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.
The part about why their is this need for increasingly tight rule set in sports and comparing it to increasing bureaucracy was genius.
A lot of people feel confused by what to them appears to be a strange diversion. However, trust me, I understand this is not a diversion at all. It is again about the need for fixity. For either having rigid boundaries about gender (aka Iranian far right) or disposing of the idea of gender altogether. It is the same malaise. Different manifestations.
Once again, experts are being called on to settle the debate, a debate they inherently cannot settle. This is what totalitarianism is about. Totalitarianism is not confined, by nature to just some political spheres, it tends to invade almost every part of life.
Those saying this is trivial and culture-war, I think some have become so tuned into avoiding popular topics, that they fail to see the significance of the debate. It is like when people tell me that abortion debate is a distraction. Well, even if it is a distraction, it is not trivial. I do not have a stance on the matter, but I cannot call it trivial. Maybe over-attended, but not trivial.
Including the psychoanalytic view on gender was a nice touch. I am incapable of either agreeing or disagreeing with the theory mentioned here, as I am not well read into the relevant literature. I see some people being upset over you differing from the current mainstream academic position on gender. That itself is revealing. A lot of people have become incapable to pay attention to the nuances of gender dynamics, and instead, believe, that by force, their thinking, must be correct. This inability to pay attention to nuance, having rigid, predetermined opinions, which almost become cultural axioms, is in view, a classic sign of beginnings of totalitarian thinking.
This article, for those who understand, is your most brilliant piece yet.
You continue your shameful game on the side of the global left. First, ridiculing Trump, and now introducing new meanings into what is obvious to many in order to confuse people even more.
XY is not a chromosome - they are two chromosomes & the presence of a Y chromosome does not mean she is not a woman (which is, after all, only a human invented category) but it does mean she should be eligible for a diving medal against other women but not a boxing medal - such decisions must not be based on general categories but on individual circumstances.
It would read easier if you could create a link of the text when you reference to another article. "as I discussed in a previous article and will not elaborate on here" if you do that, you can skip the part of 'not elaborating on it'.
2300 years ago, long before Islam, Arabs discovered that forcing people to cover their nose and mouths, broke their will and individuality, and depersonalized them. It made them submissive. That's why they imposed on every woman the mandatory use of a fabric over her face.
Then Islam turned it into the woman's symbol of submission to Alah, the man owner of the Harem, and the King.
Modern psychology explains it: without face we don't exist as independent beings. The child looks in the mirror between the ages of two and three and is discovered as an independent being. The mask is the beginning of deleting individuality.
He who does not know his history is condemned to repeat it...
We long ago realized that some individuals should not participate in some sports. Blind people would not do well in table tennis or archery for example. Perhaps some individuals who don’t fit nicely into our binary sex categories should not compete in sports where that would be unfair or even dangerous. The XY or XX chromosome differences between males and females works for 99+ percent of people, but not for everyone. Forcing these individuals into the two simplistically defined categories of humans makes little sense.
I appreciate your thoughtful perspective here Matthias, and especially the fact that you resist the lure of hyper-partisan posturing about what is a difficult and potentially painful issue with no easy solutions. I would like to add a comment about normality in a social context. In many indigenous and pre-industrial cultures, there was a cultural place for people who lived outside the norm. Perhaps the best example is the Heyoka or clown in some Native American cultures, however some types of shamans also had these characteristics. Heyoka people did everything backwards or upside down (metaphorically and in some cases literally), and through breaking norms and taboos they helped their cultures to not become too rigid and to stay connected to the Earth and the feminine. Meanwhile, in European courts of the Middle Ages we find the Fool playing a similar role: speaking uncomfortable truths to those in power to puncture webs of self-woven lies that threaten to destroy a culture. Some types of shamans operated outside normal rules too: for example those who dressed and lived in a gender opposite from that of their birth.
