Author J.K. Rowling has fallen silent on her usually busy X (formerly Twitter) feed, after Olympic gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif filed a legal complaint in France for alleged cyber harassment over statements regarding her gender.
On August 9, lawyers for Khelif filed a lawsuit with a special unit of the public prosecutor’s office in Paris, stemming from false statements that spread online about her gender after the Algerian boxer defeated Italy’s Angela Carini in her first fight of the 2024 Olympic Games. Carini pulled out 46 seconds into the bout and told reporters afterwards that she had “never felt a punch like this.”
Did she break any record? Also AFAIK the same didn’t happen to previous medalists or generally the strongest female boxers. It also didn’t happen with other monsters who broke tons of records (e.g. Katie Ledecky) just during this Olympics.
This makes me think that it’s not what you are saying but there are probably other reasons in play. Probably the IBA and the media making a case after the first boxer withdrew are responsible.
In combat sports there’s a lot of derision for women who look too strong. Instead of complementing their training regiment and dedicated they get called ugly and a man all the damn time.
On the other end usually those same trolls will call women who train and still look feminine to be gold diggers training with so many men, that’s for posting pictures of themselves training, making weight etc. And send them dm’s offering money to be choked out.
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I am sure that’s the case, but I think this has not to do with “breaking records” I.e. having success in sport. It might have to do with general gender stereotypes related to body types, for example, or with other stuff.
So either way the comment I was answering to seems counterfactual and sensationalistic.
obviously stereotypes make people’s story more believable and easier to go viral and that is why people choose the stories they choose. doesn’t change the fact that there are people who would rather explain an unexpected level of success shown by a woman by saying she is probably not a woman. the story they choose is irrelevant really. They could have claimed she has cybernetic extensions in her muscles and it would be the same thing. And all you are saying is “but there are other very successful women who have not been treated that way”. Sure, did not say every single very successful woman is deterministically being treated unfairly. I am saying it is a tendency.
There are people who are transphobic to the degree of investigating born women, time and again. (Are you aware of the lesbians “bathroom problem”? It predates the current antitrans moral panic by a decade.) It seems their hatred is so rotten that eventually they are the ones unable to define what a woman is. Now even a vagina at birth is not cutting it. Just not beat around the bush, this is about transphobia, and Khelif naming Rowling, Musk, and Trump in her suit (all of them billionaire transphobes with a platform) is no coincidence.
Ah and don’t forget that trans women are not men either. Too many let that slip in this debate because Khelif is cisgender, but let’s not forget that when nazis say “men are stronger than women” they mean trans women as men. They aren’t. Nazi punks fuck off.
What I am actually saying is that the vast majority of successful women athletes didn’t suffer from this at this time at all. If this argument works only for Imane Khelif (not even the Taiwanese boxer, who has been mostly ignored), out of the hundreds of women who just won medals, maybe it is not an argument that can be generalized to “women of success”, and other causes have to be searched.
This to me is basic common sense: if a thesis works only on a handful of examples and there are hundreds of counter examples, maybe the thesis is wrong. A tendency would require also more examples.
So are you claiming that there is no historical bias towards downplaying women’s successes in general or that in history there was but now as a whole Earth has progressed so far that we have left all those behind? Or is it just that it doesn’t happen in sports but happens in other areas? Or women have been downplayed but never because of success but always for other reasons?
What you call a handful of examples is taking a magnifying glass and only looking at this particular event. If %10 of successful women have ever been downplayed because of their gender (due to unconscious biases for example) vs %1 of successful men, then this is still a handful of examples which nevertheless points to a significant bias.
None of those, really. Just that downplaying successful women doesn’t happen as much in sport, and when it does it’s not by stating they are men.
It has to do with the fact that testosterone is a performance enhancement drug and men are categorically stronger than females, and a man punching a female is strictly unsafe.
An breakdown of your wannabe argument would be:
A: “Testosterone enhances performance” B: “Men are in most cases stronger than women” C: “A man punching a woman is unsafe”
This vaudeville of ideas have no apparent link between them, the real product of a scattered mind. Scientists are still out about A.
B is a statistical truism at this point irrelevant to the topic, since Khelif is a cisgender woman, and there is no evidence (for the time being) that she is intersex.
C is also immaterial to the discussion. Perhaps you are trying to say that high-testosterone women are “comparable” to men in combat sports, because they pose a greater threat to cisgender women but this is quite the leap, since she is no man.
Testosterone levels vary between individuals. Taking part in combat sports entails a risk of serious injury. The weight categories are in place to make things comparable between opponents, testosterone levels are not. Scientists have questioned whether testosterone level correlate that much to performance outcomes as people think.
The ersatz argument makes no sense.
Are they?
I think so, yes.
Quoting from Transgender Woman Athletes and Elite Sport
Quoting from Sport and Transgender People: A Systematic Review of the Literature Relating to Sport Participation and Competitive Sport Policies
Quoting Scientific American Trans Girls Belong on Girls’ Sports Teams my emphasis
Quoting from UK-transphobe-funded Strength, Power, and Aerobic Capacity of Transgender Athletes my emphasis
So even those highly motivated to prove trans women are disproportionately advantaged have difficulty tapping it. As for combat sports, don’t forget Joe Rogan as well female MMA athletes ended up apologizing to Fallon Fox for all the transphobic BS they had spewed at the time.
