This past weekend, two biologically male boxers won gold medals in women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics. On Friday, Imane Khelif of Algeria won the gold medal in the women’s welterweight division. On Saturday, Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan won the gold medal in the women’s featherweight division.

As reported by Boxing News, the oldest boxing publication in the world:

“Khelif has documented male XY chromosomes. Khelif—along with Lin Yu-Ting, of Taiwan—was banned from boxing at the world championships last year, this because of the fact that Khelif, and Yu-Ting, was proven to be biological male.”

Why did the International Olympic Committee allow biological men to box women?

The reason is that the IOC is a woke organization. And given that the Olympics took place in a particularly woke locale—Paris—the games featured almost everything that the word “woke” represents.

• The games opened with a drag queen mockery of Christianity.
• Due to farm animals’ alleged impact on climate, 60% of the Olympic athletes’ food was vegan (not even vegetarian). According to The Australian, the Australian government flew in “more than 700 kilograms of eggs and a ton of extra meat” to feed Australian athletes.
• Also to combat climate change, athletes’ dorms were not allowed to have air conditioning. They were to be cooled, in the words of The Washington Post, “by other cooling methods.” But few countries relied on “other cooling methods,” so they shipped in portable air conditioning units—all of which ended up doing what many green policies do: increasing the “carbon footprint.”
• And true to its wokeness, the IOC forced women boxers to fight biological males. The IOC allowed male boxers to fight women despite the males having been previously banned from women’s boxing by the International Boxing Association.

Sporting organizations independent of the IOC set their own eligibility rules—which usually means biological males cannot compete in women’s sports. But for the second straight Summer Olympics, Olympic boxing has been run by an IOC-appointed committee, not by a functioning governing body for that sport.

As a result, every woman who faced Khelif or Lin was soundly defeated. Women who devoted their lives to the grueling sport of boxing and the goal of one day winning an Olympic gold medal were cheated out of the possibility.

Of course, the world’s mainstream—meaning left-wing—media supported the IOC. The worst among the awful media may have been the Associated Press. In the view of the AP, Khelif, not the women Khelif beat up, was the real victim: Khelif was the victim of “online abuse from around the world over misconceptions about her womanhood. … Major celebrities and others have questioned her eligibility or falsely claimed she was a man.”

According to the AP, opposition to the biologically male boxers was “amplified by Russian disinformation.” “Russian disinformation slams Paris and amplifies Khelif debate to undermine the Olympics” was the AP headline of its “news” piece on Khelif’s winning a gold medal. AP cited NewsGuard—a left-wing disinformation organization that masquerades as a “fact checker”—as agreeing that Russian disinformation played a critical role in the Paris Olympics.

The once-respected AP, which, like other mainstream “news” media, has become a disgrace to the news profession, not only blamed Russian disinformation but also blamed—you guessed it—racism. Another AP headline: “For female athletes of color, scrutiny around gender rules and identity is part of a long trend.”

The article went on to say: “Female athletes of color have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination when it comes to sex testing and false accusations that they are male or transgender.” And it quoted—you guessed it again—a professor:

“Medical anthropologist Danyal Kade Doyle Griffiths, an adjunct professor with the City University of New York (said): ‘These examples strike me as particular cases where racism and transphobia and intersex phobia are kind of inseparable.'”

The whole charge of AP and the professor is a falsehood. White biological men who claim to be female and compete against women are routinely attacked for cheating. See, for example, an earlier column about the University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who claims to be female and robs women of their swimming records.

NBC also claimed Khelif was a victim: “Algerian Imane Khelif won welterweight gold Friday … overcoming a firestorm of questions from opponents wrongly questioning her gender.”

No one exposed the deceit of the IOC and the left-wing media as effectively as the women who were forced to fight against Khelif and Lin. NBC itself reported the words of Mexico’s Brianda Tamara after she fought Khelif in Dec. 2022:

“When I fought her I felt very much out of my depth. Her blows hurt me a lot, I don’t think I had ever felt like that in my 13 years as a boxer, nor in my sparring with men. Thank God that day I got out of the ring safely.”

Essentially Sports reported that female boxer Svetlana Kamenova Staneva of Bulgaria, who lost her chance at a gold medal when she was defeated by Lin, refused “to shake hands with Lin Yu Ting and instead (was) defiantly displaying an ‘X’ gesture in the ring, implying her XX chromosomes compared to her opponent’s reported XY chromosomes.”

A Turkish female boxer, Esra Yildiz Kahraman, also displayed an “X” gesture after Lin defeated her.

Presumably, the IOC, AP, NBC, and NewsGuard regard all these women fighters as sore losers.

It all began when the world saw Angela Carini, the Italian female boxer, quit her fight with Khelif after just 46 seconds. Sobbing at having to quit the fight, she later told the press: “I am heartbroken. I went to the ring to honor my father. I was often told that I was a warrior, but I preferred to stop for my health. I have never felt a punch like this.”

The solution is testing for chromosomes—not testosterone levels, not genitals, not self-identification. It may well be that Khelif herself did not know until tested that she was a biological male. Unlike Thomas and all the transwomen who play against women, Khelif was not necessarily a cheat.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni got it right: “Athletes who have male genetic characteristics should not be admitted to female competitions.”

Former President Donald Trump said essentially the same thing.

Vice President Kamala Harris has thus far said nothing.

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Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His commentary on Numbers, the fourth volume of “The Rational Bible,” his five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible, will be released in November 2024 and is available now for presale on Amazon. He is the co-founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

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