Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times:
Should women ever trust the Olympics again? This is what many will be asking themselves tonight as the closing ceremony plays out. But this is the wrong question. The correct one is, how much longer will women put up with the International Olympics Committee punching them in the face?
Photos of female boxers making protest “x” signs above their heads after their matches — emphasising that they have XX chromosomes and are therefore female, and implying that their opponents, Algeria’s welterweight Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s featherweight Lin Yu-ting who both won gold medals, are XY and therefore not — will be the emblematic images of women’s sport from the 2024 Olympics.
Well, we had four good years, gals! Four years when women were granted — and please forgive the inevitable sporting cliche here — a level playing field at the Olympics.
It’s only since 2012 — yes, ye olde 2012 — that women have been allowed to compete in every Olympics event. Women were at last graciously granted permission by the IOC to take part in the ski jump, because previously there was concern their uteruses would fall out — gosh, I hate it when that happens! It was also the first year there was women’s boxing at the Olympics.
Alas, that sweet taste of sporting equality endured only until 2016, when all three medals in the women’s 800m were won by athletes with XY chromosomes, meaning they are biologically male: Burundi’s Francine Niyonsaba, Kenya’s Margaret Wambui and — famously — South Africa’s Caster Semanya. These athletes all had a difference of sexual development (DSD), meaning they appeared to be girls at birth but were actually males with internal testes. Thus, after puberty they had the superior strength and speed that males have over females, which is the sole reason women’s sport exists as a separate category. “Being born with internal testicles doesn’t make me less of a woman,” Semanya later said, to which the response is: Well, it does mean you shouldn’t compete against women.
When GB’s Lynsey Sharp complained in 2016 about being denied a medal because of the three DSD runners, she was barraged with death threats. “Lynsey is a good runner. She would’ve been even better if she’d just bit her lip and trained,” Semanya sniped in her 2023 memoir, The Race to Be Myself.
By failing to deal with the DSD issue then, the IOC left Semanya, Wambui and Niyonsaba open to intrusive speculation, and denied women athletes their deserved medals.
Their tactic this time was to tell journalists not to use “harmful” (aka factual) terms, such as “biological male” when referring to trans or DSD athletes. Yes, far more important to prevent harmful words than harmful punches! Because unlike the 2016 Olympics, the problem here is not speed but violence, and male boxers have on average 162 per cent greater punching power than female ones. The IOC knows this, and they also know that Khelif and Lin have a DSD. This month the IOC president, Thomas Bach, huffily insisted, “This is not a DSD case”, only for the IOC to issue a hasty correction that Bach had meant to say, “This is not a transgender case”, ie, it is a DSD case.
And still they let women (the irrelevant XX kind) be pummelled by them and then insisted that anyone who objected was engaging in “hate speech”, as Bach put it. On Friday Bach made like a Labour MP circa 2019 and pretended there is no way of knowing what a woman is. He said: “If someone is presenting us with a scientifically solid system how to identify men and women … we would be more than pleased.” Well, he could push them down a ski slope and see if their uterus falls out? Or the IOC could take a swab from inside their cheeks, which is all a sex test involves.
There's now a 100% success rate for men boxing in the women's Olympics, after Lin Yu-ting followed Imane Khelif in gaining a gold medal, after another one-sided bout as he pursued his hapless opponent round the ring, punching at will:
Lin fighting for gold. Already in the lead pic.twitter.com/RS50nCPWM8
— FairPlayForWomen (@fairplaywomen) August 10, 2024
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Both men, Khelif and Yu-ting, won every round in every match on their way to gold.
Mick Hartley 
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