Masculinity and femininity at the Olympics.

I've been following the debate about the boxing match between Algerian Imane Khelif and Italian Angela Carini with some interest over the past few days. That match stirred up quite a bit of controversy. Carini gave up after taking a few punches, only 46 seconds in. Emotions ran high for both Carini and part of the public, leading to outraged protests: the match was a disgrace. Imane Khelif is not a woman but a man. And with shameless brutality, he broke Carini's nose and her Olympic tribute to her late father.

Is Imane Khelif a man? There's quite a bit of confusion about that. The initial outrage seemed to assume that Khelif was transgender, born a man but forced into the semblance of femininity through surgery. Many saw the boxing match as a further escalation of woke madness, where a man can casually identify as a woman and unleash his petty sadism in women's competitions to gather prize money.

Prominent voices like J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk sided with the outrage, and the dispute quickly took on the form of a global culture war. Initially, I also felt a sense of outrage. I sided with J.K. Rowling and made a post on X (formerly Twitter) making that clear. But an hour later, reason led me to some caution, and I deleted my post.

Rowling undoubtedly deserves a statue—and more than that—for her tireless, sincere speaking out, day after day and time after time, on points where others remain silent while our culture marches absurdly and destructively onward. But perhaps the outrage here has spoken too soon and has overlooked the complexity of the matter. Maybe it has also become somewhat insensitive to a person who was already placed in an extraordinarily difficult situation by nature.

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Imane is not a ‘transgender’; she is one of the few people whose body does not easily fit into the sexual categories of nature. And the discussion about her sexual characteristics presents an interesting social spectacle. Biologists from various ideological backgrounds are fiercely debating on social media, using the greatest technical expertise. The one expert proves that Imane is a woman and the other, equally convinced, that Imane is a man. Nowhere do you see better than here that rational expertise ultimately always serves irrational forces.

Some believe that chromosomes determine your gender, others hormones, yet others hormone receptors; some rely on external sexual characteristics; here and there, a biologist believes the answer must be found in psychology and that only what someone feels determines their gender.

Personally, I find the most convincing biological criterion for determining gender to be whether one has ovaries or testicles (whether external or internal). But even that criterion is far from absolute: can one say that someone with internal testicles but the external characteristics of a woman is a man? For example, would a heterosexual woman spontaneously become sexually aroused by seeing this body?

In that sense, the outrage is somewhat justified: it makes no sense to let a woman be beaten up by someone who clearly does not fit into the female category in some respects. But confidently saying that Imane belongs in the male category and should demonstrate her courage there might also be a step too far.

In essence, one can only conclude: Imane belongs to the very small group of people whom nature, in a moment of hesitation and doubt, did not decisively place in the category of women or men. Imane demonstrates that the symbolic sometimes falls short in determining gender compared to the real - we cannot really put her in the symbolic category of men or women. The wisest answer regarding Imane's gender might be: we don't know.

The fact that the International Boxing Association decided to give Carini the winner's prize money (while she lost) reveals precisely this: they don't know either. But they dare not admit it. They must know. Precisely that is the hardest thing for our rationalistic culture, to accept that we ultimately have no rational answer to the big questions of our existence.

The words of Keats (1817) come to mind here: "At once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement ... when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

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Should we then let Imane and only Imane decide for herself whether she is as a man or a woman? And does that extend to everyone? Look at the complex machinery of genes, hormones, receptors, internal and external sexual characteristics – don't we always find a mix of the feminine and the masculine to some extent? In other words, are the woke proponents right? Is binary thinking about man and woman outdated?

The man-woman distinction is the most fundamental polarity of human existence, and it is not because an extremely small group of people cannot be clearly categorized within that distinction that the distinction itself should be discarded. Discarding binary thinking because it fails in an extremely small number of cases is an evasion of the greatest task in human existence: becoming the gender that your body imposes on you.

Nietzsche's imperative "Become who you are" also applies here: "Become the man or woman you are." And it is indeed the body that represents being; it is our body that gives the command. What those words of Nietzsche (he actually borrowed them from ancient Greek culture but breathed new life into them) beautifully evoke is that humans are beings for whom Being is a task.

To become who we are, we must leave behind the order of appearances; we must transcend our ego and our narcissism to be. I will explore this in my next book: I cannot fully address it here. I just add this here: the woke ambition to let everyone ‘choose’ their own gender, merely on the basis of their preferences, is essentially an egocentric attempt to escape the task of being.

The entire effort to get rid of "heteronormativity" is a failure: the norm in terms of human sexuality is indeed a relationship between a man and a woman. Without that norm, a society ends up in a Babel-like confusion. We are slowly experiencing that.

