost.
Another example of reality asserting itself -- contrary to sex-positive feminist ideology and the idea of the "strong independent" woman -- is something familiar to the online MGTOW 'manosphere' : "the wall." Meaning the biological reality of women over 35 whose chance to marry and have a family is fast diminishing after a decade or two (or three) of promiscuity and turning down good men because they didn't want to settle (the pattern of hypergamy: forming or seeking a sexual relationship with a person of a superior social status.
Biological reality favours women in their 20s, who have a wide field of men to choose from, but it favours men from the 30s and 40s onward. This is because a woman's sexual selection choices diminish as she gets older. If she sleeps around or has multiple partners, she is thought to be "used" by men, reducing her ability to pair-bond and often making her unhappy with men in general. This is where a lot of misandry comes from. This is due to her experience with the top 10% of men whom she pursues but who won't commit because they have options. The bottom 90%, the so-called nice guys, who will commit are typically rejected -- or worse they are chosen but mercilessly henpecked and eventually divorced losing everything.
Meanwhile, men increase in wealth (if they remain single) and thus have greater sexual selection as time goes on because options for women increase with looks and youth while options for men increase with wealth and age. This reality has exposed the myth of the "strong independent" woman as a cruel lie: careerism and promiscuity and childlessness has made Western women unhappy. Feminism failed them. Biological reality can't be denied. Things would be better for women if they embraced traditional marriage and family values -- and some are choosing to do so.
The root cause of all this was secularism: marriage before God and community was considered holy and not to be broken. Divorce became common in the 1970s and 80s as the West shifted from Christianity to secularism, there was no social pressure to stay married so women rejected men en masse and taught their daughters to do the same, resulting in this mess.
I wondered whether you were paraphrasing him in the title of your piece --- he famously said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth".
I assumed you were deliberately quoting Mike Tyson as well. Its a well known quote. If you weren't doing it on purpose - then its actually all the more significant! Brilliantly accurate serendipity.
Now if he'd been facing Jane Couch it'd be a different story. And if the ladies,the other ladies,not me,think maybe equality ain't so hot no more,wait till they're on the front line facing big bearded blokes with huge choppers (I mean metal knives,not something else), and gotta engage in hand to hand fighting. And next time no let offs for being preggers. Thats in the plan. You want that for your granddaughter.
Would it change your mind to learn that a man's punching power has been found to be 2 1/2 times that of a woman's? I don't blame her for stopping the fight at all.
The feminist writers who insisted that physical differences between the sexes are “socially constructed” are looking pretty silly right now. Delusional, actually. As if they didn’t know, from their own immediate experience, who is better at opening the pickle jar. In my own feminist period, I used to wonder what would happen if an average man and average woman faced off in a physical fight. Well, now we know, and it ain’t pretty. The beautiful traditions of chivalry and gentlemanliness in Christian Europe involved voluntary self-restraint of masculine power, in deference to feminine vulnerability. If women were ladies again, maybe men would once more be gentlemen.
Forget average men and women. Serena Williams herself, a formidable athlete and certainly not a small and dainty woman, who will probably kick the asses of 99.9% of men, said that she could never compete against the top male tennis players because it's a different game entirely.
The Williams sisters, when they were ascending to the height of their success in women's tennis, publicly stated that they could beat any male player ranked outside the top 200.
They were at the Australian Open at the time (1998) and the men's player, Karsten Braasch accepted the challenge - he was ranked 203 on the day, but after several defeats, he was about to fall much lower as soon as the rankings were next revised. He was also at the end of his career - 50 years old - and he was dressed in off-court clothes, and smoked cigarettes between games.
He was supposed to play a set against Serena, which he did, and won 6-1. Unexpectedly, Venus then asked him to play a set against her immediately afterwards. He accepted the further challenge and without a break, beat her 6-2.
The fact that the sisters set their challenge as low as outside the top 200 shows that they were trying to think within real-world parameters, rather than the fantasies of feminist theory. Even so, they still overestimated their abilities against male players.
Lorber and Martin claim that the reduction of the number of sets in a match was a patriarchal plot to make women think they are weak. In fact, it means that women can make more Grand Slam money than men because they can play more matches.
Every battle of the sexes in tennis has ended up with the woman being utterly destroyed, except the hyped King-Riggs match, and some say that was a fix.
I personally don't believe it. I was actually working in tennis management at the time. But no question Riggs was out of shape. In any case, what does a win by a 29 year old woman in her prime over a 55 year old has-been mean?
There was actually a match between a ranked male player and a female player in an ATP (Association of Tennis Pros) sanctioned match, and the guy won 6-0, 6-0.
I read that but it was based on hearsay - plausible hearsay but still. I think he threw it because he was hoping for a rematch - which Billie Jean was too smart to give him. He should have beaten her as he beat Margaret Court but he was arrogant & underestimated her. Court he respected, trained hard, and waxed her.
Hi Diana, I'm going to weigh in on this as I actually like watching tennis. This famous match is now available on Youtube in its entirety. I'd only ever known about it through the standard accounts.
After watching I am in no doubt the threw it. His play was so incompetant as to be embarrassing. And it must have been painful for people watching to go along with the pretense. He repeatedly makes mistakes that a 7 year old would make.
I was ambivilent about the rumours that he owed money to the mob - but after actually watching its impossible to deny he deliberatly threw it. Why? Dunno.
You're ignoring the fact that King is a lesbian, and lesbian/bisexual women have higher testosterone levels than heterosexual women. Testosterone promotes muscle mass and endurance, that's why lesbians dominate in so many sports, including tennis. Have a look at the musculature on King or Navratilova in their prime, it's nothing like a normal woman. So the King-Riggs match was not a true "battle of the sexes".
BINGO! Precisely what I've been saying. Same for the Williams sisters, they are BULL DOGS with high testosterone, regardless of the fact they are married to SIMPS, probably bisexual in their own right.
Do they? I am bisexual and have very low testosterone (even for a woman), very thin bones and low muscularity. I am not athletic at all. I have two fully heterosexual female friends who did semi-professional sports and both are very heavily built with much more masculine looks than I have.
Serina Williams is a BULL DOG and so is her masculine looking sister. The Williams sisters are literally built like MEN. They are also known steroid users. The hypocrisy of this whole argument about transgenders in wo-MEN'S sports is augmented by this very point: Which is MOST fe-MALE athletes are high testosterone in the first place and many of them take steroids anyway. The cruel attack on Imane Khelif illustrates a long-standing position of mine: Transgenders & fe-MALE athletes are not all that different. MANY still do not know that Imane Khelif IS a wo-MAN who was born with a vagina, who happens to have a testosterone disorder, LIKE >ALL fe-MALE ATHLETES DO ANYWAY. SPORTS ARE DUMB AND wo-MEN'S SPORTS ARE DUMBER
Um no, the hypocrisy of this whole argument about wo-MEN'S sports is augmented by this very point. fe-MALE athletes are HIGH testosterone wo-MEN in the first place and many of them take steroids anyway. There is virtually NO difference between fe-MALE athletes & transgenders, further illustrated by the cruel attack on Imane Khelif who IS a wo-MAN with high testosterone like MOST fe-MALE athletes and who was thought to be a MAN, but like MOST fe-MALE athletes is a wo-MAN who looks like a MAN.
She was pregnant so she's definitely not a "hermaphrodite" (I don't think it even exists in humans). Of course she's a genetic freak - all elite athletes are.
I still "hold the door open" for anyone (women, men, kids). It's one way to identify feminists; kids think it hilarious, feminists react as if I've insulted them
More than once, I have held the door for someone and a train of people, all different ages and sexes, will chug on through, as though I were an employee merely doing his job. I find it strange.
I’m not surprised. With all this kindness rhetoric many of us have forgotten that good manners aren’t just for show - they convey kindness and thoughtfulness without the virtue signalling and inherent quest for likes.
True, though it can sometimes be frustrating to do the kind act and have it entirely ignored or even sneered at. I have a friend who held a door for a woman at a university and was glared at as if he had insulted her, when he merely meant it as a politeness. I've also had the experience of holding the door for a family and have them waltz through without even making eye contact, as if I weren't there at all. I must admit that although I did not do it for effusive thanks, I expected some reciprocal acknowledgement.
Um, NO chivalry is and was ALWAYS evil, we are not to bow to an angel never mind a wo-MAN.
Bowing or kneeling to wo-MEN is idolatry, gyno logy, the worship of wo_MEN.
Wanting to protect those who acknowledge they're weaker decades after invading MALE spaces, I'd say chivalry was always wrong, it's just more apparent now.
The original feudal chivalry had nothing to do with women specifically. It was quite a noble concept. What we now call "chivalry" is a distortion of those original precepts.
I think that chivalry instinct is still strong since this relatively minor issue is somehow what everyone is more passionate about than anything else even remotely.
Oh, indeed. Anti-feminists used to warn that chivalry would die out when women won the right to vote and gained other types of political and social equality/advantage. Interestingly, it never did.
Actually I should qualify that, I'm still very chivalrous towards Asian women. It's only Western women I feel no chivalry towards. In fact, I quite enjoy hearing about Western women's suffering, like increasing loneliness, poverty, homelessness, and incarceration rates. Conversely I feel extremely protective towards Asian women, and hate seeing them in poverty.
Baloney! Western males are SIMPS and are PUSSY WHIPPED. Biology NOTHING to do with gynolatry. The most courageous & enlightened MEN have NO desire to protect random wo-MEN. The most Godly thing MEN can do is to let wo-MEN reap what they sowed.
I'm never voting again. I've dutifully voted for 50 years and look where we are. I wish those dreadful Pankhurst women had got on with useful things instead of making trouble. And all their nonsense didn't win us (in UK) the vote. Emmeline and Christabel made a Devils Pact with Lloyd George that they would get all the women into the munitions factories,creating death non stop and sure enough after WW1 he kept his side of the Satanic deal and granted women of 30 and over the vote. Big deal. Like that man said,if voting meant anything they wouldn't let you do it. In the UK our female vote was paid for by men's blood.
Which suggests that it is a very deep part of our psychology. After all the hoo ha about the boxers is framed as being about "males" putting in danger helpless females, in order to gain the support of men all too ready to protect girls and women, no matter the cost to their fellow men. Whereas of course the real story is that two individuals with rare conditions and who have always been considered female find themselves caught up in a very 21st century mess. Rowling summons up the atavistic idea that as such their condition turns them into evil abusers and a danger to women demanding white knights ride in to save the fair damsels. Ignoring the fact that neither boxer has an unblemished record without any defeats. Feminism has relied upon the deep rooted gynocentric patterns of society that impel men to "protect" women.
Speak for yourself. I support trans athletes in wo-MEN'S sports. UNTIL we PROTECT BOYS from wo-MEN invading MALE spaces, I say GO TEAM TRANS! >KARMA! Only SIMPS would care about wo-MEN reaping what they sewed.
Look, if this Algerian boxer is a man, then he's lost in the arena nine times to women in his career. That just proves that women can stand up to a man in a fight and win. So, like I don't know what kind of argument you're making.
Rowling can go to hell. As it was demonstrated above, the alphabet garbage was promoted by feminists like her for decades and now that it's starting to backfire on women she has the gall to say the progressive tripe is a "men's rights movement"? J.K. belongs in that ring to face the consequences of her actions.
Women's sports as a concept is just a special privilege like the Paralympics. If the sports were allowing both sexes there would be no female winners. I'm not too sympathetic to the female athletes crying about how this is unfair - them losing some participation medals is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
I do feel sorry for the young women who aren't feminists and have poured their hearts into their sport, but I do not see the threat to women's sport as in any way equivalent to the many killing injustices that men face on a regular basis and which neither side of the political mainstream even talks about.
Until normie women start facing consequences they will continue to passively support feminism and the alphabet lunacy. I actually enjoy this feminist civil war, but unfortunately both sides still blame men (along with the tradcon white knights).
I agree to you Janice. However, I am against an yet-another-white-knight-rescue(TM) to save women from the consequences of feminist ideology. We have to start to give women the chance to recognize error and learn from it. This is the least of what we can do if we want to treat women as grown up human beings and give them chances to fail and learn. The key thing would be to prevent the Rowlings to spread misinformation on men's rights movement and owning the discourse. The Carinis have to know that what happened to her is due to feminism.
Understood. But what if it is in the nature of (most) women NOT to be accountable and in the nature of society not to be able to hold them to account? I suspect both may be adaptive strategies for survival, in which case I don't see them going away anytime soon, no matter how many opportunities are given to women. I agree with you, but with a sense of doom.
As you wrote it is not all women, and you (as my favorite MRA) are a living proof that women are not a homogeneous blob. I believe that this group is larger than it seems because the ones disagreeing with gender ideology are rather silent.
Janice is a unicorn, and there are RARE exceptions like her, unfortunately MOST wo-MEN are indeed a homogenous blob. Even RIGHT wing wo-MEN espouse the same rhetoric as the left wing fEMINISTS. i.e. Riley Gaines blaming patriarchy and domestic violence for what turned out to be to two >wo-MEN who look like MEN boxing each other. Just the fact that MOST wo-MEN look like PROSTITUTES the way they dress is PROOF. Like sheep most wo-MEN follow the herd (other wo-MEN)
"But what if it is in the nature of (most) women NOT to be accountable and in the nature of society not to be able to hold them to account?"
