The Emperor's New Chromosomes

So now the Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital; and all the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, "Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor's new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!" in short, no one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit for his office. Certainly, none of the Emperor's various suits, had ever made so great an impression, as these invisible ones.

"But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.

"Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.

"But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.

Perhaps the most tragic part about the story involving “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is the way it ends.

Here you’ve got this vainglorious emperor assaulting everyone’s eyes and collective intelligence as he peacocks around his kingdom, naked as a jaybird, expecting everyone to fawn over his non-existent clothes. And they largely do, too cowardly to speak until a child has the good sense to say what they’re all secretly thinking: The emperor is naked.

And everyone, including the emperor, knows the kid is right. This is a come-to-Jesus moment. It’s an invitation for the emperor to contend with the irony that his runaway vanity is actually wreaking havoc on his image. It’s an invitation for the nobility to care enough about his dignity to grow some stones and tell him the truth. It’s an invitation for the townspeople to pull their heads out of the sand and reclaim some dignity of their own instead of cowering before royalty. This could be the great reset that gets everyone back on track to sanity.

But instead of swallowing his piece of humble pie and rectifying the situation, the emperor digs his heels in and enlists the help of his noblemen to continue the charade, strutting his naked self through the streets, pretending like nothing is wrong and requiring the peasantry to continue joining him in his massive game of make believe.

I’ve really struggled these past few days on social media as I’ve watched countless people I know in real life stepping up to defend a naked emperor. In this context, the emperor role is played by a couple of genetic males punching women in the face on a global stage while the wide world cheers. It’s like end stage misogyny disguised as social justice, and I have a visceral response to it.

“How heroic! What courage to overcome such bigotry en route to victory!” they cry as they watch a grown male nearly break a woman’s nose, end her Olympic dreams, and reduce her to tears. “Have empathy!” they demand for everyone but her.

I’ve spent a lot of time and energy over the past few days to bring clarity into an admittedly confusing conversation. I could painstakingly counter every argument that exists about the Paris 2024 Olympics boxing controversy, and I actually thought I might need to do that, but then I discovered this brilliant write-up in Quilette, and it’s a trillion times better than anything I could produce, so you’re welcome. Hope it helps.

The bottom line is that there are two grown males contending for medals in women’s Olympic boxing matches this year. We know this because previous female contenders complained to the extent that the IBA was forced to administer two separate sex screenings on these guys, and the results came back conclusively showing XY chromosomes. XY chromosomes are male chromosomes that will lead to male puberty, with the exception of Swyers Syndrome, which is irrelevant to this conversation, as it is clearly not the specific disorder affecting either of these boxers.

A generous interpretation of these athletes’ XY reality would be to assume they both have Disorders of Sexual Development, most likely 5-ARD, which rendered their genitalia ambiguous at birth and explains the initial belief that they were female. Even so, this would mean they went through male puberty, at which point their maleness would be abundantly obvious, as would the reality that it’s both unfair and unsafe for them to compete against women. Dr. Emma Hilton explains the 5-ARD progression below.

A less charitable assumption to make is that these are just garden variety males who saw an opportunity to dominate women and took it. I’m not of this persuasion. I think the DSD interpretation is a lot more likely, and, as previously mentioned, I have a great deal of compassion for the emotional difficulty that would be inevitable in navigating such a situation. Bullying and harassment are never the answer here. It would be really hard, and I am genuinely sad for any embarrassment that these individuals have had to suffer because of circumstances beyond their control. I hope they have happy fruitful lives full of love and acceptance. But they know that what they’re doing is wrong. They know that they could fix it. And they won’t.

It’s objectively true that these two athletes have been shown, through testing, to be males, that female competitors and their coaches complained about being forced the fight them, and that both athletes refuse to take a simple cheek swab to discern their sex and remove all doubt. And it’s also true that if this is allowed to go unchallenged, then the future of women’s sports is up a proverbial creek.

The IBA offered to pay for the cost of another test if the athletes wanted to appeal the decision. Neither athlete did.

I was a mediocre athlete at best, but let me just say… If I had worked my entire life for a coveted spot at the world championships in my sport, and some bigwig told me I couldn’t compete and he announced to the world that I had been disqualified because I was actually a male… then you had best believe I would raise Cain and sue the living daylights out of whoever was slandering me.

And I would move heaven and earth to prove my female DNA to the naysayers. I would volunteer to have my cheek swabbed and my sample analyzed on public television to remove all doubt of my legitimate inclusion in the competition.

There is no way in hell I would sit on the sidelines and say, “You know what? I’m gonna choose not to appeal this. I’d rather not have a world championship title anyway.” You only refuse the opportunity to appeal if you want to keep your medical records hidden for some reason. I wonder what that reason might be. Anyone? Any guesses at all?

