By Oliver Brown:
It is bad enough for any man, even one as powerful as Thomas Bach, to pontificate about how a woman should be defined. It is worse still when the elements of his definition – to be registered female at birth, raised as female, and to have a passport identifying as female – appear to treat womanhood as a mere construct, rather than as a biological reality.
And it is downright unforgivable that his grasp of the science in making these assertions is so feeble that within 45 minutes, the International Olympic Committee has to issue an official correction.
The world had waited with bated breath to discover
what the IOC president had to say about the
scandal engulfing these Paris Games. Would there be some humility, some acknowledgement that his organisation had erred gravely in asking female boxers to go into the ring against biological males? Would there be a commitment to put it right? Sadly, even when your expectations are modest, the IOC finds a way to disappoint.
“We have two boxers,” Bach said, “who were born as women, raised as women, who have passports as women, who have competed for many years as women. And this is a clear definition of a woman.”
There was no mention that
Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan had both recorded sex tests revealing the presence of XY chromosomes, the male pattern, or the fact that neither fighter had appealed against being disqualified from last year’s world championship as a consequence. There was no reference either to the established precedent that an athlete could be socialised as a woman, legally recognised as a woman, paraded in glossy magazines as a woman, but still be genetically male. This athlete, of course, was Caster Semenya, the women’s 800 metres champion at the Rio Games in 2016 and also, in terms of chromosomes, 46XY.
You would have expected Bach to include this crucial context in his first press conference addressing such an incendiary issue. Instead, he offered only a querulous attack on anyone legitimately criticising why Lin and Khelif are permitted in the women’s category in such a dangerous sport. “We will not take part in a
politically-motivated cultural war,” he huffed. “And allow me to say that what is going on across social media, with all this aggression and abuse, fuelled by this agenda, is totally unacceptable.”
Just like his mouthpiece Mark Adams, Bach appeared irritated merely to be asked about the boxing travesty. The trouble was that he also misspoke. “This is not a DSD [differences in sexual development] case, this is about a woman taking part in a women’s competition, and I think I have explained this many times,” he said. Frantically, the IOC’s media department rushed out a correction, explaining that what Bach had meant to say was: “This is not a transgender case.”
In a single press conference, Bach succeeded in coming across as both irredeemably arrogant and fundamentally confused as to the issues at stake. You could not make it up, and yet the most powerful figure in world sport appears to be doing precisely that. Every single factor that Bach listed as a requirement for womanhood was divorced from material, biological truth. His view can roughly be summarised as: have a female passport, ergo you are a woman, and anyone who does not like it is guilty of “hate speech”. The deeper into this debacle we go, the further Bach’s clown cart veers from the path of common sense.
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