Strangely, all females in my family were always highly "accountable", responsible, and dependable. If you think that some media caricature or some fantasizing sociologists represents "most women", you are as much an ideologue as they are.
Hi Janice, Feminists are obviously selective about their demands for equality and their complaints about sexism. BTW, I would not call Kate Millett or Andrea Dworkin necessarily radical given the production of early 'second wave' feminists. To quote Norman Mailer, "Yet the SCUM Manifesto, while extreme, even extreme of the extreme, is nonetheless a magnetic north for Women's Lib." -- The Prisoner of Sex, The Acolyte
Yes, I agree that there's nothing extreme about Dworkin and Millett in the context of other Second Wave feminists such as Valerie Solanas, Robin Morgan, Mary Daly, Susan Brownmiller, Catharine MacKinnon, etc. Even Betty Friedan, who pulled back from some of the more extreme statements of her political sisters, claimed that men had put suburban women into "comfortable concentration camps."
There used to be a distinction made between radical feminism and other forms of feminism such as Marxist feminism, liberal feminism, and (a bit later) intersectional feminism. The radical feminists were the ones who saw patriarchy as the most fundamental (root=radical) system of domination (as opposed to the Marxists) and who, in finding oppression at the heart of every female experience, even or especially in family life and sex, opposed the liberal feminists, who mainly sought political rights and representation.
However, the distinction was never very clear and is not really useful now. The vast majority of feminists (even the 'coffee shop' type) are now radical feminists to some degree, having largely accepted claims about rape culture, sexual harassment, etc.
I remember that! Betty Friedan's assertion that suburban women were caged in "comfortable concentration camps" no doubt descended from Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House. The 60's and 70's were filled with claims that "men defined women and male/female roles." Men were being credited with micromanaging the entire division of labor between men and women! That both men and women had shared traditional notions of what was the proper sphere of men and the proper sphere of women in the world was supplanted by the claim that women had been historically "brainwashed." The force of bad ideas cannot be overstated. The other day a dear friend of mine said that he would never purchase the virtual assistant Alexa because its voice was female and this reinforced the notion that women are men's personal secretaries and servants. My eyes rolled out of head.
Haha! You should tell your friend that you know a woman who would never purchase an Alexa because she is sick of hearing female voices making authoritative statements and prefers male ones.
The comparison to the Paralympics, which used to be called the Special Olympics, to women's sports is one I've often made myself. Somehow, nearly everyone thinks it's a mean thing to say and makes me both a misogynist and an ableist. It is, however, perfectly appropriate.
Indeed, and what is an actual example of a 'woman's sport'? They are simply sports which men do in a higher quality division. I suppose there is netball, but they can have that.
Interesting. The reaction so different to this sort of thing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-68816466 wherein a female team from the age band above that of the league itself beats the younger boys.
There are several gymnastic events in the Olympics that have no male equivalent. There is also vaginal weight lifting, in which women clutch the handle of a rope with there vaginas and see how much weight they can lift off the floor.
Back in the '70s I remember something called the 'Cuntest' which involved women ejecting hot dogs from their vaginas for distance. I can't find anything on line about it, so I can't be sure it wasn't a parody.
Oh yes, there's that thing in gymnastics where they hang off a bar and slam their midriff into another one at high speed. Men only do that metaphorically.
As for your other examples, we have entered 'too much information' zone 😂
Unfortunately the "Special Olympics" have become more and more mired in a proliferation of categories in order to try to be fair. In a way its a microcosm of the nonsense of trying to engineer equality. I'm a fan of Max Whitlock (Gymnast) but now a mature man he has proven unable to medal, no one is surprised because age is one reality we don't have to pretend is irrelevant. He was of course also the classic gymnast build in his heyday, unlike me with tree trunk legs and weedy arms, another unfairness. Perhaps the "able bodied" Olympics should start increasing the categories to recognize all the many ways different bodies, ages etc. may give disadvantages? Or maybe we keep it simple and reflect that reality is unfair.
Well,I expect JK did what we all did from 1970 on,we struggled to overcome our natural repugnance at the thought of taking it up the ass or sucking them off,oh sorry I shouldn't say it plain like that should I,I should wreath it in pink chiffon,roses and clouds of romance. We accepted that those two sensitive and charming guys who just "want to be together" just need societal acceptance and approval to be happy and then they can get on with nice,tidy,bourgeois lives just like everyone else. But every time we went oh,ok,yes I get it ok,they raised the bar. Now they are like shoving it in our faces,an appropriate analogy. If you tolerate this we're coming for your children and they are.
Straight fire from Fiamengo. Ideological subversion has destroyed many minds, now it has destroyed women’s sports and safety. If Kamala wins, America’s first female president will further destroy women and reality as we know it. For Democracy!
I might just vote for her so I can spend the next four years responding to her word salad, cluelessness, and neuroticism with howls of "What's the alternative to this stunning bravery? Sending women back to the kitchen? Repealing the 19th Amendment?"
I don't really know if they are or not, but I do know that any sort of reasonable conversation with feminists is not possible unless both are treated as credible propositions.
When Eric Trump gave his speech at the RNC in which he listed all the things wrong with America that a Trump win would tackle, the item that got the biggest applause from the conservative audience was male athletes in women's sports. Not a word about male suicide, paternity fraud, men's loss of the right to parent their children after divorce, equity hiring discrimination, or the many other pressing issues that matter far more than a few men knocking women off podiums.
Yes, exactly. Nobody cares enough about the takeover of men's and boys' spaces or institutions to say anything about it. Or they are simply too cowardly. Feminism has been so successful in infiltrating our language and our very thoughts that most people have lost the ability to oppose it.
Yes. Somehow you should engineer a situation where you can publicly and credibly be threatened by a male, to see if that engages any white knights to leap to your aid. Or be threatened by a "Trans" woman (there appear quite a few with a nice line in florid threats). A sort of test of how wide the male concern to protect females goes. I am of course conducting a thought experiment.
TO HELL WITH wo-MEN'S SPORTS! Most of them are DIKES and the few that aren't lose their periods, lose their feminine body fat, and develop high testosterone, adding to that many take testosterone as well. wo-MEN'S sports is GAY PORNOGRAPHY
Let us suppose (against all the evidence) that the culprit is indeed misogyny. Does it not occur to feminists that they may have something to do with the creation of that state of affairs? Feminism is in any case an oxymoron. If women are simply the same as men in the ways feminists assert, then they would act and achieve as men. The fact that they need every kind of support and special treatment demonstrates that they are not. We should not forget the female tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams who lost in back-to-back friendlies to the 203rd seeded male player, Karsten Braasch and that 47% of female Israeli soldiers were, at the time of an investigation, hors de combat through training injury.
Feminists have not always argued that men and women are identical except for gestation and lactation. Long before the advent of "second wave" feminism, in the eighteenth century, Mary Wallstonecraft relied on Enlightenment philosophy to argue that women were the equals of men. It was "society" that taught the reverse. Her focus was on intellectual equality, however, not on physiological equality. It was she, perhaps, who introduced the feminist conspiracy theory of history by arguing that men prevented women from becoming their equals by depriving girls and women of education and therefore turning them into irrational and sentimental creatures--like children or pets--for their own amusement. Her notion of equality referred to sex, at any rate, but not to class.
Fast-forward to Nellie McClung, an early Canadian feminist and suffragist. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, she argued for legal equality between men and women but also for the moral superiority of women over men. Like many other feminists, McClung assumed that giving women the vote would, apart from anything else, end war and many other problems that she explained as the results not merely of masculinity but of maleness itself. To argue this, she focused her attention on a powerful and profound difference between the sexes, one that favored women instead of men. Women became mothers, after all, and men did not. It was this maternal instinct--she said little about a paternal instinct--that would make them vote against male candidates who advocated war and other cultural pathologies. It was this emphasis on maternal nature, by the way, that led her to support eugenics (and Prohibition in the States).
Both Wollstonecroft and McClung have entered the feminist pantheon, and both have led "second wave" feminists to distort the notion of sexual equality, the former by disregarding nature (emphasizing the need for culture to reform nature through reason) and the latter by emphasizing it (femaleness being innately virtuous and maleness being innately vicious).
In short, the current debate over sexual equality, let alone the larger one over nature and culture, has been a source of confusion within feminism from the very beginning. It is inherent in both strands of feminism.
I made a similar argument here in relation to transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, quoting Ernest Belfort Bax, who recognized the confusion in feminism over a hundred years ago:
The over-riding feature of feminism has of course been its self-contradictory arguments, that appear to demonstrate that women often don't know what they want. Trans-sexuals are a manifestation of the feminist idea that sex, or gender as they call it, lies on a spectrum, and all should be embraced. This argument has now come back to bite J.K. Rowling, Julie Burchill et al in the backside. Are gay men and women created by birth or by society? Feminists don't seem to know any better than anyone else, and so the Terf wars. The trouble is that feminism has really only concerned itself, perhaps not surprisingly, with how women feel about themselves, and not with any kind of scientific or biological understanding, even at the most obvious level. Oestrogen and testosterone are thought to be interchangeable in their effects, except when they make life difficult for women. Women have a maternal instinct when they claim custody or protection from violence, but are, they say, every bit as ambitious, unemotional and competitive as men when it comes to running a business or fighting in the services. Feminist Wilma Meikle (1917) "The truth is that motherhood is one of the most casual of all relationships and one of the shortest lived.... There is no natural necessity for any close association between mother and child.... after it has left its mother's breast... its health will usually have a better chance if it is handed over to the care of experts....the importance of superseding parental by State control..." gives a flavour of at least one strand of feminist belief in the maternal instinct. At the same time, robust studies have shewn that women are only slightly less aggressive than men, while having a less developed understanding and control of power and leadership.
Thank you very much for this! It's lovely to find someone else who has read Meikle. I thought she had some sensible things to say about the feminist fuss over male sexuality, but her Marxism got the better of her when it came to motherhood and the raising of children.
And of course the Communists in Eastern Europe followed exactly that plan with brief maternity leave and universal childcare. Curiously this wasn't popular with actual people. I have a friend who, amazingly, married a Czech shortly after the crushing of the "Prague spring". She lived for many years with her husband in Czechoslovakia before they finally got to leave to live in England. What is amazing is the sheer minute control of every aspect of life she experienced as well as the form of feminism there. She knows what feminism looks like in practice when women are simply "workers" and motherhood is not special at all and the state is the expert best placed to nurture children.
What hides women's aggression from obvious view is that MOST women don't want to engage in a street fight or a scrap,and most women are clever enough not to need to. That song sung by Bonnie Tyler and written by Steinman + Pitchfork,it expresses a real phenomenon and also explains why decades of "education" is never going to eradicate gang or street violence. The victor "fresh from the fight" is a deeply erotic figure to those Mean Girls (that's all of us) and he can pick the choicest one. Without first checking their educational results. So men find reasons to fight or CREATE reasons to fight and women have the evolutionary motive to pick the victor. That's how it always was. For a brief century reason and sense prevailed but it got boring,and turned out to be an anomaly anyway. Now the old ways have come back,ah happy days,burning witches,torture,Heresy and Inquisitions
A few days ago Andrew Doyle reported on his substack that, "In 2017, the Dallas under-15 boys football club beat the women’s national team 5-2 in a friendly game." This is the female team that has dominated women's soccer for the last decade, winning several world championships and Olympic gold metals. And they can't even beat a local boys team.
Yes, very true. I wrote about it extensively at the time that the U.S. Women's Soccer Team was complaining bitterly about 'equal pay' a few years ago, disguising the fact that they had negotiated a contract that paid them very differently from the men's team: they wanted a contract in which they got paid whether they won or lost, and that paid players who were injured or on maternity leave; and that paid dental benefits and various other benefits. That's the contract they got. The men negotiated a contract that paid them only if they played and only if they won. Then when the women's team went all the way to the championship, they all cried about sexism. It was one of the most impressive examples of the accountability gap I've seen recently.
Lost amidst all the hoopla was the simple fact that men's soccer/football attracts a much larger fan base than women's because it is generally faster and far more exciting; and therefore brings in far more revenue with which to pay players.
Yet the men's team was compelled, during the controversy, to come out in support of the women's team, and I believe they have even agreed to share some of the money they bring in with the women. Incredible. And still the execrable Megan Rapinoe goes on and on, on every talk show that will have her (and so many will), about gender pay gaps.
I've always thought that a simple way to solve the problem was to have as many transgender women take up the sport as possible. It would get a lot more interesting fast.
Even if women's football were, by some objective standard, better than mens. And men's football drew the vastly greater audience, its players and clubs would earn hugely greater amounts and their players be able to command higher pay. There are very many sports that are conducted as amateurs or semi amateur basis with little money in them because their audiences are small. Many have a brief limelight at the Olympics. I'm sure the players are very skillful, and dedicated, but the reality is they don't generate the vast incomes of "soccer". And therefore there is little prospect of massive payouts, unless they can somehow capture the attention of a vastly greater audience.
Apologies, I've just written a comment about the Karsten Braasch sets against the Williams sisters, not realising until now that you'd already done so.
Copied and pasted from the 'Men Are Good' Substack earlier today:
Women actually have thicker skulls than men and there's reason to believe that men are more susceptible to head injuries. Carini may well never have been punched that hard before and I'm sure it was painful, but male boxers routinely get hit that hard and there's no reason to believe it's any less dangerous or painful to them.
