Riddle: What Is an XY, High-Testosterone Boxer?

Clue: Use Common Sense

Hi friends and welcome, newcomers!

As promised, I’m following up on the boxing scandal that was breaking as my column “went to bed” last week. That’s a publishing term. Truth is, I went to bed.

Now that I’m awake, I’ll answer questions you’ve been lobbing my way. In this second in my Explainer series (see also “What Does Non-Binary Mean?”) I’ll discuss these boxers and also the broader question of “XY, high-testosterone” people now competing against female athletes.

Q: What’s the deal with Olympic boxing?

A: Two males, Lin Yu-ting (Taiwan) and Imane Khelif (Algeria), are competing in the female category. Each has won two matches as of press time.

Q: Why do you call them males?

A: They have XY chromosomes.

Q: How do you know that?

A: The International Boxing Association (IBA) disqualified them after tests in 2022 and 2023 revealed XY chromosomes (the male genotype). The boxers did not appeal, which rendered the verdict binding. The IBA reported those results to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Later, the IBA added that both boxers have high testosterone levels.

Q: How did disqualified boxers end up at the Olympics?

A: The IOC disqualified the IBA itself. Calling the boxers’ disqualifications “sudden and arbitrary” – but, significantly, not contesting the XY, nor the high-testosterone determinations – IOC President Thomas Bach defended the decision to allow the boxers to compete against women by saying, “We have two boxers who were born as women, raised as women, who have passports as women and who have competed for many years as women and this is a clear definition of a woman."

Aside from the fact that no one is born a woman (imagine those labor pains), Bach’s “clear definition of a woman” is not the definition biologists use. Sex is determined not by childhood dresses or passports but by “reproductive anatomy (i.e. ovaries or testes) that develop for the production of sperm or ova, regardless of their past, present, or future functionality,” says evolutionary biologist Colin Wright.¹

Q: Could the boxers just be women with high testosterone?

A: “Many women can have testosterone which is on what would be called male levels – and still be women, and still compete as women,” said IOC spokesperson Mark Adams.

This is false. “I cannot state strongly enough that it is unequivocally not the case,” says sports scientist Ross Tucker. “They are males.”²

Female levels: 0.5 to 2.4 nanomoles per liter. Male levels: 10 to 35 nanomoles per liter. Note the gap. And the no-overlap. Men have about twenty times as much testosterone as women.

“Doping and being male are two ways that an adult athlete might have “high T, [testosterone]” explains sex and gender expert Doriane Lambelet Coleman.

Q: Are they trans?

A: Transgender: “an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.”³ Assuming these boxers were registered female at birth, does their gender expression or behavior conform to that associated with females? Unless Algerian and Taiwanese girls are typically expected to jab, counterpunch, and knock out opponents with their fists, no.

Apparently they do not identify as transgender. But like males who do, these are males who compete against women despite the known and obvious performance advantages that males have.

If you think about this from the women’s point of view, it doesn’t matter. Because XY, high-testosterone people (also known as males⁴) have an unfair advantage in sports — especially boxing, of all things.

Q: Are they intersex?

A: Since everyone is either male or female, the preferred term nowadays is Differences (or Disorders) of Sex Development (DSD). They do seem to be males who were mistakenly registered as female at birth due to a genetic anomaly.

They may have a DSD (5-ARD or PAIS or others) that occurs only in males and leads to female-appearing or ambiguous external genitalia and undescended testes. At puberty, people with such DSDs do not menstruate because they do not have female reproductive organs. Instead, their testes produce male levels of testosterone and thus male strength, size, and power.

Q: Are we sure they’re DSD?

A: IOC President Bach said, “I repeat here: They’re not DSD” – which was soon corrected by an IOC tweet clarifying that he meant “not transgender.”

I know. Confusing. But this slip and correction point to an admission they are DSD — though there are numerous reasons not to trust the IOC when it comes to admitting males to the female category.

