Should Women Box Men? Should Women Box At All?

After its disgusting, blasphemous opening ceremony, the big news from the Paris Olympics is the 46 second loss of Italian policewoman Angela Corini to Imane Khelif. The reason is that like the Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting, Algerian national Khelif is said to be a man.

Before going any further, it should be made clear that neither of these individuals is a fake/cheat, or whatever nomenclature you choose. Such fakes/cheats include the American swimmer Will Thomas and New Zealand weightlifter Gavin Howard who called themselves women in order to compete against weaker female competition and win medals galore.  This documentary will tell you all you need to know about the contrived gender in sport debate and much else.

Will regard to Khelif and Lin, it will suffice to say that there is indeed a tiny number of people who are “assigned sex at birth”. They appear to be in that category. A far better known case is that of the South African runner Caster Semenya whose own mother insisted she was born a girl, and she should know.

It is now acknowledged that in her case, things are not that clear. Semenya says she was born with a vagina and internal undescended testes, but that she has no uterus or fallopian tubes and does not menstruate.

This tiny number of genuine cases should be left to the relevant sporting bodies to adjudicate, and it would be wrong to stigmatise any of these athletes.

Having said that, with regard to women boxing, why is this so popular or even allowed? The photograph below is not of Angela Corini but of Rhonda Rousey. Rousey is a stunningly attractive woman, but she doesn’t look stunningly attractive here, only stunned. That damage was inflicted on her by another woman, Holly Holm, in a mixed martial arts fight.

At this point, I can only repeat what I said seven years ago. Women should be encouraged to keep physically fit, train, run, compete on the field, and in the gym, but when it comes to contact sports, judo is both feminine and graceful, there is aikido, and at a push karate or kung fu, but not this sort of savagery.

 A woman’s battered and bruised face is a pitiful sight, even if those bruises were inflicted by another woman.