Can you even imagine a male boxer going up against a more powerful opponent and dropping to his knees in tears? Would he get outpourings of sympathy and outrage that someone tougher than he was was allowed to fight him? It's not like she was unaware of what she was getting into when she voluntarily got into the ring with Khelif.
Feminists, having complete mastery over cognitive dissonance, will not have any problem maintaining that "anything a man can do, a woman can do better" while also claiming that this is male on female violence and abuse.
Stop playing into the feminists' and tradcons' hands by drawing the parallel to "violence against women" domestic violence! So many people have sounded suspiciously Duluthian in the last few days, and I hate it.
Yes,I knew that,so this dignified young lady never had an inkling of what fighting is really about,real fighting. Not do I,I hasten to add,but I have read a lot of history. I love heritage cream tea history but there is a lot of blood and guts behind the pretty facade.
Thank you, Janice, for another excellent piece. Just an observation from recent experience on how extreme the physical differences are between the sexes:
I was attending to the needs of a relative in hospital recently, and watched a 90-year old man easily and repeatedly pull himself out of the grip of two (female) nurses who were trying with all their strength to prevent him from leaving the ward. He was thin but not quite emaciated, and unsteady on his feet; brain damage prevented him from understanding his situation (grave, and he died two weeks later), but left him sufficient awareness to make frequent attempts at escape.
There were soon four or five (female) nurses around him, but even then, they found it difficult to prevent him from leaving (raised voices and struggling). The situation was only resolved when an available male nurse was found, and he steered the man firmly but calmly back to his bed, while speaking soothingly to him.
I have no criticisms of the female nurses; unlike women in policing or firefighting, they weren't out of place, and were otherwise doing their job very well. I'm only pointing to the disparity in strength, and I myself initially assumed that the first two nurses on the scene would be able to manage such an elderly and sick man without difficulty - until I saw what happened.
I'm sure there are many good female nurses, but I think it is one of the many crying injustices of our time that nursing has become almost exclusively female-dominated. Many older men do not wish to be bathed, helped to the toilet, and bossed around by women, many of whom are not particularly kind or respectful to male patients. When I used to visit my mom in hospital, I frequently noted the cruelty and mockery of female nurses towards men in the wards.
Thank you so much for this. I've never seen the subject even mentioned. I think it should be a major men's issue. Most of us will find ourselves in hospital at or near the end of our lives, and it is not right that men should be at the mercy of shrewish women. I've never met a sadistic male nurse (I'm sure there are some, but they tend to be cheerful and competent) while I have met many borderline sadistic and incompetent female nurses.
When thirteen I was in hospital overnight after smashing my left shoulder. They had to assign two nurses to stay by my bed overnight to stop me rolling on to the injured shoulder.
It was one of the "advantages" of my career, being a rarity, a male, I was always seen to be available to deal with "challenging behavior". This of course gave me experience and knowledge that was valuable, and helped in promotions . As an observation my female colleagues in this "heavy" end of care tended to be lesbian. Though that may be coincidence.
I have a hard time feeling anything but supremely ambivalent on this issue.
On one hand, I’ve trained and competed in strength and combat sports for most of my adult life. I fully acknowledge the absurdity of women competing against men in any physical endeavor, let alone combat sports.
On the other hand, I don’t care about women’s sports, and, quite frankly, women vote for this bullshit.
Now, when I say, “I don’t care,” I mean that in the most literal sense possible. I don’t care whether they succeed massively, fail miserably, or fall somewhere in between. It makes no difference to me. They could disappear tomorrow and my life will be utterly unaffected.
Interestingly enough, my lack of care and concern for women’s sports is something I have in common with…the vast majority of women, it seems.
If women really wanted to put a stop to this nonsense, it ends tomorrow. Just stop participating. No whining, bitching, or petulant cries of discrimination or “mIsOgYnY.” No claims of males stealing opportunities or waging a war on women. Just simply walk away.
Until that time comes, I can’t take the so called “detractors” seriously. You get what you tolerate, I’m afraid. If you’re too afraid of being branded a “transphobe,” that’s squarely on you.
Hell, I’m convinced that the reason why women are trying to recruit (read: shame) male “allies” (read: *VOMIT*) into this is because they don’t want to have to wear that label, or at least wear it alone.
Passive aggression and plausible deniability are the second most formidable strategies women tend to implement, right behind vagina and victimhood. The only thing better than getting men to fight your battles for you by “damseling” and claiming that you’re being aggressed by other men trespassing into your sports is when you get to divert and shield yourself from the criticism that comes back your way if/when you inevitably step on the landmine of political correctness in 2024.
As for the specific case of the Algerian and Italian fighters competing in the Olympics, it seems to be a bit more complicated than its being portrayed by media outlets. With regard to the broader issue, however, the overarching point remains the same.
Whether directly or indirectly, actively or passively, explicitly or implicitly, women voted for this nonsense.
Merely stating that gender is NOT, in fact, a social construct may not get through your thick skull, but a man’s fist just might, if you let it happen.
Well said. I also find it frustrating that so many men, whether on the right or left politically (but especially on the right or center-right) become so excited to team up with radical feminists on this issue as if to prove their pro-female bona fides. These are the same men who know about the biased family court system etc. but can't resist the chivalric call to defend the very women who have been destroying men and families for five decades.
It does make one wonder. The feminization of Western Culture is pervasive. I once asked a friend who referred to himself as a male feminist, "If men as a group have so intently and maliciously treated women so poorly, why the change of heart? Why all the self-flagellation and confession of sins? Why don't men, meanies they supposedly are, burn all the feminist text and shut down all the women's studies programs? His answer was predictable, "Because feminists have shamed men into being better, " he said. Imposing current ideological resentments on the past has no doubt helped many a man see his own oppression of women everywhere. It supports at least one progressive version of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon and it has probably supported no little amount of faith in the "Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
I feel extremely protective of the notion of women's sports because I have daughters and at least one of them looks like she is going to take sport seriously (just amateur/recreational level) and I want her to be able to do that in a female-only environment. I can't do that by just being concerned with her specific sport / team, the whole zeitgeist needs sorting hence my sports-wide concern with the issue. I can't not be fatherly in this just because of what some women have been doing / saying in other issues.
Have you actually discussed the question with your daughter? She may not share your concern about "female-only environment". In fact, she may give you a lecture about "trans women are women too"! I suspect you'll find it's all very "inclusive" at the amateur/recreational level, it's only the elite level where problems arise.
I haven't. She's nine, and I don't think she is aware of the concept of trans. She has the School Of The Bleeding Obvious awareness that we all learnt in the playground, that boys and girls are different. Even at an age where there isn't yet much difference in physical attributes, boys dominate sport in the playground by virtue of greater interest and more competitive attitude. She has no interest in developing the thick skin and sharp elbows required to get along in that, she much prefers playing sports with girls only. If she ever wants to play in a genuinely mixed environment I am all for that; but I am not for her having to play in a de facto mixed environment because someone is lying and pretending they are female when they are in fact male.
Right on Brother! So much truth you covered. In fact, MOST wo-MEN >don't EVEN PLAY SPORTS! fe_MALE athletes are a small fringe of hermaphrodites, the same tom boys that invaded every MALE space from BOYS SPORTS to the BOY scouts, to the secret service. fe_MALE athletes ARE transgenders in a different form.
I used to feel a twinge of sympathy for Rowling over the trans activist bashing her around. I was also beginning to see her as a die hard feminist and began to form a degree of disdain for her.
After reading this article, I now kind of think that she has probably earned the right to be attacked by them as she appear to be guilty of similar types of ideology idiocy.
Now I do not think I could even be bothered to listen to her.
Her books in many ways do not seem to trumpet her ideology, so I guess that is something to be thankful for.
Well said. Rowling's rhetoric has such a dramatic view that it's something men are doing to women out of misogyny and patriarchal scheming. If anything it's deference to women and female leadership that creates this. The interesting thing is that the passion and outrage about this is orders of magnitude larger that what it objectively should be. Meaning on both political sides concern for women outweighs everything in practice.
It is NOTEWORTHY that she was punched with gloves, while wearing headgear. Forgive me if I be a “man-out-of-time”: was her opponent trans? I’m 63, an “old model”, high “T” male and I’ve got a stronger “Overhand Right” than that.
Not to brag; my great uncle was a Prize Fighter in the San Joaquin Valley in the Depression. His life is another example of male sacrifice to keep bread on the table; you’ll never complain about making beds again!
Janice, let me praise both you're readable prose and your timely subjects. You must've been a reporter in another life.
On a side note, the feminist attitude towards biology is worse than the denial of sex differences. Some even claim men have curtailed female evolution! Case in point: Adrienne Rich, winner of the National Book Award for poetry, also wrote Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). Here's a representative quote (pp. 126 - 127):
"Patriarchal man created - out of a mixture of sexual and affective frustration, blind need, physical force, ignorance, and intelligence split from its emotional grounding, a system which turned against woman her own organic nature, the source of her awe and her original powers. In a sense, female evolution was mutilated, and we have no way now of imagining what its development hitherto might have been; we can only try, at last, to take it into female hands."
If there's anything positive that can be said about feminists, it's that they work hard to prove that women really are irrational sex!
Thanks for this, Diego. There is a strong lesbian-feminist thread running through writers such as Rich, Sally Miller Gearhart, Mary Daly, and others that imagines utopian communities of women developing their talents freed of male oppression--so bigoted and hateful one can hardly believe it was developed and rewarded in universities across North America.
Unfortunately, I can believe it. North America - and other developed countries - have embraced plenty of bad ideas and used pseudoscience to justify them.
Hello friends, I jumped the gun on this story (mea culpa); it seems that it is still developing, with a number of news outlets asserting that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was born a woman. I had assumed from earlier reports I read that Khelif was intersex, with high testosterone and XY sex chromosomes, or even transgender. My argument about feminist flipflops on sex difference are valid, but the story is more complicated than I had assumed, and I wish I had waited before publishing. However, I will leave it stand despite its potential inaccuracies, and thank you all for your contributions.
Khelif is almost certainly male. The International Boxing Association gave him a medical test to see if he was eligible to box in the women's division, and he failed that test. He did not appeal the decision.
Did they? Have you seen this test? Did they release the methodology and results?
Or are you just repeating Umar Kremlev’s unsubstantiated claim?
You can read the minutes of the IBA boxing association where they discuss the disqualification. Both boxers actually failed testing in 2022 as well but the results weren’t available until well after the competition which is why they were allowed to compete in 2023z. On top of that you can read the letter sent to the IOC by the IBA expressing the test results and the concerns therein. Which test was run may indeed be important when it comes to testosterone levels, which test is not important in establishing XY chromosomes. This is very black and white. It’s also important to note that the Taiwanese boxer did not bother to appeal the decision. The Algerian boxer filed an appeal but withdrew it. Why do that when the only thing necessary to win your appeal is a $100 23 and Me available on the internet? Especially when if you are XX you could easily sue the IBA for piles of money? Why not take your own test between 2023 and 2024? Why not take a test when this first kicked off (which was days before the first match)?
I suspect the boxer from Taiwan knew that he was XY which is why he didn’t appeal, I still think he’s intersex, just that he was aware of it. I suspect the Algerian boxer found out about his condition via the testing and that he probably did take some sort of test to appeal to the IBA but then when that test also showed he was XY he dropped the appeal. He can’t publicly acknowledged the situation because of the social, cultural, and political realities of Algeria. Neither boxer will submit to additional testing because they know the outcome.
She is definitely female. She was born with an uterus, ovaries and a vagina
Can't trust the Russians or israelis for nothing.
That was based on a invalid chromosome test. She is definitely female. She was born with an uterus, ovaries and a vagina. So you are entirely wrong.
No he was born with abdominal testes which started producing testosterone in puberty. That is why he passed for a girl when little but once puberty hit looked more and more masculine.
Having a female looking vulva does not make once a woman. He is a male, as determined by his chromosomes and supported by the presence of excessively high levels of testosterone and male secondary sec characteristics. He is a male with a tragic developmental condition, not a female with a genetic condition.
That's not my understanding from what I've read. There seems to be a lot of conflicting information around
This is one example
https://www.sportingnews.com/au/olympics/news/imane-khelif-condition-explained-gender-fact-check/51994b8a2e23e7b423782f7a#:~:text=Khelif%20was%20one%20of%20two,most%20commonly%20found%20in%20males.
Appreciate the correction if Khelif turns out to be female. The reporting is odd at present and olympic officials are not being helpful.
That said, the exposure of feminist delusion and hypocrisy remains relevant. Seems they jumped the gun too.
Khelif was born with an intersex condition. XY chromosomes and high testosterone levels. One can objectively SEE that. Carole Hooven, author of "The Story of Testosterone" writes on X: Carole Hooven
@hoovlet
Seems like a good time to re-post my older (now edited) post about athletes with XY DSDs (Disorder, or Difference of Sex Development). Lots of graphs and detail about the relevant biology at the end.
* * *
First: People living with DSDs should be treated with compassion and understanding, and receive any heath care they need. These can be challenging conditions for individuals and their families. But when male athletes have DSDs that give them an advantage over females, and they compete in the female category, this raises concerns about safety and fairness, and forces discussion of the relevant physical traits.
Athletes with XY DSDs who have testes (usually internal), XY sex chromosomes, male-typical levels of testosterone, and functional androgen receptors are often described as females with "hyperandrogenism," i.e., abnormally high levels of testosterone. They experience physical benefits of this high testosterone during puberty, which translate into athletic advantages over females. The issue for sports is that athletes with the XY DSD 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), may be socialized as female, may be legally female, and may live and identify as female; but they are male.
