TESTED: What is going on with boxing at the Olympics?
Hello from Paris, friends.
I was meant to be on vacation, a nice little break from pulling twelve hour days for the last six months to make Tested happen. But as you've probably seen, sex testing has been in the news. So let's talk about it, shall we?
First, I want to clear up what actually happened.
This is one of those stories where there is so much vitriol and chaos and bad actors, as well as genuinely confusing plot points, that it's hard to be sure what the fact are. I've seen a lot of misinformation on both sides of this, and so I want to start with what we actually know.
In the spring of last year, the leadership of the International Boxing Association (IBA) held a meeting, in which they decided to disqualify two women from competition — Lin Yu-ting from Taiwan, and Imane Khelif from Algeria. The meeting minutes of the meeting at which this happened says that these two women allegedly "failed to meet eligibility rules, following a test conducted by an independent laboratory." At no point do they say what test was actually done, or what it showed (which we'll get to in a minute). The meeting minutes essentially say that this is a one off decision, and that the IBA should “establish a clear procedure on gender testing”. The upshot here is that both boxers were disqualified and stripped of their wins.
Three months after that meeting, the International Olympic Committee stripped the IBA of recognition. This was not directly related to this sex testing situation. The IBA had been sanctioned in 2019 for breaches of ethics, abuse of power, and corruption, and had failed to make sufficient changes to appease the IOC. So in June of last year the IOC basically took over boxing for the purposes of the Olympics, and formed the Paris Boxing Unit (PBU).
One of the consequences of that takeover, was a reversal of the ban on these two boxers, because they meet all the IOC eligibility rules for boxing according to the PBU. As you heard on the show, the IOC has a "framework for inclusion" that argues that any kind of eligibility policy like this be extremely heavily vetted and rooting in sport specific science. The boxing decision was clearly not in compliance.
And so these two women — Lin Yu-ting from Taiwan, and Imane Khelif from Algeria — fought at the Olympics this week.
The fight you've probably heard about, is the one in which Algeria's Imane Khelif beat Italy's Angela Carini in a really short bout. Carini bowed out after 46 seconds. She said "It hurt so much. I am heartbroken. I was told a lot of times that I was a warrior, but I preferred to stop for my health. I have never felt a punch like this." Carini has since said that she did not stop out of some kind of political message, nor does she think that Khelif has done anything wrong.
But the quotes from this interview have been spun out of context, J.K. Rowling has gotten involved, and things have gotten totally out of hand.
Two things that are really important to get right about this, before we move on to my analysis:
Neither of these women are trans athletes. They were both assigned female at birth, and have lived their whole lives as women. There is a concerted (and in my opinion deeply bizarre) effort among a certain set of people online to unilaterally decide that women like Lin and Khelif are trans. They are not. You can't simply decide someone is trans because they don't perform womanhood the way you think they should. (I've also seen high profile activists in this space decide that Caster Semenya is trans. She is not. Again, you can't simply... decide that someone is trans. That's not how this works.)
We have no idea what tests were done on these women. The IBA says they were not testing testosterone. They've also said that these women have Y chromosomes. That might be true, but we don't know what test was done to actually figure that out. And that matters because there are all kinds of biological configurations that could be at play here. Between one and two percent of the population has variations in sex biology. Some studies estimate that about 1 in 15,000 women have Y chromosomes in some or all of their cells. Some of those women with Y chromosomes have high testosterone, some don't. And again, we have no idea whether either of these particular women have high testosterone, because that test has not been done. I've seen a lot of folks (on both sides of this) arguing that these women have high testosterone. We simply do not know whether that is true!
Now that we have the facts, what do we make of this?
Obviously, if you've listened to the show, you know that these kinds of policies and statements have a long history. And one thing that's incredibly striking to me about watching this story go down today, in the year 2024, is that many of the quotes and headlines I'm seeing, could have easily been written in 1928, or 1966, or 1988. Over and over we see these same ideas around what women are supposed to look like; accusations that some women are too strong, too fast, and too good to be women; the assertion that random strangers can know more about a person's "true identity" that they do themselves.
I won't rehash those things here, because you're already quite aware. So you folks get the deeper dive on what I'm thinking about as I watch this.
