Updated
PARIS (LifeSiteNews) — “This is France!” Emmanuel Macron crowed on X as the Olympic Opening Ceremony in Paris unfolded. That, unfortunately, was what everyone was afraid of.
The ceremony featured a blasphemous representation of the Last Supper, featuring drag queens as the disciples and Barbara Butch, an overweight lesbian DJ, as the Lord Jesus Christ. The International Olympics Committee has already issued a pseudo-apology and deleted the video from its YouTube channel, but Butch was quite clear that this was a deliberate inversion.
There was more, but suffice it to say that after that ceremony, it would come as no surprise that the Olympic Committee had approved two male athletes to compete as “women.” Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan and Imane Khelif of Algeria were previously disqualified from the Women’s World Boxing Championships in March 2023 in New Delhi, India, for reportedly having “XY chromosomes.” At the time, president of the International Boxing Association (IBA) Umar Kremley announced that a number of boxers were being disqualified after “a series of DNA-tests” conducted “uncovered athletes who were trying to fool their colleagues and pretend to be women.”
IBA released a public statement announcing that “a boxer from Algeria, Imane Khelif, was excluded from the IBA World Boxing Championships due to the failure to meet the IBA eligibility criteria.” The Algerian Olympic Committee called the IBA’s decision a “conspiracy” to deny Algeria a gold medal and noted at the time that they hoped Khelif could fight in the Paris Olympics.
After the disqualification, Mexican boxer Brianda Tamara posted about her experience boxing Khelif at the championship on X. “When I fought with [him] I felt very out of my depth,” Tamara said. “[His] 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, and it’s good that they finally realized.” There are now serious concerns that female boxers could be injured by Khelif and Yu-Ting. Here is Khelif fighting in an earlier match—clearly far stronger than the opponent:
🚨Beating women is now a spectator sport
We have never been more aware as a society of male violence against women
Why are the #Olympics allowing this male to enter the boxing ring with a woman? #Paris2024 @fairplaywomen pic.twitter.com/I4gKzvigJt
— Katherine Deves Morgan 🇦🇺🚺 (@deves_katherine) July 30, 2024
Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting, who previously won five gold medals in women’s boxing tournaments, was also disqualified and stripped of a bronze medal. Now, at the Paris Olympics, Khelif is scheduled to fight Angela Carini of Italy on August 1, with Yu-Ting to be paired off with a female fighter the following day.
Marshi Smith of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS) spoke with Reduxx about the issue:
The IOC’s decision to end sex-verification screening in 2000 has caused distrust and confusion in women’s sports ever since. Its 2021 decision to offload the responsibility for international eligibility criteria to individual sporting bodies has resulted in varied standards and widespread chaos among athletes, coaches, officials, and the public. In boxing, the recent contentious split between the IBA and the IOC has now placed Olympic eligibility power into the hands of national boxing federations, allowing countries like Algeria and Taiwan to set their own standards and continue placing male boxers in the ring with female athletes in combat for women’s Olympic medals.
This, said Smith, has led to a truly ugly scenario. “The physical abuse of women on an Olympic stage eliminates the integrity of all Olympic events and risks lifelong injury or even death for female athletes. This deceit cannot be allowed to continue.” A 2020 study by the University of Utah concluded that a man’s punch is, on average, about 160-170% more powerful than a woman’s punch.
(Editor’s note: Algerian media is contesting widespread allegations that Imane Khelif is not a woman. Fans of the athlete state that Imane has a condition called hyperandrogenism. It is worth noting that Algeria is a conservative country where transgenderism is neither legal nor tolerated.)