How can we afford to ignore these red flags? How can we pretend like this is inconsequential? How can we afford to be quiet?

People keep telling me that we can’t trust the IBA because… corruption, but they can never quite seem to explain what could possibly motivate a sports body to risk gazillion dollar lawsuits in order to manufacture this outrage. What possible perks could they be getting from putting their necks on the chopping block like this? You just can’t make it make sense.

But I have friends—people I’ve known for years and years in the real world, people who have followed my work and seen my hundreds upon hundreds of calls to defend women against the male takeover of our sex-based protections— who are posting all kinds of propaganda designed to frame those of us who are speaking up as hysterical bigots and ignorant, hateful, even racist, science deniers who should just shut up already and find something more important to care about.

I want to smack them upside the head and tell them how offended I am by their unwillingness to cover the emperor’s naked body because I just don’t want to see it anymore.

The other day, a friend who I’ve known in real life, who’s watched me labor for years in defense of women, who’s seen the evidence and reviewed the arguments… well this friend decided to post an article on Facebook with the following headline:

“IDK Who Needs to Hear This, But Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif is Not A Man.”

You guys, something in me just kind of snapped, and I did something really uncharacteristic of me: I unfriended her. I almost never do this, and I immediately regretted it. It’s petty and hot headed and immature and impulsive. It solves nothing, and it tears down a bridge to someone whose differing ideology may bring important challenges to my own blind spots. For years, I’ve prided myself on being someone who can endure dissenting opinions without falling apart. I mean, I co-founded a bipartisan coalition with a Jewish lesbian radical feminist for crying out loud; I’m steeped in dissenting opinions on everything from abortion to immigration to Trump. I live for debate. Unless people are being overtly abusive, I am really pretty hesitant to hit that “unfriend” button.

But I just hit a wall that forced me to contend with my own trauma as it relates to this whole discussion. It felt like gaslighting from a friend. It felt personal to me, like I was the one getting bashed in the face by a post-pubescent guy only to have a friend tell me his feelings mattered more than my safety because he had a hard life. I felt like she made a clear choice to signal virtue rather than loving well enough to actually exercise virtue.

When women are being physically beaten by individuals whose bodies are coursing with testosterone and muscle that allows them to land a punch that’s 2.6 times more powerful than theirs, the only headline we need to be reading is the one that warns us “IDK Who Needs to Hear This, But Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif is Not A Woman.”

This is how we get people killed.

It’s not about some isolated person’s feelings. It’s about the bigger picture and the misogynistic precedent we are watching unfold before our eyes. Do you think for one minute the trans lobby won’t use this? Once we’ve allowed the Olympic definition of womanhood to include XY individuals, women’s sports are toast. We already saw this play out in Rio in 2016, when the gold, silver, and bronze medals in the women’s 800m race were presented to three males with XY DSD’s. You don’t think these people will be heavily recruited? Does it just not matter that there are three women in the world who trained their whole lives for that race, who should have gone home with medals and have nothing to show for it? Are we still going to go with the whole, “You’re a hateful bigot” schtick for those of us complaining?

Another follower on Twitter condescended to remind me that he’s really glad he unfollowed me because how dare I? I’ve been told I should never be allowed to have any kids. I’ve been told my frustration is secretly really just my closeted racism, that I’m only upset because individuals with brown skin are beating white women.

To be fair, none of this is exactly new to me. I’ve been called a bigot for almost 10 years now for opposing men in women’s locker rooms. I shouldn’t be shocked to see the ad hominem messaging campaign continue. It doesn’t ultimately matter whether it’s a DSD or trans identity involved. Either way, you’ve got male bodied people ignoring their advantages and leveraging them against women, and you’re expecting women to sit around on our laurels and watch men hit other women in the face without saying anything about it because we really just need to be nice to the men.

And the answer, of course, is a resounding “No.”

I am genuinely baffled as I try to make sense of peoples’ collective resistance to acknowledging the obvious. Do they actually believe the arguments they’re making, or are they just so thoroughly committed to playing the role of “friend to the marginalized” than they cannot see how they’re contributing to women’s oppression? Do they distrust their eyes when they see a grown male because the people naming his maleness are mostly conservatives? Is that’s what’s going on here? Are they gaslighting themselves because they just can’t possibly fathom the possibility that maybe something right-wingers care about actually matters? How can the same people who chose the bear last week tell women we can’t identify males when we’re in their presence? I just don’t get it.

Standing for women will always mean you’re swimming upstream. Oh friggin well. I’m not going to waltz around town holding up the emperor’s imaginary train by pretending guys who’ve gone through obvious male puberty aren’t actively threatening women’s safety and rights.

The emperor is naked, and there are testes involved. They aren’t welcome in women’s spaces or sports.

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