These individuals are usually born with female-appearing genitalia, which can lead to being sexed as female. Here's why. 5-ARD is caused by a mutation in the gene that codes for the enzyme 5-alpha reductase, which converts testosterone into a more potent androgen, DHT. This androgen interacts with the androgen receptor, like testosterone, and is necessary for the typical development of male external genitalia (penis and scrotum) and the prostate. Without DHT, female-typical external genitalia develop. At the end of this monster post is a graphic of the relevant steroid production pathway, from my book T: The story of Testosterone.
DHT is also responsible for male-pattern baldness and dark, coarse facial hair, which is why people with the condition have smooth skin that can give a feminine appearance.
The “decision makers” are aware that athletes with 5-ARD are male, and that they experience the benefits of male puberty. The requirement to reduce their testosterone to typical female levels isn’t discriminatory, since these are males who are asking to compete in the female category. But more significantly, all the relevant scientific evidence shows that reducing male T in adulthood does not undo the physical benefits of male puberty.
Here's more detail about T, DHT, and male advantage in strength and speed.
I've been asked if men with the DSD 5-ARD (in which ppl cannot convert testosterone into the more potent androgen DHT) experience the typical benefits of male puberty, that would give them an advantage in strength and speed relative to women. This is relevant to questions about whether male athletes with 5-ARD should be allowed to compete in the female category. This is an excellent question, because it could be the case that DHT is necessary for the development and maintenance of male-typical muscle, lean body mass and strength. If that were the case, then people with 5-ARD might not have a typical male advantage, because the lack of DHT would perhaps lead to a more feminine pattern of fat, lean body mass and strength. I've wondered about this myself and have looked into the evidence.
Perhaps the top researcher in this area, Shalendar Bhasin, who is scrupulous in his methods, has examined this very question. The answer appears to be: no, testosterone does not need to be converted to DHT to exert its typical anabolic effects. These findings are reported in his 2012 study, "Effect of Testosterone Supplementation With and Without a Dual 5α-Reductase Inhibitor on Fat-Free Mass in Men With Suppressed Testosterone Production, A Randomized Controlled Trial." (It is linked to below—and since it's paywalled, I've included the graphs that show comparisons between the placebo and DHT— inhibited conditions, with no difference on the various outcomes.)
For more detail, the investigators wanted to examine the effects of suppressing DHT on muscle mass, strength, and sexual function. This important because one of the treatments for benign prostatic hyperplasia and male-pattern baldness is to suppress DHT, but clinicians have been concerned about effects on other outcomes that affect health and quality of life. Participants (healthy men, 18 to 50, with normal T levels) had their T blocked, and were given graded doses of T, along with either placebo or a drug that blocked the conversion of T to DHT. So both groups had T, but only one, the placebo group, also had DHT. After 20 weeks of treatment, changes in lean body mass, muscle, and strength were assessed. There were no significant difference between the placebo and DHT-blocked groups in these outcomes.
For LOTS more detail, here's the relevant text from the results. Please don't ask me questions about the study. Just look at the abstract and results which you can find by Googling. The main point is that while there are predicted effects of the different doses of T received, there were no differences in the outcomes according to whether they had DHT blocked (with dutasteride) or not (placebo). "Fat-Free Mass Fat-free mass and lean body mass increased in a dose-dependent manner in the placebo and dutasteride [THIS IS THE DRUG THAT BLOCKS CONVERSION OF T TO DHT] groups (Figure 2).
The changes in fat-free mass were related to testosterone dose and changes in testosterone concentrations in the placebo and dutasteride groups but did not differ between groups; the dose-adjusted mean difference (placebo minus dutasteride) in fat-free mass was 0.50 kg (95% CI, −0.22 to 1.22 kg; P = .18). There was no significant interaction between testosterone dose and randomization to dutasteride or placebo, indicating a lack of evidence that the relationship of testosterone dose to change in fat-free mass differed between the dutasteride and placebo groups.
The model-based smoothed regression lines, obtained by generalized additive models, describing the relationship between changes in testosterone concentrations and changes in fat-free mass and lean body mass were similar in the placebo and dutasteride groups. Changes in fat mass were negatively related to testosterone dose and concentrations, but the relationship between change in fat mass and dose did not differ significantly between the placebo and dutasteride groups (P = .41; Figure 2)."
"Muscle strength Leg-press and chest-press strength increased dependently by dose in the placebo and dutasteride groups. Increases in leg-press and chest-press strength were greater with larger doses and higher concentrations of testosterone. These relationships did not differ between the placebo and dutasteride groups (Figure 2)."
Really interesting commentary from the authors on the role of DHT in adult men: "Why then did the steroid 5α-reductase system evolve for androgens? Forty-six XY males with steroid 5α-reductase deficiency exhibited ambiguous or female external genitalia at birth and poor prostate development, but underwent normal muscle and bone development during pubertal transition. The phenotype of these patients suggests that steroid 5α-reductase plays an essential role in the development of prostate and phallus by providing local amplification of an androgenic signal without systemic hyperandrogenemia during critical periods of sexual differentiation, illustrating nature's extraordinary ingenuity in creating mechanisms for tissue-selective amplification during development.
We speculate that in adult men, in whom this tissue-specific amplification is not essential because the circulating testosterone concentrations are substantially higher than those in the fetus, testosterone and DHT can interchangeably subserve many androgenic functions. When circulating testosterone concentrations are low, intraprostatic DHT formation may become important in maintaining prostate growth, thus buffering the effects of decreasing testosterone levels, which has been suggested by Marks et al.
Our data are consistent with studies that have reported no effects of 5α-reductase inhibitors on muscle or bone mass. Inferences from these trials are limited by the fact that administration of 5α-reductase inhibitors increases testosterone levels, rendering it difficult to ascribe the outcomes to differences in DHT levels alone. In our trial, inhibition of endogenous testosterone by administration of a gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist eliminated this problem. Additionally, the high-dose dutasteride regimen effectively inhibited both steroid 5α-reductase isoenzymes."
Not to take the wind out of all those sails, but there’s a solid chance she’s just a big, tall, XX-chromosomed cis woman, and that Umar Kremlev made the whole thing up to justify disqualifying her.
XY, obviously.
XX don’t ever look like that either and we all know it.
But you don't actually "know it." You're just making a call based on prior beliefs and vibes, and copy-pasting a wall of text to make it sound less arbitrary.
Go away, little Troll under the bridge, dirty little woman-hater who thrives on seeing women get their jaws broken. What a turd.
Despite 'jumping the gun', in this instance, your essential points are valid; feminist claims are shown to be nonsense when the ceaseless quest for 'equality' that was started by them reaches the destination many predicted long ago. Hopefully the train will hit the buffers soon.
That aside, the quote from Lorber and Yancey reminds me of the rubbish I've read in literary criticism in which all sorts of specious nonsense is written about 'the author's intentions'.
I'm not sure any buffers exist.
There are always buffers, women have just been encouraged to believe otherwise.
Give an example of one, please.
I assume you think that an intelligent request. I'm always saddened, here, when I feel a commenter is so stupid that I have to be impolite, disrespectful, abusive, or whatever you choose to interpret my reply as, simply because framing a serious reply is so far beyond my tolerance levels the action has left the solar system. Were you even half as intelligent as you appear to think yourself, you'd know that, to use aphorisms our forebears coined to describe the processes they'd observed, 'nothing lasts forever' and 'for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction', 'you can fool some of the people some of ... ' and 'a pendulum swing like a pendulum do' and so on, etcetera ad infinitum. I'm sure that has flown over your head so fast you haven't yet felt the draught.
I hope you'll agree that was remarkably restrained and I hope others will see again how much time, effort and temper must be wasted treating £u*%ing $tu9i6 (u^"s like you with the respect and courtesy you delude yourselves you deserve.
A simple statement of what I hope for your future might well get me into some sort of warmer than desirable water so I'll simply say that, for the good of the human race, I hope you and all of those as stupid as you are up to date with your jabs.
You have increased to three the number of total fucking morons* I have had to deal with at the Fiamengo File, which shows that stupidity is so pervasive even a platform as elevated as this is not immune. That is how low the human race has sunk.
* Sorry Janice.
O.K., then. Quite the panoply of verbiage. I think you may have misunderstood me, however; I’ll rephrase the question:
What are you talking about?
A very reasonable request for you to provide an example to explain your bland assertion. Your response was abusive. Did you think the request was some kind of implied criticism? It was just a request and I would also like to understand more of your argument. But your personally insulting responses are simply unpleasant and pollute civilized discussion on Prof. Fiamengo's essays. I would encourage her to block you from these discussions.
Ian Lambton, I have never seen such a long, verbose ad hominem used to avoid addressing a question. The Guiness Book of Records may well be interested.
We are bogging down with all these definitions Janice, so I am not sure you jumped any gun. Who ever is to make sense of all that? You cannot mix xx and xy chromosomes in one body, so that leaves hormones, which begs the question, where did all these "women" that look like "men" (or the reverse) come from? "There is something rotten in the state of Denmark" Perhaps the Olympics are the lens bringing it all into focus?
I’m 6 feet tall, “big boned” and as female as they come- and all 6’ of me wants to vomit at your ignorant remark.
9 women have beaten Khelif in previous matches.
THE FEMINIST DILEMA:
Should feminists champion them ..... or demand they also be banned from competing in women's boxing given that they pose even more of a threat to other female boxers than Khelif?
People come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and abilities. I am a5’ nothing female. At age 25, being extremely obese, low cardio capacity, no intense training, I benched 150 lbs. Several of my brother’s friends, male, late teens to early twenties, 5’ 10” and taller, average weight, etc could not bench that amount. It only proves that men and women can be of very different body types and therefore physical capabilities. Any person who meets the criteria and skills for a job and desire to do a particular job should be allowed to do it. There are small, slight men and tall, muscular women; each sex has a spectrum of personalities. To say that one’s genitalia is all that qualifies or disqualifies someone from a job is rather ignorant. Men can be compassionate caretakers and women can be aggressive soldiers. Who we are and what we can do, given the opportunity to maximize our physical, mental, emotional capabilities has jaw dropping implications for all of us and for society. We need embrace the possibilities, so we can each be all we can be, rather than limit them based on preconceived stereotypes.
She has XY chromosomes and female body parts.
Prove it. Show us. It's coarse and vulgar I know but we are at a place where we should be told if the punter is crested or cleaved as our Queen Elizabeth 1 put it.
She has breasts and a vagina.
You continue to tell untruths.
He is a male with XY chromosomes, regardless of "assignment at birth."
You know this. You also know he doesn't have breasts, because you can see that.
Why are you lying, Robert Lindsay? Why do you continue to lie in public this way?
You're all a bunch of reactionary loons. Is that what this movement is about? If so then it’s shit. You don’t have to be rightwing nutball to realize how awful snd insane feminism is.
She doesn’t have breasts? Says who?
What, you have seen them?
That doesn't make you a woman. I have those and no one my whole life has ever mistaken me for a woman. I'm not talking about female. Yes I am biologically female.but being a woman is on another level,it comes from.a place of deep spirituality that I have not got.
Well that’s just absurd
You're asking me, personally, to prove what to you?
Why are you asking me to show you genitals that I do not have the power to show you?
Are you saying that you do not accept the published report that he has XY chromosomes, Jane?
Your message is confusing.
Females do not have XY chromosomes. Males do.
If she has AIS, she can indeed be female with XY chromosomes. They are referred to as females due to female phenotype.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrome
She has testicles, female genitalia, and a uterus but she has no ovaries. She also definitely has breasts if you look closely. She doesn't have periods. She has little to no pubic or underarm hair. They also have a short vagina.
If he had CAIS, he wouldn't look like a man; he'd look more girly than most girls. If his AIS isn't complete, he should not compete against women.
Ok well there is something wrong with her. She obviously has some sort of intersex condition. She has breasts and a vagina and uterus but otherwise she went through male sexual development in puberty in terms of body strengthl.
There’s no actual evidence that she has XY chromosomes. That claim may have been entirely made up by Umar Kremlev.
I’m pretty sure this is someone with a DSD, AIS to be specific. Why would Kremlev make up such a thing?
Because she’d just beaten a Russian boxer, and he needed an excuse to disqualify her. See: https://open.substack.com/pub/infinitescroll/p/the-trans-boxer-story-isnt-what-you
Interesting theory but it begs the question - if Khelif is actually a woman who is the victim of Russian disinformation, why would she not simply prove it by providing certified test results showing XX chromosomes and normal female testosterone levels. Such testing is readily available to anyone. Instead she complains about "gender scrutiny", suggesting she has something to hide. Unfortunately we'll probably never see the IBA or IOC test results due to privacy laws, and the IOC has denounced sex testing altogether: "We managed to do away with sex testing in the last century." (Mark Adams, IOC Spokesperson)
Liberal Democrat Zionist, for God's sake. Oh well, there's worse things to be.
You must be Jewish. No one else would post like that. Well, whatever, I have bigger demons to fight, like Trump, etc. and Republicans. I'd ask you to reconsider your views, but you're obviously hopeless. All you guys are.
