IOC’s decision to allow Algerian boxer Imane Khelif to compete against women was a disgrace | David Penberthy

It’s the Olympic moment that has everyone talking for all the wrong reasons. As David Penberthy says, if the IOC wasn’t so ridiculously PC, we’d never have landed here.

There is a stupidity and a cruelty at the heart of the International Olympic Committee’s management of that disgraceful “fight” between the Italian female boxer Angela Carini and the Algerian “winner”, intersex athlete Imane Khelif.

The stupidity is that in enabling the fight to proceed out of some mush-headed adherence to progressive principles of “fairness and equity”, the IOC staged a demonstrably unfair and inequitable contest between a weaker biological female and a more powerful person with both male and female chromosomes.

Algeria's Imane Khelif lands a punch on Italy’s Angela Carini in their controversial Women's 66kg preliminary round match at the Paris Olympic Games. Picture: Fabio Bozzani/Anadolu via Getty Images

The cruelty is that the IOC put Carini in a position where she was physically hurt and could have even been killed, while also turning Khelif into a pariah for the broader and technically unrelated issue of male trans athletes.

I say technically unrelated because Khelif is not a trans athlete. She was born a woman and has only ever identified as a woman but as an intersex person she also has male chromosomes. She’s not Caitlin Jenner or Dani Laidley.

She hasn’t made some conscious decision to “change” gender, rather, her gender has become blurred on account of her genetic makeup.

The problem is that however she got there, the effect on the fairness of the contest is the same.

It puts her in a biological position where she is stronger than her female opponents.

It was on this basis that boxing’s peak body ruled on two occasions that she should not be allowed to compete.

A tearful Carini after bowing out of the bout. Picture: Fabio Bozzani/Anadolu via Getty Images

Khelif became the centre of controversy through no fault of her own. Picture: Fabio Bozzani/Anadolu via Getty Images

This ruling was ignored by the IOC, with Thursday night’s ensuing fiasco all their own work.

This was a huge and dreadful moment in the history of sport.

By allowing this appalling spectacle to go ahead, the one good thing the IOC has achieved is to force international calls for clarity around the participation of non-biological females in women’s sport.

And overwhelmingly, the view is that there should be no place for them.

The reality is that as the trans fad has taken off in the western world, the vast majority of non-biological female would-be athletes are ex-blokes who for whatever reason have tried to jump the fence.

Good luck to all of them. Whatever makes you happy.

Where we should draw the line is if their particular brand of happiness also involves a desire to jump into a boxing ring and punch a real woman in the face.

A despondent Carini during the short-lived bout. Picture: Mohd Rasfan/AFP

Or get into the pool alongside the likes of Ariarne Titmus and see how fast they can go.

Or to be built like a brick sh*thouse and decide that what they really want to do is play AFLW with women half their size and one-third their weight.

As things stand under the IOC rules, Mike Tyson could have arrived in Paris wearing a bit of lippy and some eyeliner and got in the ring and thrown a few haymakers against a female opponent.

One of the IOC advisers on gender issues argued last week that the sole criteria for determining gender should be left up to the athletes themselves; that is, if you think you’re a bloke, you’re a bloke, and if you think you’re a woman, you’re a woman.

It is harder to think of anything further from common sense than this.

Khelif leaves the ring after being declared the “winner”. Picture: Mohd Rasfan/AFP

At its most extreme, this trans agenda really is nothing less than a new form of misogyny.

It is the ultimate male impertinence for men who have made the switch to demand that women adjust their behaviour and expectations accordingly to accommodate male demands.

And it’s not some right wing nutjob concern, it’s a real concern which has been played out with female weightlifters who have devoted their life to their sport, only to see men who now claim to be women competing among their number, towering ex-blokes competing in women’s college swimming in the US, and other sports such as soccer where physically stronger genetic males are competing too.

But in the broader societal sense, again under the hooray-for-everything stylings of the fairness and equity brigade, it is women who have to compromise.

Only last year some drongo public servant in my home state issued a press release advising “pregnant people” about which vaccinations they could and couldn’t take for the winter ‘flu season. (To his credit the Health Minister was aghast and held a press conference where he set a world record for using the correct term “pregnant women” as many times as he could).

The idea that women, who do all the heavy lifting in a child-bearing sense, should have to put up with this kind of PC gobbledygook is an insult to their gender.

As is the idea that they devote their life to their sport, competing against their equals, only to have that quite literally knocked out of them when a bloke is allowed to enter the ring.

The story of Australia’s triumph at this Games has been a story of female triumph.

At the time of writing this column, all eight of our gold medals had been won by women. Indeed, since the Sydney Olympics, the women’s swim team has won one-third of the 70-odd gold medals Australia has claimed.

If the Australian female swimmers were a country in their own right, they’d be in the top 10 nations on earth on the medal tally.

These achievements belong to all of us as a nation but they belong especially and uniquely to women.

It should remain that way. And it has to, unless the world’s peak sporting body, the very Olympic movement itself, is going to shred any commitment it has to the real principles of fairness, best evidenced by a disgraceful contest which left one woman bleeding and turned an innocent intersex athlete into a hate figure.

Originally published as IOC’s decision to allow Algerian boxer Imane Khelif to compete against women was a disgrace | David Penberthy