How about sex testing for female Olympic competitions?

By Mathew Goldstein

Richard Dawkins’s Facebook account was deleted after he posted on X that genetically male boxers should not fight women (he stated in a tweet on July 29, "Two men, pretending to be women, are being allowed to compete against real women in the Olympics"). The famous evolutionary biologist posted on X this morning about what he characterized to be censorship, writing that as of this morning [August 10] he was not provided with the reason for the sudden removal of his account. Dawkins’s tweet, quoted below, was reportedly viewed over 10 million times.

My entire @facebook account has been deleted, seemingly (no reason given) because I tweeted that genetically male boxers such as Imane Khalif (XY undisputed) should not fight women in Olympics. Of course my opinion is open to civilised argument. But outright censorship?

While it is possible that there is some other reason for the deletions, it is not believable that a mass deletion of his entire account, or nearly his entire account (there is a rumor that two of his Facebook posts were retained), if deliberate and not accidental, is justifiable. Update: It has now been reported that Meta concluded his account was hacked and his account has been reinstated.

It is certainly reasonable to believe, and to accordingly assert, that biological males should be blocked from competing with biological females in Olympic boxing. Why have a separate female category in boxing, and various other athletic competitions, if not for the purpose of excluding biological males? 

I am inclined to agree that the International Olympic Committee (IOC)  should be vetting athletes competing as females and disqualify those athletes who are found to have XY chromosomes, testes, and male hormones. Such athletes are biological males. A non-invasive blood test can determine both chromosomes and hormones. That is what the International Boxing Association (IBA) claims it relied on when it decided to disqualify the two boxers, Imame Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan. The test was conducted in labs approved by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). It has been widely reported that IBA has a history of financial, governance, and corruption problems, but the reputation of the IBA does not explain why the IOC opts to avoids sex testing (see “Are the Olympic Boxers’ XY DNA Test Results ‘Russian Disinformation’?” by Colin Wright).  It appears that IBA disqualifies anyone with XY chromosomes. A combination of XY with a male hormone profile would arguably be better because it would allow Swyer syndrome females who have XY chromosomes to compete with other females. Maybe additional testing could be required when needed to resolve remaining ambiguities. The details of what vetting methods are the most practical and effective can be hashed out by the experts. There may not be a method that is both practical to implement and 100% effective, so some compromises may be unavoidable. Meanwhile, as a non-expert observer, I am skeptical that avoiding such sex vetting altogether, as was the case for boxing at this Olympics, is the best approach.

Unfortunately, many news organizations are reporting an overly simplistic, one-sided perspective of two winning female boxers being unfairly smeared with spurious accusations that they are cheaters. Their perspective appears to be that when an athlete was identified as female at birth and continues to self-identify as female as an adult that it is somehow uncouth to question the integrity of their self-identification as it applies to the athletic competition context. This superficial perspective is unperceptive to differences/disorders of sex development (DSD) that manifest as males (they have internal testes, not ovaries) with genitals that resemble female genitals and/or to the impact of male puberty (triggered by the additional testosterone secreted from testes, ovaries secrete less testosterone) on athletic performance. 

Update: Khelif’s coach, Georges Cazorla, recently confirmed that Khelif has both a male karyotype and high testosterone, a combination consistent with being a male who has a DSD that contributed to his being misidentified as female at birth.