That sounds like total bullshit. That man is president of the International Boxing Association. He's not going to make up a bunch of crap. His whole career at the IBA is on the line if he makes up lies. Plus Russians and Russian press don't really lie that much. The Western press lies vastly more than the Russian press does. He also said a Taiwanese boxer also failed the test and was found to be XY. Did he make up lies about her too. Saying someone is XY when they are XX is a very serious lie and his career would be over. He also said both women were disqualified for having excessive testosterone levels.
Are you one of those liberals or maybe conservatives who is a Russia-hater. This BS sounds like it's coming from the Russia-hating liberal lunatics. "Everything Russia says is a lie." Prove it.
Based on her appearance, Imane Khelif appears to have AIS with the male appearance and strength, XY chromosomes, female genitalia, and high testosterone. If she had AIS, she would be far stronger than an ordinary woman. She would also have very high circulating testosterone levels in the male range. AIS persons go through male sexual development past puberty. This involves the formation of muscle mass, etc. These individuals should not be allowed to compete against women. They should have to fight men.
Some photos show what appears to be a penis under his clothing. I don't for one second believe he was born with female reproductive organs. Regardless, even if his sex was indeterminate his chromosomes are male and his body, bearing and strength are male characteristics.
Identified as female at birth, raised female, ID's as female all means that she obviously has female genitalia. If she has AIS, which seems likely, then she has female genitalia. However, she sure looks like a man in photos.
This emerging story, with all its flip-flops, highlights the that IOC and international/national sporting bodies do not have consistent rules as to "what is a man" in their sport. Clarification of the Algerian boxers real sex and sexual identification needed to be disclosed prior to his first fight.
Hi Janice, you article is solid and well written and based on what you knew up to the moment. I enjoyed it and take it in context that, the whole world is still developing ... just wish it would always be in the positive.
This female boxer has been banned from several fights for having excessive testosterone levels.
She was banned by the IBA last year for having XY chromosomes.
There is no "she" with XY chromosomes. Why are you saying this?
While I agree with your position there are DSDs with XY that are biologically female.
That does not mean that khelif is in fact female, it merely means sexual dimorphsims is a complext topic: https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/sex-development-charts
Josh Slocum I refer to Khelif as "she" because she identifies and lives as a woman, despite her XY chromosomes. I respect her right to do so because she was assigned female at birth, and would not have suspected any different until puberty, when menstruation failed to occur like other girls. That does NOT mean I respect her right to COMPETE IN SPORT as a woman. She has an unfair advantage over XX women, due to much higher testosterone levels.
No, she was banned by Umar Kremlev for beating a Russian boxer. The IBA has not released its report, methodology, or tests, and should not be considered a reliable source.
As always Janice the highest quality of writing and ethics. I honestly don’t believe we will ever know definitively the gender of Imane Khelif because they are now managing the situation and don’t want us to have certainty. If we had certainty it only validates your article and the argument against their policies. In my opinion Imane appears masculine, moves in a masculine manner and appears to have a strength advantage in line with masculinity.
How can someone with XY chromosomes have been born a woman?
She was assigned female at birth.
There is no such thing as "assigned at birth"
A sex is identified not assigned.
Well whatever you want to call it. She was definitely assigned female at birth. She was raised female and has ID’d as female his whole life.
What is this 'assigned sex at birth' business? It has long been medically possible to detect the sex of a child even while it is still in the womb. Sex is therefore not 'assigned' at birth. It may be officially recorded at time of birth, as fuller examination of the baby becomes possible then, but the foetus has been developing as a male or female body for months before that.
It's a significant difference, not semantics.
The identification as a female could have been a mistake if this person suffers from a DSD.
It does not matter if a person "identifies as", is raised as or has a Id saying the person is female. What matters is the persons actual sex.
"The identification as a female could have been a mistake if this person suffers from a DSD."
In which case it would be MISIDENTIFICATION and the hospital may be liable. Which is precisely why the word "assigned" is used rather than "identified". It recognizes the possibility of error, and the existence of indeterminate sex at birth. As such it leaves the door open for "reassignment" in later life.
Somebody's lying again.
Well done.
Like Caster Semenya both boxers have always been girls, coming from societies without the "nuance" and technology we are "blessed" with here in the uber sensitive west. Having been always girls and then women in their societies they are (sadly for them) an experiment in that idea of social construction. And clearly the biology was not negligible in their development. It both points out the nonsense of feminist theory and in addition the hatred of males. For these are not boys or men who decided to change sex, but girls whose participation in sport forced the uncovering of their very rare conditions. You'd expect that such "marginalised women" who in other ages would live their lives as women would be part of the "diversity" of womanhood and supported through what must be a traumatic situation. But no. the mere hint they may have some maleness in their bodies makes them fair game and a target. And that of course is the game of Rowling et al. All males or even those with some male traits contain an original evil. I feel sorry for these boxers and indeed any other people with such rare conditions, now so likely to bring the hatred of feminists, for the "accepting difference and diversity" mantra doesn't apply to them. Without the enlightenment of feminism such people may have been able to continued in their societies to live lives as rather "butch" women (or for others as soft men) without the secrets within their chromosomes or hormones rendering them targets.
She was assigned female sex at birth, raised as a woman, and spent her whole life as a woman.
She is intersex. She has XY chromosomes, high testosterone, and female body parts.
Why do you keep repeating that an XY person is a she? This is not true. XY means male *even when that male is intersex*.
There is also no such thing as being "in between sexes"
this word has been resurfacing due to the trans-lobby meddling but people suffering a DSD, which you wrongly call "intersex" have a accurately definable sex.
And how do we identify the true sex of an intersex person? I think medicine calls these people intersex also.
No they don't. Intersex is an old term which usage has come back due to the translobby.
You can accurately define a person sex based on sexual dimorphisms. Sex is defined no on a single aspect but function in reproduction, therefore the gametes (or the potential gametes) of a person are highly relevant in defining their sex.
CAIS for example:
https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/sex-development-charts
There have been no known males with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS). CAIS is characterized by a 46,XY karyotype and the presence of male gonads (testes) but with complete resistance to androgens, leading to the development of female external genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics. Despite having male chromosomes and internal testes, individuals with CAIS are recognized as female based on their physical characteristics.
A mutation, lack of certain aspects of sexual dimorphisms or the existence of divergence or untypical sex dimorphism aspects do not change ones sex.
The word intersex is simply biologically wrong, there is nothing "in between" the sexes there is only male and female as that is the only relevant factor in sexual reproduction. Even a true hermaphrodite, which in humans does not exist is Intersex, it simply has both sexes,
Then maybe take it down until you have the facts?
"a number of news outlets asserting that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was born a woman."
That simply means Khelif was assigned female at birth, based on external genitalia. The presence of XY chromosomes would not become evident until puberty, due to Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome: "One in 15,000 males is born and grows up as a girl. And neither these girls nor their parents know it. These girls do not discover anything different until puberty. These people have an extremely high level of testosterone and other male sex hormones, but the testosterone does not affect the foetal cells that usually develop into male sexual organs because of a mutation in the androgen receptor gene. These people therefore have male chromosomes but are women socially and in external appearance. They do not have internal female sexual organs, and they form testicles that remain concealed in the abdominal cavity.”
https://novonordiskfonden.dk/en/news/more-women-than-expected-are-genetically-men/
Khelif was disqualified last year due to XY chromosomes, as reported by TASS:
MOSCOW, March 25. /TASS/. The International Boxing Association (IBA) leadership has excluded athletes who tried to pass themselves off as women from the list of participants in the Women's World Championship in India. This was announced to TASS on Saturday by the organization's president Umar Kremlev. "Based on the results of DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to deceive their colleagues and pretended to be women. Based on the results of the tests, it was proven that they have XY chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from the competition," Kremlev said.
Personally I'm disappointed with the IBA ruling, I wanna see more boxers like Khelif beat the shit out of crybaby women like Carini, until they dominate the sport and drive feminist scum like Rowling into terminal apoplexy. Apparently the IOC feels the same way!
Thanks for the explanation.
There is a phenomenon in the Dominican Republic that’s relevant. This is the güevedoce:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCevedoce?wprov=sfti1#
In general the intersex phenomenon is far more evident in poor countries where folks can't afford to have the condition medically "corrected" in childhood/adolescence. Unlike in the affluent West, where we generally intervene in childhood to "correct" any abnormalities. Not just intersex conditions. Even tall girls are given stilboestrol to deliberately stunt their growth, despite potentially dangerous side effects.
She doesn’t have AIS. She has DSD.
Robert Lindsay you don't seem to understand that AIS (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome) is a type of DSD (Disorder of Sexual Develoment).
Ok thank you very much. You mean she has testicles inside of her?
Yes, that's my understanding.
Not a "she." It's "he."
In the case of CAIS it's accurately she
AIS is a type of DSD. It is the most common cause of DSDs in 46,XY individuals.
No "she."
My husband wrote a follow-up article based on this piece, and pointing out, amongst innumerable other oddities, that the same elites who cannot define a woman are now quite certain that Imane Khelif IS one:
https://pjmedia.com/david-solway-2/2024/08/03/the-olympic-boxing-scandal-a-thought-correction-is-needed-n4931326
This article in the WSJ confirms what many in the comments section guessed or had already figured out, that Imane Khelif has XY chromosomes and DSD: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/does-imane-khelif-belong-in-the-womens-ring-olympics-boxing-transgender-ideology-b227f2cd?st=n0q18ho67s6u218&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Very well said. While I do not question that the Italian boxer had the right, and may have been wise, to withdraw from her match as she did...it is somewhat absurd when you claim to be an Olympic boxer that you were not prepared to take a few really hard punches and start crying about it. Forgive me, but crying about it reinforces every negative stereotype about women that feminism claims to fight against. A man who withdrew when discovering he was over matched would not receive sympathy were he to start crying about how unfair it is.
Ironically, the trans movement is doing society a great service by exposing the foolishness of the feminist arguments here. This is best seen in sports like running or swimming where individual athletes regardless of sex ARE competing on a level playing field against the course and time. If the top 500 college swimmers on a level playing field result in 498 men and 2 women as the Riley Gaines situation reveals, then we must conclude that women are indeed physically inferior to men and we should stop pretending otherwise even if it means an end to all the affirmative action preferences for women for positions they probably are underqualified for.
I also must object to the whining about how the trans boxer's performance deprived a woman of her dreams. She was deprived of nothing...she lost her match. 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 without creation of separate protected leagues. Just my thoughts.
"The male athletes whose sports were cancelled to create programs for women under Title IX ..." Great point, my friend. What a disgrace in the name of gender equality, and no feminist gives a damn.
That’s not quite right. Feminists cheer any reduction in exclusively male spaces. They want to destroy men.
And then their puppet masters will destroy them
"Ironically, the trans movement is doing society a great service by exposing the foolishness of the feminist arguments here."
Exactly. The feminists declared that "gender is a social construct", so men simply took them at their word and began identifying as women. And now the feminists are crying foul because their bluff has been called and they have egg all over their faces.
Transsexual men's domination of women's sports is irony of the most delicious sort --- the ideological chickens have well and truly come home to roost.
Another example of reality asserting itself -- contrary to sex-positive feminist ideology and the idea of the "strong independent" woman -- is something familiar to the online MGTOW 'manosphere' : "the wall." Meaning the biological reality of women over 35 whose chance to marry and have a family is fast diminishing after a decade or two (or three) of promiscuity and turning down good men because they didn't want to settle (the pattern of hypergamy: forming or seeking a sexual relationship with a person of a superior social status.
Biological reality favours women in their 20s, who have a wide field of men to choose from, but it favours men from the 30s and 40s onward. This is because a woman's sexual selection choices diminish as she gets older. If she sleeps around or has multiple partners, she is thought to be "used" by men, reducing her ability to pair-bond and often making her unhappy with men in general. This is where a lot of misandry comes from. This is due to her experience with the top 10% of men whom she pursues but who won't commit because they have options. The bottom 90%, the so-called nice guys, who will commit are typically rejected -- or worse they are chosen but mercilessly henpecked and eventually divorced losing everything.
Meanwhile, men increase in wealth (if they remain single) and thus have greater sexual selection as time goes on because options for women increase with looks and youth while options for men increase with wealth and age. This reality has exposed the myth of the "strong independent" woman as a cruel lie: careerism and promiscuity and childlessness has made Western women unhappy. Feminism failed them. Biological reality can't be denied. Things would be better for women if they embraced traditional marriage and family values -- and some are choosing to do so.
The root cause of all this was secularism: marriage before God and community was considered holy and not to be broken. Divorce became common in the 1970s and 80s as the West shifted from Christianity to secularism, there was no social pressure to stay married so women rejected men en masse and taught their daughters to do the same, resulting in this mess.
Iron Mike might be interested in your remarks. I understand he’s taken an interest in this case!
Chuck, I don't know who Iron Mike is. If you see this, could you clarify?
"Iron Mike" is the nickname of Mike Tyson.
I wondered whether you were paraphrasing him in the title of your piece --- he famously said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth".
Hi Pilgrim,
Thanks for clearing that up for Janice. BTW are you channeling John Wayne! If you are, Nice One!
To be honest, I was thinking more John Bunyan than John Wayne!
Though The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance was a great film...
He used ‘Pilgrim’ 23x in ‘The Searchers ‘ and once in ‘TMWKLV’.. Regardless you picked a good one!
I assumed you were deliberately quoting Mike Tyson as well. Its a well known quote. If you weren't doing it on purpose - then its actually all the more significant! Brilliantly accurate serendipity.