First, it's super interesting to watch the IOC at work here. Because they have taken over from the IBA, they have been forced to step in and take a definitive stand. And on the whole, I've actually been surprised by how strongly they have come out in defense of these athletes. The press release they put out called the decision by the IBA "sudden and arbitrary" and says: "The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years." In press conferences, IOC president Thomas Bach has said that the "hate speech" directed at Khelif and Lin is "totally unacceptable."
(There was one frustrating snafoo — in a press conference, Bach said "But I repeat, here, this is not a DSD case, this is about a woman taking part in a women’s competition, and I think I have explained this many times." The IOC then later had to clarify that what me meant to say was “But I repeat, here, this is not a transgender case." This does not help the issue of confusion around the differences between trans and DSD athletes, and feeds into the desire by some parties on this discussion to collapse them down into one conversation.)
This is all notable because the IOC has chosen not to step in with the same strength or support when it comes to athletes on the track. When it comes to World Athletics, and their eligibility policies that you heard about on the show, the IOC has chosen to defer, and let WA run things as they see fit.
I think there are a couple of reasons for that. The IOC is constantly walking a delicate tightrope around regulation of these so-called "international federations." It would be completely unfeasible for the IOC to run every sport. (In fact, early on in the history of sex testing, there was a long and robust debate in the IOC meeting minutes about who should be responsible for these tests — the IOC or the individual sports. For a while, they left it to the sports. Then, as you heard, they decided to do it all in house.) So if the IOC is going to step in on a policy like this, they're upsetting not only the various political alliances at play between powerful executive boards, but also the precedent of letting sports organizations choose the rules for their sport. If the IOC steps in on sex testing, the argument goes, where do they draw the line? Do they also step in on video review rules? On pitch clocks? On when to call a lift in volleyball?
(The counterargument to this is that the IOC should step in when someone's human rights are being violated. Which is quite different from rules about how many substitutes should be allowed in a game.)
The other interesting thing here (welcome, the weeds, we are in them) is that the IBA has a huge supporter in a very specific country: Russia. The IBA’s president is a man named Umar Kremlev, who is not just a Russian boxing guy, but also an acquaintance of Vladimir Putin. (You can find a good rundown of this here.)
And Russia and the IOC has a fraught relationship at the moment — after the IOC sanctioned the country for both doping and its war in Ukraine. Russian athletes at the Olympics have not been allowed to compete under their country's flag. In response, Russia has waged a war against the IOC. And Kremlev sees this decision to strip the IBA of status as another aggression against Russia.
In turn, the IOC sees this incident as one of the many ways in which Russia is attempting to undermine the games. Which might be one of the reasons they’re taking such a strong stance.
The Russian government has reportedly offered Angela Carini $50,000. And according to the AP, Kremelev has “released a series of English-subtitled videos on social media packed with insults, saying the Olympics ‘burns from pure devilry’ and calling Bach ‘evil’ and urging him to ‘resign urgently.’ Kremlev has ended some of them by saying he’s sending Bach diapers so he doesn’t soil himself, then punching the camera.”
So… there's that going on.
The boxing of it all
The other thing that I think makes this story extra fraught, is the fact that it's boxing.
Boxing is a very "male coded" sport. It's about fighting, which is still perceived to be something that men do, not women. Women in the ring are fighting a ton of stereotypes about whether they should even be there. Women had to fight for years and years to even be allowed to box. The men in charge believed that they were too delicate to do so, that it was simply not appropriate. (A quick aside here: when I was at 30 for 30 I pitched a story about early women's boxing. I'll put that pitch in full below, in case you're curious.)
And again, here, I'm reminded of 1928. Back then, track and field was the manliest sport around. But today, it might be boxing.
I confess, I'm not a boxing fan. I don't like watching people beat the crap out of each other! I find it stressful! But the fact that this sport is so specifically about fighting I think really ups the emotional ante.
What all this means is that the worst actors here (who are in my inbox giving me their thoughts and also writing headlines at large publications) can spin this as "a man just beat up a woman in the Olympics." One email I got simply said:
They are men. Men shouldn't beat up women. XY makes one stronger by design.
This is a really great and concise summary of all the things that people get wrong about this story, so let's take that sentence by sentence, shall we?
