Plenty of the debates about transgender “rights” during the last decade have hinged on the theoretical, the exceptional, and the personal. But in Paris, the most practical, immediate, and apolitical circumstance is making the case against the notion of gender as a subjective identity. Two boxers, Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, have been allowed to compete in women’s boxing at the 2024 Olympics despite both being disqualified from previous competitions over multiple rounds of laboratory testing confirming the two have XY, or male, chromosomes.

While the boxing brouhaha first attracted online critics of the overreach of transgender rights superseding that of women, watching Khelif and Yu-Ting clobber the heck out of biological women had nothing to do with the politics of gender identity and everything to do with an XY person, one who may be intersex but likely went through some chemical and physical process of male puberty, beat up women with the standard XX chromosomes. For some odd reason, stripping the situation of the political context made some ostensible conservatives less angry about the situation, rather than more so.

This case, unlike plenty involving the ethics of allowing a person to fulfill the social gender roles opposite the biological sex into which they are born, is anything but complicated. Contrary to the International Olympic Committee’s embarrassing defense, people aren’t outraged because of “misleading information.” People are ticked off because they have eyes, and this situation marks the pinnacle of the problem transgender truthers have been warning us all was impending.

Whether transgender people can change the pronouns they use or what names they call themselves necessarily is a question of whether it is rude for others not to respect an adult’s wishes. And the growing social contagion of minors with gender dysphoria has become a lightning rod in the culture over the debate of whether a child who cannot consent to the act of sex is capable of ethically changing its gender. Including transgender women in women’s sports is a question of fairness, and in most educational settings regulated by Title IX, it’s a matter of the federal law that, as written, arguably insists that biological women and girls cannot be denied the athletic funds and subsequent scholarship opportunities of female sports to accommodate transgender women and girls.

But in any contact sport, especially one with the physical risks of boxing, safety must be the priority. Fairness is only a secondary concern, with respect and then maybe the social obligation that is “inclusion” only on the table to consider after the first two priorities are fulfilled.

It does not matter if Khelif and Yu-Ting identify as women, men, or any third thing in between. It doesn’t even matter if neither of the boxers knew that they were intersex prior to a few years ago, nor does it matter if they have external female genitalia. If they have XY chromosomes, and thus are dramatically likely to have undergone male puberty, resulting in a permanently stronger and denser physique with elevated testosterone levels, it is not safe to compete in boxing, of all sports, against an XX woman. That it is unfair is a secondary concern, and whether it is respectful or inclusive is irrelevant in this situation.

The reason we must be terribly vague about the medical status of these boxers is that the IOC intentionally rewrote the rules to allow for something like this to happen. The IOC’s “framework on fairness, inclusion and non-discrimination” now allows each sport to enact its own eligibility requirements so long as it does “not systematically exclude athletes from competition based upon their gender identity, physical appearance and/or sex variations” or determine fairness and safety with “medically unnecessary procedures or treatment” or “gynaecological examinations or similar forms of invasive physical examinations.”

So although the IOC continues to refer to and categorize the two boxers in question because their passports demarcate them as women, the public has no idea just how elevated their testosterone levels are. The most precise diagnosis given is “differences in sex development,” perhaps in a similar manifestation as former Olympic track champion Caster Semenya.

But the difference between Semenya and the boxers is that Semenya wasn’t trying to, well, box biological females. Even though Semenya has been required to take medications to lower her testosterone levels to compete, the reason was fairness, a concern that is indeed important, but as discussed above, secondary to safety.

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We can debate in the abstract whether basic manners take precedence over personal religious objections when choosing how to address an adult who identifies as transgender, and the debate over the intersection of choices of children versus the rights of parents to protect them is a relevant matter of public policy. At certain points, especially when we discuss adults with subjective preferences just trying to live their own lives, respect for personal autonomy should indeed be considered in coordination with fairness and objective reality.

But when the matter could literally hinge on life or death, imminent physical safety indeed trumps all.