Supposedly, the IBA and IOC are being coy to protect the boxers’ privacy. Yet in the Olympics, sex designations (XX or XY) should not be private. Nancy Hogshead, a Title IX attorney who won 3 gold medals and 1 silver in 1984 swimming events, remembers passing a cheek-swab test, then strolling around the Olympic village wearing a badge identifying her as female. “We had to wear our sex certification everywhere,” she says. To her, it demonstrated the Olympics’ then-commitment to a fair playing field.

Hogshead wearing her sex certification badge and one of 3 Olympic golds

Q: I heard that those two boxers have lost some matches to women.

A: Yes, because all male athletes are not better than all female athletes. Males have an unfair advantage due to their greater strength, power, speed, height, limb length, heart size, lung size, bone density, and more. Women might win due to superior training, coaching, technique, equipment, desire, nutrition, sleep, athletic ability, etc. Many of the men now defeating women in recreational cycling, high school track, and beyond are mediocre athletes. But they have that inherent physical advantage. Which is why the female sport category exists.

Q: Why are women angry?

A: Boxing is dangerous. Especially for a woman in a ring with a man.⁵ A man’s punch is 162 percent more powerful than a woman’s punch.⁶

These Olympic matches constitute “male violence against women for sport and entertainment.” – author and activist Kara Dansky

Female victims of male violence know the impact of these punches firsthand and are being re-traumatized by the international attention on these matches.

“If you made a list of all the sports in which male advantage would be most dangerous for women, boxing would be number one.” – Ross Tucker.⁷

Fallon Fox, a trans-identifying male mixed martial artist who fractured a woman’s skull during a fight in 2020, commented afterward: “And just so you know, I enjoyed it. See, I love smacking up TERFS in the cage who talk transphobic nonsense. It’s bliss!”

Women are also angry because male incursions into female sports are unfair. What? Men are going to invade the one place designed to empower women and celebrate their physical accomplishments? Women have been protesting for years. The more it happens, the more people — Republicans, Democrats, feminists, non-feminists, women and men from all over the world — join in.

Q: Why isn’t the International Olympic Committee stopping it?

A: It doesn’t want to. In fact, it explicitly prioritizes “inclusion” of males (those who identify as transgender or have DSDs) over safety and fairness for women. Its Framework on Fairness, Inclusion, and Non-Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations insists that male athletes must not be presumed to have an advantage, which Tucker calls “scientific make-believe. It’s a fairy tale. The premise behind [separate] male and female [categories] is because there is a presumption of advantage.” Similarly, “there’s a presumption of advantage for a heavyweight against a lightweight in boxing. There’s a presumption of advantage for an able-bodied athlete to not go to the Paralympics. The whole system of sport is built on this presumption of advantage.”⁸

The IOC’s media guidelines advise: “It is always preferable to emphasize a person’s actual gender identity rather than…the sex category.” In other words, if men say they’re women, take them at their word.

The IOC spends $136 million on anti-doping efforts each Olympiad. If it wanted to evaluate the boxers’ chromosomes and testosterone levels to ensure competitive fairness for females, it could conduct its own tests. Instead, it’s defending the males.

It took the IOC 128 years to equalize female and male participation at the Games – but it undermined that proclaimed parity by allowing those two males to fight as females. Apparently two Zambian soccer players with high testosterone (which only males and dopers have, as Coleman noted above) played on an Olympic women’s team as well. Who knows how many others, whether trans or DSD? With the IOD’s media warning not to mention sex, we all are being gaslighted.

Q: I feel sympathy for the two boxers. Don’t you?

A: Absolutely. What it’s like to be told you’re a girl, only to discover at puberty, as often happens, that you’re developing a man’s body? Depending on familial and social responses, this could become a nightmare. About two-thirds change to a male identity after puberty.

Q: But there aren’t very many DSDs: Less than 0.02 percent.