I think that the power of these characters comes from their social role: to break down taboos and rigid social rules to reach the truth, and indeed the truth of the heart not of the intellect. Yet what has happened in modern times is that the act of transgression has become valorised as an end in itself, and an effort made to destroy nature-based norms (such as in regard to sexuality), rather than accepting that variations exist, that there is a reason for them, and that it is living the truth that is needed for a healthy society, rather than eliminating boundaries and norms that hold true for most people. As you point out, this can lead to an unhealthy flight from reality, where people seek to avoid the challenges inherent in life and relationships through trying to define them away and to live as if their nature doesn't exist and doesn't matter.
Actually, I believe that honouring and celebrating the fullness of who we are is the only path to peace and happiness, recognising that who we are is a work in progress and that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, as Solzhenitsyn so poignantly put it. For a few, this may mean living outside of some usual human norms (while still living ethically), whereas for most, it will not, perhaps beyond some experimentation at some point. But this must be a decision of the heart, not of the head/ideology.
Great take on the topic. However, having thought about this subject, I went on to research what came of the previous publicly known case, the South African runner Caster Semenya. As you probably know, she won several Olympic titles in female athletics. I came to discover that she married a female (having identified as a lesbian woman) and has two biological children whom she fathered via assisted reproductive technology. She seems to have the same or very similar condition to Imane with an XY chromosome and internal testes. Can a woman father a child? If Imane can even theoretically become a father, then there is no space for her in female sport. Of course, she can identify and live her life as female, however she pleases.
This is a perfect example of the science not being settled and there is no consensus. It also highlights the point, there is a need for an alternative category in sports where those who are athletes in the category compete fairly with their own kind. I propose another theory, something a little more sinister, the Olympic bodies deliberately used this global event to push their corrupted 'DEI' agenda by allowing these athletes to compete as they have been, knowing full well that something like this would happen so they could stir the pot of divide and conquer stew. What makes them look totally stupid is their pathetic allocation of the prize money to the loser to assuage the masses who pushed back on them. A good thing because they have been taught a lesson that the masses are not buying into their authoritarian, gender driven dystopia. Welcome to the Olympic Hunger Games.
They can be women without being biological women, which is what sports should be based on. While we don't have confirmatory evidence (due to right to privacy), I don't think there's any confusion about the DSDs they're most likely to have making them biological men with testes. (Swyers and androgen insensitivity syndromes are the candidates I've heard about that provide performance enhancing male biology)
I need to read again to pick up the broader symbolism of your piece which I am sure points to something deeper but surely this is an instance where scientific rationalism is useful. Having a fundamental structural functional setup designed for sperm production does indicate a biological male (non functional in these cases) even if a genetic abnormality stops the process from realising secondary sex characteristics. They may have been brought up as women but they are not biologically women and this would become very real in a hypothetical where someone was attracted to them and wanted children. Im not talking about your piece but more generally from what I have seen in the culture, but if we fall into nominalism and preclude the ability of science to tell us something about reality, we lose an important orientation in trying to navigate broader cultural accomodations.
Another interesting and illuminating interview on the subject and a short summary: "Why would an XY chromosome appear in the genetics of someone who is female? - There are rare occasions where people are born with disorders of sex development. So you can have the male XY chromosome and obviously then your genetic sex is male and the intended body plan is male. But there are some disturbances in the normal development of sex organs and sex glands, which can lead to ambiguous external genitalia, for example, which then occasionally leads to some infants actually been mistaken as girls instead of boys … If we talk sort of more generally about the issue that has been within sports, it has concerned a mainly a specific DSD called Five ARD, which is basically a lack an enzyme that converts testosterone. So this essentially means that your external genitalia doesn't develop and come out as it should, which essentially means that you can be identified as a girl at birth, and it may, in some cases take all until the years around puberty when you don't get your menstruation or you can notice this more masculine development of the body. And so sometimes this is detected around pubertal ages rather than at or around birth,
How would having DSD or this kind of sex difference impact the body of someone who has grown up supposedly female? - This was discussed and analyzed in detail in the in the process with Caster Semenya. And the case went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and the expert there witnessed about the condition and scientific consensus at this time and basically concluded that this condition mainly affects the development of the genitalia but also things like body hair and stuff, but they conclude that in terms of the attributes that we associate with better sports performance such as the more male development of muscle mass, etc, these athletes should be viewed as males."
