The IOC is willing to bet on women's lives

It’s hard to accept that, say, your painfully handsome, popular, well-born, Hermes-kitted boyfriend is a lying misogynistic scumbag. That’s where we are with the International Olympic Committee. The light has finally come on for many Olympic fans, that despite years and unspeakable gold ingots spent constructing a noble facade, they are a cartel of vile, corrupt, amoral pimps.

As with most abusers, the IOC has been able to get away with unfairness to women, discrimination against women, ignoring and excluding women because we live in a patriarchal world, particularly sports. It’s status quo. Their behavior isn’t even recognized as misogyny, but rather, just the way things are. Emboldened by decades of “getting away with it,” the brotherhood (with useful handmaidens like Madeleine Pape) escalated until, with their 2021 Framework on Fairness, Inclusion,and Non-Discrimination (a contradiction of terms), they revealed their true nature—inclusion of men in women’s sports as a trendy “civil rights” guise for their long-simmering misogyny.

But they’ve gone too far. Like serial abusers, the IOC’s now-open sociopathy will be its downfall. This week in front of a global audience at the Paris Olympics, two boxers, Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu‑ting of Chinese Taipei, will fight in the women’s category. Both boxers were deemed ineligible for last year’s world championships by the International Boxing Association for having XY chromosomes. Due to what the IOC called governing irregularities (pot, meet kettle), they took over Olympic boxing’s governing policies from the IBA, and reinstated the boxers.

Imagining that a simple news conference would smooth over the fact that the public now knows the IOC is willing to not only lie, but to put female athlete’s lives in danger, spokesperson Mark Adams justified the crime by saying 1) the boxers are female because their passports have an F on them (not mentioning a piece of paper does not change male physiology), 2) these boxers competed in the Tokyo Olympics (without killing a woman, so it probably won’t happen), and 3) that it’s very complex (true, the more you lie, the more you have to lie, but don’t worry your pretty little sports fan heads about it). The IOC knows those boxers are male and have a potentially lethal advantage over women. They are willing to bet women’s lives on these pathetic lies.

Some people could sit through trans-identified male swimmer Lia Thomas breaking records and winning a women’s national championship, they could even maintain some sympathy toward the three male athletes with Disorders of Sexual Development who took gold, silver, and bronze in the women’s 800-meter run at the 2016 Olympics. Those instances of men in women’s sports were blatantly unfair and, in the case of the Olympics, ruined women’s careers, but, like, no one died, right? Barbaric attitude? Yes, it is. As sport scientist Ross Tucker points out, such is the state of misogyny in our society that a woman bloodied, grotesquely injured, or killed in the Olympic ring is what it will take to wake the IOC-smitten up to the fact that their boyfriend is a lying misogynistic scumbag.