On a packed Friday afternoon at the low-fi North Paris Arena, essentially a reconfigured trade fair hall, the Paris 2024 boxing programme staged the most wildly politicised, toxic and largely misunderstood event of these Olympics.
Yes: this was a travesty. But not perhaps the travesty many people might have had in mind. Definition: a distorted or false version of events. All that was really certain in Paris was that we definitely got one of those.
At 3.30pm Chinese Taipei’s Lin Yu-ting stepped between the ropes to fight Sitora Turdibekova of Uzbekistan in the opening round of the women’s featherweight competition. In the process, and in an extraordinary development in her own previously regulation existence, Lin did so under the gaze of Donald Trump, JK Rowling and the entire massed global commentariat of a complex and acrimonious war of ideas and identity in which she is essentially non-combatant.
Can we just be really clear on this? Lin is not, as far as anyone knows, a transgender woman. Lin is also not male, as far as anyone knows, and has never changed her gender identity.
Lin was born a girl 28 years ago. She is an athlete competing under her birth passport as a woman, backed also, as has been reported in her home country, by a Taiwanese identity number assigned at birth that begins with a 2, meaning this person was born a baby girl. Lin is a career fighter, much respected in her home country. She had until a year ago, as we must assume in the absence of any other evidence, no idea that this issue was going to subsume her life.
This is what has happened since. At last year’s world championships Lin took a swab test which, according to the International Boxing Association (IBA), indicated the presence of sufficient male chromosomes to disqualify her from the women’s event. This is something that has begun to happen more regularly in elite sport.
A similar thing happened to the Namibian runner Christine Mboma. In Mboma case she grew up as a girl and a woman, found she was good at running, went into competition and discovered after being tested before the Tokyo Games that she was producing a large amount of testosterone, could not have children and would now live with this previously unknown condition.
She competed and won 200m silver in Tokyo but her subsequent ban from competition when World Athletics changed its rules feels odd in a certain light, a case of Sebastian Coe and pals taking it on themselves to define what a woman is allowed to be, not just on the outside but also on the inside. Mboma, it could be argued, simply has an innate physical capacity, as Usain Bolt has.
This may or may not be the case with Lin. No one knows if she, like Mboma, is what elite sport calls a DSD athlete, which means a person with a different, less linear personal biology, that may convey certain performance advantages.
Only one thing is really clear. It is all very hard on Lin and the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who had a similar result in a test taken by the IBA. Both boxed without incident in Tokyo. Both have competed for years at this level. Khelif has a similar backstory. She was born and grew up as female. She is not doping, and is not trying to assert a new gender identity.
She also comes from Algeria, which continues to outlaw homosexuality, which has no visible LGBTQ+ culture, support network or any progressive culture on such issues. This is by any objective measure, a startling situation for a 25-year-old Algerian woman to find herself in. How to digest or process or deal with this?
Is this even a trans issue, as so many seem to have assumed? It is certainly a sporting and practical one. Clearly trans people deserve, and are long overdue, full personal, legal and emotional freedom to be as they are and do as they please. At the same time there are obvious problems with encouraging people who have been through a testosterone-fuelled male puberty to compete in particular sporting events against people who have not.
These are hugely complex, essentially irresolvable issues. Equal rights, health concerns, wellbeing and access to sport for young women all come into play. It is an impossibly difficult balance of interests, one that requires care and thought and sensitivity on all sides; that can only progress with trust and respect, by an absence of censure and blame, and above all by total clarity on the facts.
At which point, well, here comes everybody. Here comes the startling ineptitude and tardiness of the IOC in addressing this issue. Here come stampeding online hordes, opportunist politicians looking for a piñata to thwack. Here comes a misunderstanding of the facts, pre-cooked argument looking for its nail which is always the same nail.
Why is the author of the Harry Potter series engaged in an arms-length and factually uncertain feud with the Taiwanese boxing community over the sex of an Olympic featherweight contender? What could Trump possibly have to offer on this subject? Why are two groups of people who really do have more in common than what divides them, women who are concerned about women’s rights, and trans people who are concerned about trans rights, so entrenched in this battle that an unresolved issue of biology in women’s boxing becomes just another nuclear button issue?
There was a visceral reaction to Khelif’s bout on Thursday. There are urgent unresolved questions about the safety of women in sport. But Khelif is also a person who was born a woman and has, all evidence suggests, always considered herself a woman.
In the end the only obvious fault here lies with the IOC’s malfunctioning boxing unit, which has managed this situation with a ham-fisted and weirdly aggressive sense of its own certainty. It lies with Thomas Bach, who clearly just hoped this would all blow over. It lies with the failure to formulate a proper policy, to have a plan and a programme for the athletes. It lies with every talking head who has half-understood this situation, has assumed that what they are witnessing here is just another variation on previous outrages and leapt in with both feet.
For now, and with the competition ongoing, there are no sensible answers. Probably, seeing Lin and Khelif in the flesh, as people, not avatars in a war of ideologies, might help. Another person who deserves our sympathy is Turdibekova, Lin’s opponent in Paris, a 22-year-old Uzbek whose hero is Muhammad Ali and whose dream is to win a gold medal.
That will not happen here. Lin took the fight in a routine points decision and will move on to fight in the last 16. At the end she was pursued towards the safety of the players’ area by a swarming media crew, before exiting without saying a word.
Her coach did stop to say a few words in Mandarin, looked largely nonplussed. Asked a question by an American journalist his only response before scooting back behind the barricades was to shrug and say “Hey. It’s the Olympic Games.” Which is at least, exceptionally in the current circumstances, undeniably correct. This will continue to run. Perhaps though it can become just a little more civil, a little kinder to the people at its centre, and a little more anchored in fact.