What was your point again?
Bodybuilders everywhere in the world are using testosterone boosting steroids.
Anecdotal evidence? Marketing scheme? Performance enhancing drug manufacturer snake oil? How does this respond to a score of peer review evidence. People everywhere in the world believe in astrology and crystals as well. So what?
At the moment we don’t have any concrete data, so in case it is based on a suspicion at most.
The IBA is notoriously corrupt and in the pockets of Russia. The whole stuff against Khelif was likely made up, because she did not adhere to planned match fixing by the IBA.
Add to that the fact that she is from an African Muslim country and on top of that the country that kicked the French colonisers out. She was made the perfect targeted for all levels of racism and white supremacism, from the very blatant, to the more or less concealed “Liberals”.
To be honest I don’t consider something being Russian as automatically 100% false. This case from the IBA seems likely made up, or at least it is until they provide further proof, which they didn’t so far.
That said, this is irrelevant in this particular conversation. Real or not, that precedent is in my opinion partly responsible for why people decided to attack this particular athletes. I agree with you on the next country also playing a role.
Basically my whole argument is that there are multiple factors that made this a case. The fact that she “broke records” or “had success” is generally very low in the list, imho.
breaking record not in the formal sense but performing exceptionally well, such as beating your opponent in 46 seconds in the last 16
I doubt that fight can be counted as “exceptionally good performance”, but anyway why the same didn’t happen for those that both performed exceptionally well and actually set records?
There are so many examples of that not happening that makes me seriously doubt it identifies the right cause(s).
What you think are the right causes are not the causes, they are the tools (stereotypical biases etc) that these people use to make their stories believable.
And counting is not the correct methodological approach to this question it is the incident rate (historically of women whose success has been deliberately downplayed because she does not fit the stereotypical women in their head vs men who suffered from the same).
Those look nothing like “tools” to me.
I will make it simpler: In this very thread a person talked about “high testosterone”. Why they didn’t say the same about the 99% of the women who won competitions? Probably because of a combination of factors:
To me the combination of the above is a much better explanation of the causes for which people attacked this particular boxer, and not the many other women of success, including black and including masculine (e.g., Simone Biles, or Grace Bullen).
I really don’t see how this measurement can lead to any conclusion. How can you not measure the amount of women who don’t fit the stereotypical woman aspect and yet whose success has not been downplayed due to their aspect (i.e., people called them men)?
It makes up for a more believable story in this context (boxing which is accepted as a masculine sport) and therefore becomes a more efficient tool. It fits in more easily with people’s biases making it much easier to spread. Simon Biles is a gymnast so that does not fit into the context here. Grace Bullen does. But you can not simply say “it did not happen to other women in plausible scenerios, therefore it is not real”. It is like saying belts are useless in %90 of the cases, it is a useless statistic that does not take into account the expected effect.
What do you mean? Comparing the rate at which women are subject to such effects vs men is a worse statistic than saying “but many successful women are not subject to such effects”? If there is a systematic bias towards women’s success being downplayed, you cannot call this an isolated incident of stereotypical bias.
You can take any other boxer, I specifically chose black and “masculine” athletes as examples to show that even race/body type alone was not the determining factor. In these Olympic games you have just Imane’s example: how can you call this a trend or make general statements with one case (not even the Taiwanese boxer got attention)?
Men don’t have a category to which they are wrongfully assigned when they win sports. This is also because men are the higher category in most sports (i.e., higher performers), so it is a parallel that simply doesn’t make sense. So yes. It is a worse statistics because men who are victim of gender stereotypes are generally not the ones who excel at sports (men who are called women in general break the masculine stereotype of the muscular and competitive guy - and these unsurprisingly are not characteristics common in elite athletes).
But this was not your claim either. Your claim is that downplaying is done by specifically saying those women are men. The whole point here is on the cause, not the existence of the phenomenon in general.
You are thinking it is a worse statistics because you are still too fixated on the particular example that I gave which that she was called a man. We are currently discussing the ridiculous ways in which women’s success are generally downplayed more than men and men are embraced more than women. That is because you think the cause ia gender sterotypes where as I think gender stereotypes is a particular tool/excuae used in this particular case whose cause is unwillingness of particular types of people to accept women’s success. And then you will again say they have embraced a lot of women’s success in this particular event and we will circle back to me talking about incident rates and other historical examples and how compared to men incident rate of downplaying the success will be much higher so perhaps we can stop here, I dont know.
If you think the point of my original statement is really about “successful women being called men all the time” then you have really missed the point. It just points out to a particular way in which a woman’s success was downplayed in this particular event vs all the other men’s were embraced. Many other women’s were embraced as well, however the impact of downplaying this woman’s success was profound.
How did I miss the point? To me it seems clear that what you were saying that women can’t be successful, if they are, they are considered men (because men have success).
I am not fixating on the example, sorry, it’s the whole thesis you condensed into this sentence that I am fixated on. Women’s success can be downplayed in many ways. Either way, in sports in 2024 I don’t think this is as much of a problem as it is - say - in business. Most importantly, I think this case had not much to do with downplaying Imane’s success (the whole case started waaaay earlier she won the medal), but simply with other factors.