But this note is fundamental to ensure we do not end up in an ultraconservative (and ultra hypocritical) society: that norm should not be oppressively imposed. It is a compass needle that guides the ship of society, but the hand that steers the ship should not handle the steering wheel in a relentless and tense way. The ability to deviate from the norm is a hallmark of cultural maturity (as I discussed in a previous article and will not elaborate on here). Precisely because the ship has a compass on board, it can afford to go on excursions and explorations to the left and right of the course indicated by the compass.

And "the norm" cannot be used to stigmatize. Far from it. What deviates from the norm can be (much) better than what conforms to it. For example, Michelangelo and Da Vinci, both likely homosexual, can hardly be considered beings who were less than "the average person."

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Back to the Olympic Games. What do we actually do with Imane and similar cases? First, we must accept that we are fundamentally uncertain. And that is precisely difficult in our current culture. We take sports very seriously – dead seriously. Any sense of relativity and light-heartedness has disappeared from the sports culture. And that in itself is a problem. In a society where the Soul prevails over the Ego, where Love prevails over Narcissism, sport is a form of play and entertainment.

For instance: in a group of men who love each other and who are united by friendship, a soccer game is an occasion for lightness and laughter. If one wins, they are happy because they have won, and if the other wins, they are just as happy for the Other. All rivalry is just a tinkling laugh in a warm ocean of Love.

But in a society where the Ego prevails, sport becomes pure competition and rivalry. More and more rules have to be invented to contain the underlying aggression and feed the narcissism. Someone must ultimately be able to beat their chest and claim that a flawless weighing and measuring of abilities has designated them as the winner of winners.

This obsession with rules is not unique to sports; the entire bureaucratization of our society is a manifestation of it. More and more rules to contain the growing aggression and disconnection in interpersonal relationships. And this obsession with rules is always accompanied by a corresponding urge to break the rules.

In this way, society becomes a high-pressure vessel that must continuously thicken its walls to withstand the increasing pressure within. The Soul eventually withers away behind pseudo-rationalistic prison walls that muffle its soft cries before they can reach the ears of the Other.

The dominance of the Ego over the Soul is ultimately a consequence of our blind faith in what our eyes show us as "objective." That faith causes us to literally lose ourselves in superficiality, that means, in the visible surface of things. This could itself be the subject of an essay: what the eyes show us is, in a certain sense, always a negative of true Being.

Consider the observation of colors: the colors we see are those light frequencies that are not absorbed by the object we are observing; they are the ones the object repels and does not want to absorb. The colors our eyes see are those that the object is not. Or take the identification of ourselves with our mirror image, the basis of the Ego. The image we see in the mirror is a left-right inversion of our real image.

In this way, the objectivist quest for the Real ends in radical appearance and the inversion of every truth. Precisely that is the main characteristic of this objectivist and rationalist culture: it claims to speak the Truth but represents the lie. The phenomenon of "propaganda"—the systematic lie—is not coincidentally the essence of our culture. In a society where appearance, deceit, and manipulation are cultivated without restraint, speaking the Truth inevitably becomes forbidden and sanctioned as a crime.

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And we encounter yet another issue in contemporary sports culture. The entire effort to promote women's competitions and make them as attractive as men's competitions is reaching its limits. It ends in contradiction. In quite a few sports, it turns out that as a woman, you become more successful the less woman and more man you are.

In this way, we end up in the rather peculiar situation that two people (Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting) will be in the women’s boxing finals who not only look like men but also have the main genetic characteristics of a man (the XY chromosome). The step towards a conservative stance is quickly taken: the only way to be successful as a woman in top sports is to stop being a woman. Consequently: certain sports are not for women. So, stop promoting women's competitions in those sports.

In itself, there is a certain logic in that, but we need a much more fundamental reflection to overcome the confusion about human sexuality as a culture. The physical difference between men and women corresponds to a psychological difference.

Both physically and psychologically, being a woman involves the absence of something, a gaping void, and being a man involves having something that fits into that void. Physically, this requires little explanation; psychologically, it means that the archetypal female position is that of having the courage to express her vulnerability and lack of Knowledge through words to the Other. And the male position consists of hearing the woman's lack in her words with all tenderness and integrity and giving a response that temporarily fills that void.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that a man hasn’t just as much ‘lack’ as a woman; he too is characterised by lack of being and knowledge. And that’s why the physical sexes must always rotate around these two psychological positions. But the woman will still have an archetypal preference for the first position (expressing her lack) and the man for the second (giving words that make the Lack cease for a moment). More about this in later articles and in my next book.

In this way, the male-female polarity is necessary for the birth of Truth. The phenomenon of Truth fully realizes itself precisely at this point: someone articulates something in all vulnerability that the Ego normally keeps hidden and unspoken; someone else listens sensitively and with integrity, without judging and condemning from their Ego and narcissism. The appearance of Truth thus represents the moment when the love between the male and the female is realized and the moment when the Soul transcends the Ego.