Now if he'd been facing Jane Couch it'd be a different story. And if the ladies,the other ladies,not me,think maybe equality ain't so hot no more,wait till they're on the front line facing big bearded blokes with huge choppers (I mean metal knives,not something else), and gotta engage in hand to hand fighting. And next time no let offs for being preggers. Thats in the plan. You want that for your granddaughter.
Would it change your mind to learn that a man's punching power has been found to be 2 1/2 times that of a woman's? I don't blame her for stopping the fight at all.
GOD BLESS YOU SIR! YOU GET IT!
wo-MEN'S sports is gay pornography
The feminist writers who insisted that physical differences between the sexes are “socially constructed” are looking pretty silly right now. Delusional, actually. As if they didn’t know, from their own immediate experience, who is better at opening the pickle jar. In my own feminist period, I used to wonder what would happen if an average man and average woman faced off in a physical fight. Well, now we know, and it ain’t pretty. The beautiful traditions of chivalry and gentlemanliness in Christian Europe involved voluntary self-restraint of masculine power, in deference to feminine vulnerability. If women were ladies again, maybe men would once more be gentlemen.
Forget average men and women. Serena Williams herself, a formidable athlete and certainly not a small and dainty woman, who will probably kick the asses of 99.9% of men, said that she could never compete against the top male tennis players because it's a different game entirely.
The Williams sisters, when they were ascending to the height of their success in women's tennis, publicly stated that they could beat any male player ranked outside the top 200.
They were at the Australian Open at the time (1998) and the men's player, Karsten Braasch accepted the challenge - he was ranked 203 on the day, but after several defeats, he was about to fall much lower as soon as the rankings were next revised. He was also at the end of his career - 50 years old - and he was dressed in off-court clothes, and smoked cigarettes between games.
He was supposed to play a set against Serena, which he did, and won 6-1. Unexpectedly, Venus then asked him to play a set against her immediately afterwards. He accepted the further challenge and without a break, beat her 6-2.
The fact that the sisters set their challenge as low as outside the top 200 shows that they were trying to think within real-world parameters, rather than the fantasies of feminist theory. Even so, they still overestimated their abilities against male players.
Fascinating. Thanks for this.
Lorber and Martin claim that the reduction of the number of sets in a match was a patriarchal plot to make women think they are weak. In fact, it means that women can make more Grand Slam money than men because they can play more matches.
Every battle of the sexes in tennis has ended up with the woman being utterly destroyed, except the hyped King-Riggs match, and some say that was a fix.
I personally don't believe it. I was actually working in tennis management at the time. But no question Riggs was out of shape. In any case, what does a win by a 29 year old woman in her prime over a 55 year old has-been mean?
There was actually a match between a ranked male player and a female player in an ATP (Association of Tennis Pros) sanctioned match, and the guy won 6-0, 6-0.
https://www.atptour.com/es/players/atp-head-2-head/abbie-maynard-vs-ion-tiriac/mp25/t040
I heard he threw it for mob money, or something like that!
I read that but it was based on hearsay - plausible hearsay but still. I think he threw it because he was hoping for a rematch - which Billie Jean was too smart to give him. He should have beaten her as he beat Margaret Court but he was arrogant & underestimated her. Court he respected, trained hard, and waxed her.
Hi Diana, I'm going to weigh in on this as I actually like watching tennis. This famous match is now available on Youtube in its entirety. I'd only ever known about it through the standard accounts.
After watching I am in no doubt the threw it. His play was so incompetant as to be embarrassing. And it must have been painful for people watching to go along with the pretense. He repeatedly makes mistakes that a 7 year old would make.
I was ambivilent about the rumours that he owed money to the mob - but after actually watching its impossible to deny he deliberatly threw it. Why? Dunno.
You're ignoring the fact that King is a lesbian, and lesbian/bisexual women have higher testosterone levels than heterosexual women. Testosterone promotes muscle mass and endurance, that's why lesbians dominate in so many sports, including tennis. Have a look at the musculature on King or Navratilova in their prime, it's nothing like a normal woman. So the King-Riggs match was not a true "battle of the sexes".
BINGO! Precisely what I've been saying. Same for the Williams sisters, they are BULL DOGS with high testosterone, regardless of the fact they are married to SIMPS, probably bisexual in their own right.
Do they? I am bisexual and have very low testosterone (even for a woman), very thin bones and low muscularity. I am not athletic at all. I have two fully heterosexual female friends who did semi-professional sports and both are very heavily built with much more masculine looks than I have.
There are plenty of studies on the subject, eg.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306453016301846
"Results revealed that lesbian/bisexual women had higher overall testosterone and progesterone concentrations than heterosexual women"
That does not mean ALL lesbian/bisexual woman have higher levels. There would be a range of levels, just like in the hetero population.
I’m a tennis aficionado and though I heard that had happened I never read the deets until now. Fascinating, refreshing and enlightening…Thank You!
PENIS ENVY coming home to roost. Boo hoo hoo KARMA!
I believe he had a beer as well
I doubt that Williams would win so much as one game against the 1,000th top male tennis player in the world, let alone a set.
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS http://j4mb.org.uk
LAUGHING AT FEMINISTS http://laughingatfeminists.com
Not sure about 1,000 but most probably a few hundreds. Such attempts were done in the past. Women at their peak sometimes won over men in their 50s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_(tennis)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IfM9x2WxLFU
She already said that she couldn't win that type of match...
Serina Williams is a BULL DOG and so is her masculine looking sister. The Williams sisters are literally built like MEN. They are also known steroid users. The hypocrisy of this whole argument about transgenders in wo-MEN'S sports is augmented by this very point: Which is MOST fe-MALE athletes are high testosterone in the first place and many of them take steroids anyway. The cruel attack on Imane Khelif illustrates a long-standing position of mine: Transgenders & fe-MALE athletes are not all that different. MANY still do not know that Imane Khelif IS a wo-MAN who was born with a vagina, who happens to have a testosterone disorder, LIKE >ALL fe-MALE ATHLETES DO ANYWAY. SPORTS ARE DUMB AND wo-MEN'S SPORTS ARE DUMBER
And do you have any evidence to back up this claim of steroid use by the Williams sisters or other fe-MALE atheletes ?
Take a hike pal. I think you're on the wrong page
Serena Williams is a FREAK/HERMAPHRODITE/ not at all different from transgenders.
FREAKS like the Williams sisters are testosterone users. She's a MAN. Really & truly, fe-MALE athletes are the SAME as transgenders
You are vile
Um no, the hypocrisy of this whole argument about wo-MEN'S sports is augmented by this very point. fe-MALE athletes are HIGH testosterone wo-MEN in the first place and many of them take steroids anyway. There is virtually NO difference between fe-MALE athletes & transgenders, further illustrated by the cruel attack on Imane Khelif who IS a wo-MAN with high testosterone like MOST fe-MALE athletes and who was thought to be a MAN, but like MOST fe-MALE athletes is a wo-MAN who looks like a MAN.
She was pregnant so she's definitely not a "hermaphrodite" (I don't think it even exists in humans). Of course she's a genetic freak - all elite athletes are.
Ok, fair enough, but as I've said males who marry fe-MALE athletes are IMOP bisexual themselves.
I’m old. I habitually go with “Ladies first”. The number of big smiles I get for this is astounding.
I still "hold the door open" for anyone (women, men, kids). It's one way to identify feminists; kids think it hilarious, feminists react as if I've insulted them
Small acts of kindness still matter to most people, and make life far more pleasant. Good for you.
I also hold the door open for anyone.
I'm just a nice guy
More than once, I have held the door for someone and a train of people, all different ages and sexes, will chug on through, as though I were an employee merely doing his job. I find it strange.
I've had that experience as well!
And I say 'thank you' to anyone who opens or holds open the door for me. Why wouldn't I?
Me also... Teeth show up and a "Thank you". Simple and basic social courtesy!
And I also do it to other Men.
I’m not surprised. With all this kindness rhetoric many of us have forgotten that good manners aren’t just for show - they convey kindness and thoughtfulness without the virtue signalling and inherent quest for likes.
True, though it can sometimes be frustrating to do the kind act and have it entirely ignored or even sneered at. I have a friend who held a door for a woman at a university and was glared at as if he had insulted her, when he merely meant it as a politeness. I've also had the experience of holding the door for a family and have them waltz through without even making eye contact, as if I weren't there at all. I must admit that although I did not do it for effusive thanks, I expected some reciprocal acknowledgement.
Um NO. Simping to wo-MEN who are already over protected is just wrong & naive
Um, NO chivalry is and was ALWAYS evil, we are not to bow to an angel never mind a wo-MAN.
Bowing or kneeling to wo-MEN is idolatry, gyno logy, the worship of wo_MEN.
Wanting to protect those who acknowledge they're weaker decades after invading MALE spaces, I'd say chivalry was always wrong, it's just more apparent now.
The original feudal chivalry had nothing to do with women specifically. It was quite a noble concept. What we now call "chivalry" is a distortion of those original precepts.
Ok, Fair enough
You sound awful bitter and cynical.
I don't understand a word of this,wot are u on about.
I think that chivalry instinct is still strong since this relatively minor issue is somehow what everyone is more passionate about than anything else even remotely.
Oh, indeed. Anti-feminists used to warn that chivalry would die out when women won the right to vote and gained other types of political and social equality/advantage. Interestingly, it never did.
Well it has with me!
Me Too!
I will take your word for it.
Actually I should qualify that, I'm still very chivalrous towards Asian women. It's only Western women I feel no chivalry towards. In fact, I quite enjoy hearing about Western women's suffering, like increasing loneliness, poverty, homelessness, and incarceration rates. Conversely I feel extremely protective towards Asian women, and hate seeing them in poverty.
Our, ahem, biological imperative is to protect women. Until that changes chivalry will not die.
Baloney! Western males are SIMPS and are PUSSY WHIPPED. Biology NOTHING to do with gynolatry. The most courageous & enlightened MEN have NO desire to protect random wo-MEN. The most Godly thing MEN can do is to let wo-MEN reap what they sowed.
I have no desire to protect random women. I am extremely selective on the subject. I imagine most men are.
Good to know. Thanks for clarifying.
I'm never voting again. I've dutifully voted for 50 years and look where we are. I wish those dreadful Pankhurst women had got on with useful things instead of making trouble. And all their nonsense didn't win us (in UK) the vote. Emmeline and Christabel made a Devils Pact with Lloyd George that they would get all the women into the munitions factories,creating death non stop and sure enough after WW1 he kept his side of the Satanic deal and granted women of 30 and over the vote. Big deal. Like that man said,if voting meant anything they wouldn't let you do it. In the UK our female vote was paid for by men's blood.
Which suggests that it is a very deep part of our psychology. After all the hoo ha about the boxers is framed as being about "males" putting in danger helpless females, in order to gain the support of men all too ready to protect girls and women, no matter the cost to their fellow men. Whereas of course the real story is that two individuals with rare conditions and who have always been considered female find themselves caught up in a very 21st century mess. Rowling summons up the atavistic idea that as such their condition turns them into evil abusers and a danger to women demanding white knights ride in to save the fair damsels. Ignoring the fact that neither boxer has an unblemished record without any defeats. Feminism has relied upon the deep rooted gynocentric patterns of society that impel men to "protect" women.
Speak for yourself. I support trans athletes in wo-MEN'S sports. UNTIL we PROTECT BOYS from wo-MEN invading MALE spaces, I say GO TEAM TRANS! >KARMA! Only SIMPS would care about wo-MEN reaping what they sewed.
Haha
Those two "feminist" writers should be forced to do the following experiment:
- 1 month box training with another 2 men that never also never trained box
- Fight after that month...
That would be FUN to watch!
Look, if this Algerian boxer is a man, then he's lost in the arena nine times to women in his career. That just proves that women can stand up to a man in a fight and win. So, like I don't know what kind of argument you're making.
Rowling can go to hell. As it was demonstrated above, the alphabet garbage was promoted by feminists like her for decades and now that it's starting to backfire on women she has the gall to say the progressive tripe is a "men's rights movement"? J.K. belongs in that ring to face the consequences of her actions.
Women's sports as a concept is just a special privilege like the Paralympics. If the sports were allowing both sexes there would be no female winners. I'm not too sympathetic to the female athletes crying about how this is unfair - them losing some participation medals is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
I do feel sorry for the young women who aren't feminists and have poured their hearts into their sport, but I do not see the threat to women's sport as in any way equivalent to the many killing injustices that men face on a regular basis and which neither side of the political mainstream even talks about.
Until normie women start facing consequences they will continue to passively support feminism and the alphabet lunacy. I actually enjoy this feminist civil war, but unfortunately both sides still blame men (along with the tradcon white knights).
BINGO! SPOT ON! I'm voting for Trump while holding my nose.
I agree to you Janice. However, I am against an yet-another-white-knight-rescue(TM) to save women from the consequences of feminist ideology. We have to start to give women the chance to recognize error and learn from it. This is the least of what we can do if we want to treat women as grown up human beings and give them chances to fail and learn. The key thing would be to prevent the Rowlings to spread misinformation on men's rights movement and owning the discourse. The Carinis have to know that what happened to her is due to feminism.
Understood. But what if it is in the nature of (most) women NOT to be accountable and in the nature of society not to be able to hold them to account? I suspect both may be adaptive strategies for survival, in which case I don't see them going away anytime soon, no matter how many opportunities are given to women. I agree with you, but with a sense of doom.