Here is a good Judith Butler interview to ponder on w.r.t. the gender issue(s). I found it to be an interesting discussion that clarified some questions I had: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChLv2wK0Eqs
It's all quite strange, full of contradictions....
But one thing keeps repeating itself: confusion.
It look like that she is lost in the world of thought, which can never coincide with the real, which is nonconceptual. Thoughts only produce a lack, which is why "I" can never find a place of complete identity, it cannot be selfidentical. Her position becomes absurd: she says her I is not that or that. This is neti-neti strategy, but then she cannot withstand the abyss this opens for the ego and creates a new narrative - a non-binary identity.
She never comes to a conclusion that will collapse her/his question, wrongly posed to begin with. The journey is only completed when we recognise ourselves as the unborn, what we have been all along.
He's got a point, I'm no Peterson acolyte but her whole goal is subversion of norms. I don't know why these people never make the leap to wondering if their own ideas are socially constructed and what that could mean for their epistemology. She is one of the few people in the world I would consider evil.
Are you referring to Judith Butler? If so, I am certain she is a totalitarian and Neo-Marxist. I would believe that it comes from Psychopathy in her case.
She is a truly odious person. Reminds me of Jim Jones. Only Butler's kool-aid was a different flavour.
Oh yes, that sounds just right. I am normally pretty reticent to cast aspersions on people I don't know, redeeming features etc but there's some dark power archetype going on. Why else would she create such a paradigm that leads to children having mastectomies and not even have an iota of humility about her own ideas.
She has no conscience. She has caused decades of destruction through her evil gender ideologies, and she is proud of it.
Another of that gender-ideology Psychopathic cabal of the 70s was Kate Millet. Her own sister has written that Kates's Psychopathy was actually diagnosed before that time, and that she took great pleasure is siding with the Communists while duping women into feminism.
Of course there are still a great many women who believe in feminism, and will defend it to the hilt. They never stop to actually think what it really is. Or the history of those who created the ideology.
Clearly it really hurts to be misgendered:
https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/summer/boxing/boxing-harassment-imane-khelif-1.7292457
The part about why their is this need for increasingly tight rule set in sports and comparing it to increasing bureaucracy was genius.
A lot of people feel confused by what to them appears to be a strange diversion. However, trust me, I understand this is not a diversion at all. It is again about the need for fixity. For either having rigid boundaries about gender (aka Iranian far right) or disposing of the idea of gender altogether. It is the same malaise. Different manifestations.
Once again, experts are being called on to settle the debate, a debate they inherently cannot settle. This is what totalitarianism is about. Totalitarianism is not confined, by nature to just some political spheres, it tends to invade almost every part of life.
Those saying this is trivial and culture-war, I think some have become so tuned into avoiding popular topics, that they fail to see the significance of the debate. It is like when people tell me that abortion debate is a distraction. Well, even if it is a distraction, it is not trivial. I do not have a stance on the matter, but I cannot call it trivial. Maybe over-attended, but not trivial.
Including the psychoanalytic view on gender was a nice touch. I am incapable of either agreeing or disagreeing with the theory mentioned here, as I am not well read into the relevant literature. I see some people being upset over you differing from the current mainstream academic position on gender. That itself is revealing. A lot of people have become incapable to pay attention to the nuances of gender dynamics, and instead, believe, that by force, their thinking, must be correct. This inability to pay attention to nuance, having rigid, predetermined opinions, which almost become cultural axioms, is in view, a classic sign of beginnings of totalitarian thinking.
This article, for those who understand, is your most brilliant piece yet.
You continue your shameful game on the side of the global left. First, ridiculing Trump, and now introducing new meanings into what is obvious to many in order to confuse people even more.
XY is not a chromosome - they are two chromosomes & the presence of a Y chromosome does not mean she is not a woman (which is, after all, only a human invented category) but it does mean she should be eligible for a diving medal against other women but not a boxing medal - such decisions must not be based on general categories but on individual circumstances.