They are not men.
Men shouldn't beat up women, I agree, nor should women beat up men, but boxing is literally about beating each other up. That is the whole thing of the sport!
XY does not actually make one stronger "by design." We know this from lots of research.
(A small aside: I would be very curious how many people engaged on this topic online actually watch boxing regularly. The video of the fight has circulated everywhere (thanks in part to J.K. Rowling and JD Vance, what's up with the J_ initial name people being the worst?) but when I watch it mostly am reminded that I don't know anything about boxing. And I think most people watching also don't have the context to even know how to process what they're seeing. What is normal? What usually happens in a match?)
A few final thoughts:
The fact that this is happening in boxing is also super interesting because boxing is actually one of the sports that is often used as an example of how we might move away from the gender binary in sports. Because boxing has weight classes. It's divided by gender still, but it also divides itself by a specific physical factor that impacts performance. And yet, even there, you still see this biological essentialism at play — the idea that men are inherently better, that this is a specifically male coded behavior, and that women must be protected from secret men.
Thusfar, neither Lin nor Imane Khelif have addressed this issue publicly. Last year, I actually reached out to Lin to see if she'd talk to me for Tested. I never got anywhere (I don't know if she ever even saw my messages — often with athletes, you wind up sending messages on Instagram of FB and it's hard to know if they even see them).
Khelif is from Algeria, which has quite repressive laws around LGBTQIA identities. In the meeting of the IBA at which Khelif was disqualified last year, there was an Algerian representative, who made the case for her. But it's unclear whether the country will rally around her, and support her here or not. (Historically, we have seen some countries like South Africa do so, while others, like Kenya, have tended to leave their athletes out in the cold). Whatever happens, I hope that both women have good support networks around them.
Lin and Khelif both fight again on August 6th, and I think the outcome of those matchups will really dictate what happens next. If they win, the folks who claim to care about fairness in women's boxing will get even more aggressive. If they lose, they'll probably stop caring about boxing all together.
Cat vs Tyger
Here's the pitch for a story about old women's boxing drama. I did talk to Tyger Trimiar on the phone, but I could never track down Cat, which is one reason this never really went anywhere.
In October of 1974, Marian “Tyger” Trimiar and Jackie Tonawanda both applied for professional boxing licenses. These two women were at the forefront of fighting for women’s right to box, and they were ridiculed harshly for it. Male athletes and journalists alike saw the push for women’s boxing as a threat, and let everybody know how unseriously they took the prospect.
Of course, Tyger and Jackie eventually won. But they don’t get the credit for it.
In 1978 three boxing licenses were issued, one each to Tyger and Jackie and a third to a tall, white, blonde fighter named Cat Davis.
Cat was physically handed her license first, and she’s largely remembered as the first woman in history to get a boxing licenses, likely because the media found her more palatable than the black women who came before her. In the press, Tyger and Jackie were often described as “large Amazons” while Cat was called graceful and beautiful.
Tyger and Cat had already had a rivalry — according to their managers, they hated each other — but the fact that Cat got that first license only made their rift even deeper. The day the licenses were handed out, Tyger challenged Cat to a fight, and Cat retorted “You’ll have to learn to box first” and the two were at each other’s throats.
Tyger and Jackie had fought for this chance for years before Cat came along, but today Cat is usually the one remembered as the trailblazing woman who fought for women’s right to box. Davis’s fights were televised on NBC and ABC, while Tyger and Jackie’s were ignored. Davis even had a documentary made about her in 1978 called “Cat, the Woman Who Fought Back.” Tyger has, as far as I can tell, never been featured in a single documentary.
In the end, Cat and Tyger never got to face off in the ring, as things quickly went south for Cat when it was uncovered that some of her matches might have been fixed. Meanwhile, Tyger went on to become the World lightweight champion. And Tyger never stopped fighting for women in the sport. In 1987 she went on a hunger strike to protest the way women’s boxing was being handled — including the way Cat’s manager treated her. Over the course of the hunger strike she lost 30 pounds.
But today, when people talk about the first woman to get a boxing license, it’s always Cat Davis’s face that illustrates the stories. It's time for people to meet Tyger.