As you wrote it is not all women, and you (as my favorite MRA) are a living proof that women are not a homogeneous blob. I believe that this group is larger than it seems because the ones disagreeing with gender ideology are rather silent.
Janice is a unicorn, and there are RARE exceptions like her, unfortunately MOST wo-MEN are indeed a homogenous blob. Even RIGHT wing wo-MEN espouse the same rhetoric as the left wing fEMINISTS. i.e. Riley Gaines blaming patriarchy and domestic violence for what turned out to be to two >wo-MEN who look like MEN boxing each other. Just the fact that MOST wo-MEN look like PROSTITUTES the way they dress is PROOF. Like sheep most wo-MEN follow the herd (other wo-MEN)
"But what if it is in the nature of (most) women NOT to be accountable and in the nature of society not to be able to hold them to account?"
Strangely, all females in my family were always highly "accountable", responsible, and dependable. If you think that some media caricature or some fantasizing sociologists represents "most women", you are as much an ideologue as they are.
No Janice is right. Spot on actually. wo-MEN have smaller brains and that definitely plays into their solipsistic nature.
wo-MEN need to reap what they sow.
Hi Janice, Feminists are obviously selective about their demands for equality and their complaints about sexism. BTW, I would not call Kate Millett or Andrea Dworkin necessarily radical given the production of early 'second wave' feminists. To quote Norman Mailer, "Yet the SCUM Manifesto, while extreme, even extreme of the extreme, is nonetheless a magnetic north for Women's Lib." -- The Prisoner of Sex, The Acolyte
Yes, I agree that there's nothing extreme about Dworkin and Millett in the context of other Second Wave feminists such as Valerie Solanas, Robin Morgan, Mary Daly, Susan Brownmiller, Catharine MacKinnon, etc. Even Betty Friedan, who pulled back from some of the more extreme statements of her political sisters, claimed that men had put suburban women into "comfortable concentration camps."
There used to be a distinction made between radical feminism and other forms of feminism such as Marxist feminism, liberal feminism, and (a bit later) intersectional feminism. The radical feminists were the ones who saw patriarchy as the most fundamental (root=radical) system of domination (as opposed to the Marxists) and who, in finding oppression at the heart of every female experience, even or especially in family life and sex, opposed the liberal feminists, who mainly sought political rights and representation.
However, the distinction was never very clear and is not really useful now. The vast majority of feminists (even the 'coffee shop' type) are now radical feminists to some degree, having largely accepted claims about rape culture, sexual harassment, etc.
I remember that! Betty Friedan's assertion that suburban women were caged in "comfortable concentration camps" no doubt descended from Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House. The 60's and 70's were filled with claims that "men defined women and male/female roles." Men were being credited with micromanaging the entire division of labor between men and women! That both men and women had shared traditional notions of what was the proper sphere of men and the proper sphere of women in the world was supplanted by the claim that women had been historically "brainwashed." The force of bad ideas cannot be overstated. The other day a dear friend of mine said that he would never purchase the virtual assistant Alexa because its voice was female and this reinforced the notion that women are men's personal secretaries and servants. My eyes rolled out of head.
Haha! You should tell your friend that you know a woman who would never purchase an Alexa because she is sick of hearing female voices making authoritative statements and prefers male ones.
The comparison to the Paralympics, which used to be called the Special Olympics, to women's sports is one I've often made myself. Somehow, nearly everyone thinks it's a mean thing to say and makes me both a misogynist and an ableist. It is, however, perfectly appropriate.
Indeed, and what is an actual example of a 'woman's sport'? They are simply sports which men do in a higher quality division. I suppose there is netball, but they can have that.
Not even netball.
https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/controversy-after-all-boys-team-wins-netball-state-title-over-girls/
Interesting. The reaction so different to this sort of thing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-68816466 wherein a female team from the age band above that of the league itself beats the younger boys.
There are several gymnastic events in the Olympics that have no male equivalent. There is also vaginal weight lifting, in which women clutch the handle of a rope with there vaginas and see how much weight they can lift off the floor.
Back in the '70s I remember something called the 'Cuntest' which involved women ejecting hot dogs from their vaginas for distance. I can't find anything on line about it, so I can't be sure it wasn't a parody.
Oh yes, there's that thing in gymnastics where they hang off a bar and slam their midriff into another one at high speed. Men only do that metaphorically.
As for your other examples, we have entered 'too much information' zone 😂
I widened my search parameters a bit and found this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_pong_show
Unfortunately the "Special Olympics" have become more and more mired in a proliferation of categories in order to try to be fair. In a way its a microcosm of the nonsense of trying to engineer equality. I'm a fan of Max Whitlock (Gymnast) but now a mature man he has proven unable to medal, no one is surprised because age is one reality we don't have to pretend is irrelevant. He was of course also the classic gymnast build in his heyday, unlike me with tree trunk legs and weedy arms, another unfairness. Perhaps the "able bodied" Olympics should start increasing the categories to recognize all the many ways different bodies, ages etc. may give disadvantages? Or maybe we keep it simple and reflect that reality is unfair.
Well,I expect JK did what we all did from 1970 on,we struggled to overcome our natural repugnance at the thought of taking it up the ass or sucking them off,oh sorry I shouldn't say it plain like that should I,I should wreath it in pink chiffon,roses and clouds of romance. We accepted that those two sensitive and charming guys who just "want to be together" just need societal acceptance and approval to be happy and then they can get on with nice,tidy,bourgeois lives just like everyone else. But every time we went oh,ok,yes I get it ok,they raised the bar. Now they are like shoving it in our faces,an appropriate analogy. If you tolerate this we're coming for your children and they are.
My feelings exactly.
Riley Gaines needs breast implants and a muzzle
bLESS YOU! AGREED
Straight fire from Fiamengo. Ideological subversion has destroyed many minds, now it has destroyed women’s sports and safety. If Kamala wins, America’s first female president will further destroy women and reality as we know it. For Democracy!
I might just vote for her so I can spend the next four years responding to her word salad, cluelessness, and neuroticism with howls of "What's the alternative to this stunning bravery? Sending women back to the kitchen? Repealing the 19th Amendment?"
Love the kitchen.
LOL so do I.
Notice how after women gave up cooking and got jobs MEN took up cooking and got tv shows and book deals!
It started out as an excuse to drink beer, TBH. Then I got good at it.
And your own tv series! Because when females cook stuff it's mindless drudgery but when men cook stuff it's Amazing Creative Art. It's so funny!
Both good ideas
I don't really know if they are or not, but I do know that any sort of reasonable conversation with feminists is not possible unless both are treated as credible propositions.
See, there's your problem. You've used the word "reasonable" and the word "feminists" in the same sentence.
And take down Western Civ while she’s at it!
They aren't even empirically in that much danger, but like most things the right and left are both preoccupied on hyperbolic concern for women.
When Eric Trump gave his speech at the RNC in which he listed all the things wrong with America that a Trump win would tackle, the item that got the biggest applause from the conservative audience was male athletes in women's sports. Not a word about male suicide, paternity fraud, men's loss of the right to parent their children after divorce, equity hiring discrimination, or the many other pressing issues that matter far more than a few men knocking women off podiums.
Gynocentrism beats reality every time politicians open their mouths.
Exactly! To HELL with chivalry. fe-MALE athletes are not all that feminine.
fe-MALE athletes are not all that different from trans males...
Sports make wo-MEN masculine. TO HELL WITH wo-MEN'S SPORTS
And not a word about wo-MEN in >BOYS sports the BOY scouts and the secret service>
Yes, exactly. Nobody cares enough about the takeover of men's and boys' spaces or institutions to say anything about it. Or they are simply too cowardly. Feminism has been so successful in infiltrating our language and our very thoughts that most people have lost the ability to oppose it.
Yes. Somehow you should engineer a situation where you can publicly and credibly be threatened by a male, to see if that engages any white knights to leap to your aid. Or be threatened by a "Trans" woman (there appear quite a few with a nice line in florid threats). A sort of test of how wide the male concern to protect females goes. I am of course conducting a thought experiment.
Gid bless you SIR! <YOU GET IT! TO HELL WITH wo-MEN'S SPORTS!
Transgenders are accomplishing what the Matrix (Media/courts/police/church/ could not.
Making wo-MEN reap what they sow.
Who's going to vote for an ugly tart. I can think of a funny witty reply to this but Im not going to venture it.
TO HELL WITH wo-MEN'S SPORTS! Most of them are DIKES and the few that aren't lose their periods, lose their feminine body fat, and develop high testosterone, adding to that many take testosterone as well. wo-MEN'S sports is GAY PORNOGRAPHY
Forcing feminists to confront the harm they’re doing to women is why I will not speak out against trans athletes.
Let us suppose (against all the evidence) that the culprit is indeed misogyny. Does it not occur to feminists that they may have something to do with the creation of that state of affairs? Feminism is in any case an oxymoron. If women are simply the same as men in the ways feminists assert, then they would act and achieve as men. The fact that they need every kind of support and special treatment demonstrates that they are not. We should not forget the female tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams who lost in back-to-back friendlies to the 203rd seeded male player, Karsten Braasch and that 47% of female Israeli soldiers were, at the time of an investigation, hors de combat through training injury.
Feminists have not always argued that men and women are identical except for gestation and lactation. Long before the advent of "second wave" feminism, in the eighteenth century, Mary Wallstonecraft relied on Enlightenment philosophy to argue that women were the equals of men. It was "society" that taught the reverse. Her focus was on intellectual equality, however, not on physiological equality. It was she, perhaps, who introduced the feminist conspiracy theory of history by arguing that men prevented women from becoming their equals by depriving girls and women of education and therefore turning them into irrational and sentimental creatures--like children or pets--for their own amusement. Her notion of equality referred to sex, at any rate, but not to class.
Fast-forward to Nellie McClung, an early Canadian feminist and suffragist. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, she argued for legal equality between men and women but also for the moral superiority of women over men. Like many other feminists, McClung assumed that giving women the vote would, apart from anything else, end war and many other problems that she explained as the results not merely of masculinity but of maleness itself. To argue this, she focused her attention on a powerful and profound difference between the sexes, one that favored women instead of men. Women became mothers, after all, and men did not. It was this maternal instinct--she said little about a paternal instinct--that would make them vote against male candidates who advocated war and other cultural pathologies. It was this emphasis on maternal nature, by the way, that led her to support eugenics (and Prohibition in the States).
Both Wollstonecroft and McClung have entered the feminist pantheon, and both have led "second wave" feminists to distort the notion of sexual equality, the former by disregarding nature (emphasizing the need for culture to reform nature through reason) and the latter by emphasizing it (femaleness being innately virtuous and maleness being innately vicious).
In short, the current debate over sexual equality, let alone the larger one over nature and culture, has been a source of confusion within feminism from the very beginning. It is inherent in both strands of feminism.
I made a similar argument here in relation to transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, quoting Ernest Belfort Bax, who recognized the confusion in feminism over a hundred years ago:
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/lia-thomas-is-the-child-of-feminism/comments
The over-riding feature of feminism has of course been its self-contradictory arguments, that appear to demonstrate that women often don't know what they want. Trans-sexuals are a manifestation of the feminist idea that sex, or gender as they call it, lies on a spectrum, and all should be embraced. This argument has now come back to bite J.K. Rowling, Julie Burchill et al in the backside. Are gay men and women created by birth or by society? Feminists don't seem to know any better than anyone else, and so the Terf wars. The trouble is that feminism has really only concerned itself, perhaps not surprisingly, with how women feel about themselves, and not with any kind of scientific or biological understanding, even at the most obvious level. Oestrogen and testosterone are thought to be interchangeable in their effects, except when they make life difficult for women. Women have a maternal instinct when they claim custody or protection from violence, but are, they say, every bit as ambitious, unemotional and competitive as men when it comes to running a business or fighting in the services. Feminist Wilma Meikle (1917) "The truth is that motherhood is one of the most casual of all relationships and one of the shortest lived.... There is no natural necessity for any close association between mother and child.... after it has left its mother's breast... its health will usually have a better chance if it is handed over to the care of experts....the importance of superseding parental by State control..." gives a flavour of at least one strand of feminist belief in the maternal instinct. At the same time, robust studies have shewn that women are only slightly less aggressive than men, while having a less developed understanding and control of power and leadership.
Thank you very much for this! It's lovely to find someone else who has read Meikle. I thought she had some sensible things to say about the feminist fuss over male sexuality, but her Marxism got the better of her when it came to motherhood and the raising of children.
And of course the Communists in Eastern Europe followed exactly that plan with brief maternity leave and universal childcare. Curiously this wasn't popular with actual people. I have a friend who, amazingly, married a Czech shortly after the crushing of the "Prague spring". She lived for many years with her husband in Czechoslovakia before they finally got to leave to live in England. What is amazing is the sheer minute control of every aspect of life she experienced as well as the form of feminism there. She knows what feminism looks like in practice when women are simply "workers" and motherhood is not special at all and the state is the expert best placed to nurture children.