A: When we discover any athlete using performance-enhancing drugs, we disqualify them, even if there aren’t very many of them. We even disqualify athletes when it’s not their fault — when they accidentally ingested something illegal. Why punish athletes who did nothing wrong? Because those are the rules — for the sake of fairness to all. Athletes “with male levels of testosterone — for whatever reason — are banned in women’s sports,” notes Hogshead. Correction: Should be.

Q: What else should happen?

A: “Center us, center women, and the answers are clear,” advises Hogshead.

• Let’s start by sympathizing with the girls and women who, at all ages and levels of sport, are being forced to compete against boys and men – or drop out. Don’t allow your sympathy for males with medical anomalies, nor for males who want to be “affirmed as women,” to overshadow girls’ and womens’ rights to develop their athletic competence and confidence in fair and safe environments.

• Abolish the IOC’s Framework on Fairness. Its only goal is to include males in female sports. Prioritize female fairness and safety instead.

• Reinstate the cheek swab, the simple test to determine XX or XY chromosomes, which the IOC abolished in 1999. Female athletes overwhelmingly want the cheek swab reinstated.

• These particular boxers should withdraw from the Olympics - or switch to the men’s events. If they didn’t realize they had XY chromosomes and male levels of testosterone, they do now.

• All males, regardless of gender identities and DSDs⁹, should compete in male or open categories. Sports organizations could make other accommodations — so long as those accommodations do not diminish females’ sport opportunities or financial rewards, nor females’ right to fair, safe, sex-separated sports experiences, as we say in the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group.

Center us, center women. These are our sports, our bodies, our lives.

Q: I have more questions.

A: I have more answers! Keep those questions coming.

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Other Stronger Women essays about female sports and gender:

• What Does Non-Binary Mean? Transgender Translations for the Thoroughly Confused

• “I Would Have Been Trans’ed”

• “But She Identifies as a Woman”

• Can We Ensure Fairness for Female Athletes While Including Trans-Identified Males?

For more info, see Women’s Sports Policy Working Group.
Recommended reading: Doriane Lambelet Coleman, On Sex and Gender: A Commonsense Approach, published in 2024 by Simon & Schuster. Coleman is a Duke Law School professor. This is one of the best books I’ve read on this subject.

1. “The sex of individuals within a species isn’t based on whether an individual can actually produce certain gametes at any given moment. Pre-pubertal males don’t produce sperm, and some infertile adults of both sexes never produce gametes due to various infertility issues. Yet it would be incorrect to say that these individuals do not have a discernible sex, as an individual’s biological sex corresponds to one of two distinct types of evolved reproductive anatomy (i.e. ovaries or testes) that develop for the production of sperm or ova, regardless of their past, present, or future functionality. In humans, and transgender and so-called “non-binary” people are no exception, this reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female over 99.98 percent of the time.” – Colin Wright, “Sex Is Not a Spectrum,” Reality’s Last Stand, February 1, 2021.

2. Ross Tucker, “Paris 2024: Males Are About to Fight in Women’s Boxing, How Did We Get Here?” The Real Science of Sport Podcast, August 1, 2024.

3. Quote is from the American Psychological Association. The Human Rights Campaign, American Psychiatric Association, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Endocrine Society define transgender in almost identical ways.

4. The DSD exception would be males with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS), which prevents an XY body with normal male levels of testosterone from responding to androgens, including testosterone. These people appear female and would be unlikely to see themselves as, nor to be perceived by others as, male.

5. The World Boxing Council (another boxing organization) and the International Mixed Martial Arts Federation ban males from the women’s category because the risks of injury to women are too great.

6. Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg, “Transgender Women in The Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage.” Sports Medicine. 2021;51: (PMID 33289906 and doi: 10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3). This research is one of the most cited ever in academic literature. It definitively establishes that no amount of testosterone reduction can make male competition in women’s categories fair or equal, even when the athlete has been on testosterone blockers for many years.

7. Tucker, 2024.

8. Tucker, 2024.

9. The only DSD exception: Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which blocks males from using any of the testosterone they produce.