Paris Olympics

Quote: rxwine

I don't think most of the people complaining about the Last Supper part even watched it. I had to fast forward through 2 hours of ceremony just to find the bit, which kind of looked like it for 30 seconds, then morphed into a fashion show. Headless Marie Antonette wasn't even part of that bit.

Everyone complaining can go rot and die.

Quote: AZDuffman

Nah, we will just tune out. Some of us do not understand this fascination with featuring drag queens in so many things.

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Khelif is a cis woman, born and raised in a conservative village in Tiaret, Algeria. She is believed to have hyperandrogenism, a condition characterized by higher-than-usual levels of androgens (male hormones) in a woman’s body. This condition can occur naturally and is often linked with disorders like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). Despite her biological reality and the fact that she is legally and anatomically female, the 25-year-old has been subjected to invasive gender tests and public scrutiny, further perpetuated by her disqualification from the world champion­ships last year for failing gender eligibility tests.

According to The International Olympic Committee (IOC), she was “disqualified just hours before her gold medal showdown against Yang Liu at the 2023 world championships in New Delhi, India, after her elevated ­levels of testosterone failed to meet the eligibility criteria.”

At the time, the Algerian Olympic Committee responded by alleging that the disqualification was part of a “conspiracy” to prevent them from winning a gold medal, and honestly, they’re probably not too far off.

The social media witch-hunt against the three-time African champion, led primarily by white conservative men and women, is filled with rhetoric steeped in racism, xenophobia, and transphobia.

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A lack of legal consensus on the eligibility of women with naturally elevated levels of testosterone to compete in elite sport has caused a stir at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

The issue of hyperandrogenism – the term used to describe the excessive production of androgens, the best known of which is testosterone – first erupted in the sporting world in 2009 when South African runner Caster Semenya won the 800m in record time at the World Championships in Berlin. She was subsequently prevented from competing while she underwent gender testing and was subjected to intense media scrutiny.

Caster Semenya - pic by Erik van Leeuwen

Caster Semenya
Semenya was eventually cleared to compete in July 2010 but only on the condition that she took medication to lower her testosterone levels. Following the Semenya debacle, in May 2011 the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) introduced new regulations which required hyperandrogenic female athletes to limit their testosterone levels to below 10 nmol/L. The female range is typically between 0.1 nmol/L and 2.8 nmol/L, while the normal male range is above 10.5 nmol/L.

This all changed in July 2015 when a case brought by the Athletics Federation of India on behalf of hyperandrogenic runner Dutee Chand saw the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) suspend the IAAF’s regulations pending the receipt of more evidence demonstrating the performance advantage of hyperandrogenic female athletes over female athletes with normal testosterone levels. Suddenly athletes like Chand and Semenya were eligible to compete at Rio and other international competitions without being required to artificially control their testosterone levels.


Michael Beloff discusses hyperandrogenism
The IAAF has until July 2017 to gather more evidence, but Dr Silvia Camporesi, a bioethicist and lecturer at King's College London, is unconvinced further research will resolve this contentious issue. ‘What are we trying to prove? Science is driven by research and the binary division between female and male. The current system for sports competition is based on two categories, male and female, but we must realise that the boundaries are not binary. We need to be careful and need to be inclusive. If we set a threshold for [naturally occurring] testosterone it’s problematic because there isn’t a threshold for men and in that sense it’s discriminatory and unfair.’

Despite the controversy over the IAAF’s regulations, Michael Beloff, Chair of the IAAF Ethics Board, who has advised both the International Olympic Committee and the IAAF on hyperandrogenism, told Global Insight in a recent interview that they sought to strike as fair a balance as possible. ‘It’s an incredibly difficult issue,’ he says. ‘It's not that they are not women. The question is something different: should they be able to compete as women in a sporting contest that's got a binary divide? So you're not, as it were, casting doubt on their femininity, you're simply setting some kind of levels in order to have a level playing field. But what the solution may be I'm not in a position to say.’