What hides women's aggression from obvious view is that MOST women don't want to engage in a street fight or a scrap,and most women are clever enough not to need to. That song sung by Bonnie Tyler and written by Steinman + Pitchfork,it expresses a real phenomenon and also explains why decades of "education" is never going to eradicate gang or street violence. The victor "fresh from the fight" is a deeply erotic figure to those Mean Girls (that's all of us) and he can pick the choicest one. Without first checking their educational results. So men find reasons to fight or CREATE reasons to fight and women have the evolutionary motive to pick the victor. That's how it always was. For a brief century reason and sense prevailed but it got boring,and turned out to be an anomaly anyway. Now the old ways have come back,ah happy days,burning witches,torture,Heresy and Inquisitions
So well said, Paul!
A few days ago Andrew Doyle reported on his substack that, "In 2017, the Dallas under-15 boys football club beat the women’s national team 5-2 in a friendly game." This is the female team that has dominated women's soccer for the last decade, winning several world championships and Olympic gold metals. And they can't even beat a local boys team.
Yes, very true. I wrote about it extensively at the time that the U.S. Women's Soccer Team was complaining bitterly about 'equal pay' a few years ago, disguising the fact that they had negotiated a contract that paid them very differently from the men's team: they wanted a contract in which they got paid whether they won or lost, and that paid players who were injured or on maternity leave; and that paid dental benefits and various other benefits. That's the contract they got. The men negotiated a contract that paid them only if they played and only if they won. Then when the women's team went all the way to the championship, they all cried about sexism. It was one of the most impressive examples of the accountability gap I've seen recently.
Lost amidst all the hoopla was the simple fact that men's soccer/football attracts a much larger fan base than women's because it is generally faster and far more exciting; and therefore brings in far more revenue with which to pay players.
Yet the men's team was compelled, during the controversy, to come out in support of the women's team, and I believe they have even agreed to share some of the money they bring in with the women. Incredible. And still the execrable Megan Rapinoe goes on and on, on every talk show that will have her (and so many will), about gender pay gaps.
I've always thought that a simple way to solve the problem was to have as many transgender women take up the sport as possible. It would get a lot more interesting fast.
Even if women's football were, by some objective standard, better than mens. And men's football drew the vastly greater audience, its players and clubs would earn hugely greater amounts and their players be able to command higher pay. There are very many sports that are conducted as amateurs or semi amateur basis with little money in them because their audiences are small. Many have a brief limelight at the Olympics. I'm sure the players are very skillful, and dedicated, but the reality is they don't generate the vast incomes of "soccer". And therefore there is little prospect of massive payouts, unless they can somehow capture the attention of a vastly greater audience.
Apologies, I've just written a comment about the Karsten Braasch sets against the Williams sisters, not realising until now that you'd already done so.
Copied and pasted from the 'Men Are Good' Substack earlier today:
Women actually have thicker skulls than men and there's reason to believe that men are more susceptible to head injuries. Carini may well never have been punched that hard before and I'm sure it was painful, but male boxers routinely get hit that hard and there's no reason to believe it's any less dangerous or painful to them.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080121122138.htm
Can you even imagine a male boxer going up against a more powerful opponent and dropping to his knees in tears? Would he get outpourings of sympathy and outrage that someone tougher than he was was allowed to fight him? It's not like she was unaware of what she was getting into when she voluntarily got into the ring with Khelif.
Feminists, having complete mastery over cognitive dissonance, will not have any problem maintaining that "anything a man can do, a woman can do better" while also claiming that this is male on female violence and abuse.
Tom hits the nail on the head.
Actually, that was my comment.
The way I heard it, Khelif just won the first ever Gold Medal in Freestyle Domestic Violence.
Stop playing into the feminists' and tradcons' hands by drawing the parallel to "violence against women" domestic violence! So many people have sounded suspiciously Duluthian in the last few days, and I hate it.
I'm pretty sure that all through her training years,her male trainers pulled their punches.
Punches are always pulled when sparring.
Yes,I knew that,so this dignified young lady never had an inkling of what fighting is really about,real fighting. Not do I,I hasten to add,but I have read a lot of history. I love heritage cream tea history but there is a lot of blood and guts behind the pretty facade.
Thank you, Janice, for another excellent piece. Just an observation from recent experience on how extreme the physical differences are between the sexes:
I was attending to the needs of a relative in hospital recently, and watched a 90-year old man easily and repeatedly pull himself out of the grip of two (female) nurses who were trying with all their strength to prevent him from leaving the ward. He was thin but not quite emaciated, and unsteady on his feet; brain damage prevented him from understanding his situation (grave, and he died two weeks later), but left him sufficient awareness to make frequent attempts at escape.
There were soon four or five (female) nurses around him, but even then, they found it difficult to prevent him from leaving (raised voices and struggling). The situation was only resolved when an available male nurse was found, and he steered the man firmly but calmly back to his bed, while speaking soothingly to him.
I have no criticisms of the female nurses; unlike women in policing or firefighting, they weren't out of place, and were otherwise doing their job very well. I'm only pointing to the disparity in strength, and I myself initially assumed that the first two nurses on the scene would be able to manage such an elderly and sick man without difficulty - until I saw what happened.
Thanks for this.
I'm sure there are many good female nurses, but I think it is one of the many crying injustices of our time that nursing has become almost exclusively female-dominated. Many older men do not wish to be bathed, helped to the toilet, and bossed around by women, many of whom are not particularly kind or respectful to male patients. When I used to visit my mom in hospital, I frequently noted the cruelty and mockery of female nurses towards men in the wards.
Few women notice this. Fewer still care.
https://patientprivacyreview.blogspot.com/
http://patientmodestysolutions.blogspot.com/
"I frequently noted the cruelty and mockery of female nurses towards men in the wards."
Many of them despise men.
A chilling thought when one thinks of the power they wield over the sick.
Thank you so much for this. I've never seen the subject even mentioned. I think it should be a major men's issue. Most of us will find ourselves in hospital at or near the end of our lives, and it is not right that men should be at the mercy of shrewish women. I've never met a sadistic male nurse (I'm sure there are some, but they tend to be cheerful and competent) while I have met many borderline sadistic and incompetent female nurses.
If one were a man-hater or sadist, what sort of job would one choose?
...Makes one think, doesn't it?
And as you say, it's something which is simply not on people's radar, even within the MRM.
Heartening to see that it hasn't escaped your gimlet eye, though. God bless you, Janice.
Thank you.
@Janice: An article that might be of interest to you.
https://drlinda-md.com/2016/11/men-patients-forced-man-medical-setting/
Thank you--that's useful!
Excellent article. Thanks for that.
When thirteen I was in hospital overnight after smashing my left shoulder. They had to assign two nurses to stay by my bed overnight to stop me rolling on to the injured shoulder.
It was one of the "advantages" of my career, being a rarity, a male, I was always seen to be available to deal with "challenging behavior". This of course gave me experience and knowledge that was valuable, and helped in promotions . As an observation my female colleagues in this "heavy" end of care tended to be lesbian. Though that may be coincidence.
I have a hard time feeling anything but supremely ambivalent on this issue.
On one hand, I’ve trained and competed in strength and combat sports for most of my adult life. I fully acknowledge the absurdity of women competing against men in any physical endeavor, let alone combat sports.
On the other hand, I don’t care about women’s sports, and, quite frankly, women vote for this bullshit.
Now, when I say, “I don’t care,” I mean that in the most literal sense possible. I don’t care whether they succeed massively, fail miserably, or fall somewhere in between. It makes no difference to me. They could disappear tomorrow and my life will be utterly unaffected.
Interestingly enough, my lack of care and concern for women’s sports is something I have in common with…the vast majority of women, it seems.
If women really wanted to put a stop to this nonsense, it ends tomorrow. Just stop participating. No whining, bitching, or petulant cries of discrimination or “mIsOgYnY.” No claims of males stealing opportunities or waging a war on women. Just simply walk away.
Until that time comes, I can’t take the so called “detractors” seriously. You get what you tolerate, I’m afraid. If you’re too afraid of being branded a “transphobe,” that’s squarely on you.
Hell, I’m convinced that the reason why women are trying to recruit (read: shame) male “allies” (read: *VOMIT*) into this is because they don’t want to have to wear that label, or at least wear it alone.
Passive aggression and plausible deniability are the second most formidable strategies women tend to implement, right behind vagina and victimhood. The only thing better than getting men to fight your battles for you by “damseling” and claiming that you’re being aggressed by other men trespassing into your sports is when you get to divert and shield yourself from the criticism that comes back your way if/when you inevitably step on the landmine of political correctness in 2024.
As for the specific case of the Algerian and Italian fighters competing in the Olympics, it seems to be a bit more complicated than its being portrayed by media outlets. With regard to the broader issue, however, the overarching point remains the same.
Whether directly or indirectly, actively or passively, explicitly or implicitly, women voted for this nonsense.
Merely stating that gender is NOT, in fact, a social construct may not get through your thick skull, but a man’s fist just might, if you let it happen.
Well said. I also find it frustrating that so many men, whether on the right or left politically (but especially on the right or center-right) become so excited to team up with radical feminists on this issue as if to prove their pro-female bona fides. These are the same men who know about the biased family court system etc. but can't resist the chivalric call to defend the very women who have been destroying men and families for five decades.
It does make one wonder. The feminization of Western Culture is pervasive. I once asked a friend who referred to himself as a male feminist, "If men as a group have so intently and maliciously treated women so poorly, why the change of heart? Why all the self-flagellation and confession of sins? Why don't men, meanies they supposedly are, burn all the feminist text and shut down all the women's studies programs? His answer was predictable, "Because feminists have shamed men into being better, " he said. Imposing current ideological resentments on the past has no doubt helped many a man see his own oppression of women everywhere. It supports at least one progressive version of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon and it has probably supported no little amount of faith in the "Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
I feel extremely protective of the notion of women's sports because I have daughters and at least one of them looks like she is going to take sport seriously (just amateur/recreational level) and I want her to be able to do that in a female-only environment. I can't do that by just being concerned with her specific sport / team, the whole zeitgeist needs sorting hence my sports-wide concern with the issue. I can't not be fatherly in this just because of what some women have been doing / saying in other issues.
Have you actually discussed the question with your daughter? She may not share your concern about "female-only environment". In fact, she may give you a lecture about "trans women are women too"! I suspect you'll find it's all very "inclusive" at the amateur/recreational level, it's only the elite level where problems arise.
I haven't. She's nine, and I don't think she is aware of the concept of trans. She has the School Of The Bleeding Obvious awareness that we all learnt in the playground, that boys and girls are different. Even at an age where there isn't yet much difference in physical attributes, boys dominate sport in the playground by virtue of greater interest and more competitive attitude. She has no interest in developing the thick skin and sharp elbows required to get along in that, she much prefers playing sports with girls only. If she ever wants to play in a genuinely mixed environment I am all for that; but I am not for her having to play in a de facto mixed environment because someone is lying and pretending they are female when they are in fact male.
Fair enough, but you may not have much say in the matter, if the school or sporting league promotes "inclusivity".
Indeed, that's the problem and why I maintain interest and concern on the matter!
Every single word of this.
Right on Brother! So much truth you covered. In fact, MOST wo-MEN >don't EVEN PLAY SPORTS! fe_MALE athletes are a small fringe of hermaphrodites, the same tom boys that invaded every MALE space from BOYS SPORTS to the BOY scouts, to the secret service. fe_MALE athletes ARE transgenders in a different form.
I used to feel a twinge of sympathy for Rowling over the trans activist bashing her around. I was also beginning to see her as a die hard feminist and began to form a degree of disdain for her.
After reading this article, I now kind of think that she has probably earned the right to be attacked by them as she appear to be guilty of similar types of ideology idiocy.
Now I do not think I could even be bothered to listen to her.
Her books in many ways do not seem to trumpet her ideology, so I guess that is something to be thankful for.
Well said. Rowling's rhetoric has such a dramatic view that it's something men are doing to women out of misogyny and patriarchal scheming. If anything it's deference to women and female leadership that creates this. The interesting thing is that the passion and outrage about this is orders of magnitude larger that what it objectively should be. Meaning on both political sides concern for women outweighs everything in practice.
It is NOTEWORTHY that she was punched with gloves, while wearing headgear. Forgive me if I be a “man-out-of-time”: was her opponent trans? I’m 63, an “old model”, high “T” male and I’ve got a stronger “Overhand Right” than that.
Not to brag; my great uncle was a Prize Fighter in the San Joaquin Valley in the Depression. His life is another example of male sacrifice to keep bread on the table; you’ll never complain about making beds again!
Janice, let me praise both you're readable prose and your timely subjects. You must've been a reporter in another life.
On a side note, the feminist attitude towards biology is worse than the denial of sex differences. Some even claim men have curtailed female evolution! Case in point: Adrienne Rich, winner of the National Book Award for poetry, also wrote Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). Here's a representative quote (pp. 126 - 127):
"Patriarchal man created - out of a mixture of sexual and affective frustration, blind need, physical force, ignorance, and intelligence split from its emotional grounding, a system which turned against woman her own organic nature, the source of her awe and her original powers. In a sense, female evolution was mutilated, and we have no way now of imagining what its development hitherto might have been; we can only try, at last, to take it into female hands."
If there's anything positive that can be said about feminists, it's that they work hard to prove that women really are irrational sex!
Thanks for this, Diego. There is a strong lesbian-feminist thread running through writers such as Rich, Sally Miller Gearhart, Mary Daly, and others that imagines utopian communities of women developing their talents freed of male oppression--so bigoted and hateful one can hardly believe it was developed and rewarded in universities across North America.
Unfortunately, I can believe it. North America - and other developed countries - have embraced plenty of bad ideas and used pseudoscience to justify them.