If a woman has a vagina but can produce male hormones. What sex do you consider her to be?
Answer: Intersex
It would read easier if you could create a link of the text when you reference to another article. "as I discussed in a previous article and will not elaborate on here" if you do that, you can skip the part of 'not elaborating on it'.
In he/her words? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYAENSqcmgA
Is s/he upset because her gender identity came into question? Or is it because s/he identified with XX chromosomes?
Imagine that.
DID YOU KNOW THAT...
2300 years ago, long before Islam, Arabs discovered that forcing people to cover their nose and mouths, broke their will and individuality, and depersonalized them. It made them submissive. That's why they imposed on every woman the mandatory use of a fabric over her face.
Then Islam turned it into the woman's symbol of submission to Alah, the man owner of the Harem, and the King.
Modern psychology explains it: without face we don't exist as independent beings. The child looks in the mirror between the ages of two and three and is discovered as an independent being. The mask is the beginning of deleting individuality.
He who does not know his history is condemned to repeat it...
——-
We long ago realized that some individuals should not participate in some sports. Blind people would not do well in table tennis or archery for example. Perhaps some individuals who don’t fit nicely into our binary sex categories should not compete in sports where that would be unfair or even dangerous. The XY or XX chromosome differences between males and females works for 99+ percent of people, but not for everyone. Forcing these individuals into the two simplistically defined categories of humans makes little sense.
I appreciate your thoughtful perspective here Matthias, and especially the fact that you resist the lure of hyper-partisan posturing about what is a difficult and potentially painful issue with no easy solutions. I would like to add a comment about normality in a social context. In many indigenous and pre-industrial cultures, there was a cultural place for people who lived outside the norm. Perhaps the best example is the Heyoka or clown in some Native American cultures, however some types of shamans also had these characteristics. Heyoka people did everything backwards or upside down (metaphorically and in some cases literally), and through breaking norms and taboos they helped their cultures to not become too rigid and to stay connected to the Earth and the feminine. Meanwhile, in European courts of the Middle Ages we find the Fool playing a similar role: speaking uncomfortable truths to those in power to puncture webs of self-woven lies that threaten to destroy a culture. Some types of shamans operated outside normal rules too: for example those who dressed and lived in a gender opposite from that of their birth.
I think that the power of these characters comes from their social role: to break down taboos and rigid social rules to reach the truth, and indeed the truth of the heart not of the intellect. Yet what has happened in modern times is that the act of transgression has become valorised as an end in itself, and an effort made to destroy nature-based norms (such as in regard to sexuality), rather than accepting that variations exist, that there is a reason for them, and that it is living the truth that is needed for a healthy society, rather than eliminating boundaries and norms that hold true for most people. As you point out, this can lead to an unhealthy flight from reality, where people seek to avoid the challenges inherent in life and relationships through trying to define them away and to live as if their nature doesn't exist and doesn't matter.
Actually, I believe that honouring and celebrating the fullness of who we are is the only path to peace and happiness, recognising that who we are is a work in progress and that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, as Solzhenitsyn so poignantly put it. For a few, this may mean living outside of some usual human norms (while still living ethically), whereas for most, it will not, perhaps beyond some experimentation at some point. But this must be a decision of the heart, not of the head/ideology.
Great take on the topic. However, having thought about this subject, I went on to research what came of the previous publicly known case, the South African runner Caster Semenya. As you probably know, she won several Olympic titles in female athletics. I came to discover that she married a female (having identified as a lesbian woman) and has two biological children whom she fathered via assisted reproductive technology. She seems to have the same or very similar condition to Imane with an XY chromosome and internal testes. Can a woman father a child? If Imane can even theoretically become a father, then there is no space for her in female sport. Of course, she can identify and live her life as female, however she pleases.
This is a perfect example of the science not being settled and there is no consensus. It also highlights the point, there is a need for an alternative category in sports where those who are athletes in the category compete fairly with their own kind. I propose another theory, something a little more sinister, the Olympic bodies deliberately used this global event to push their corrupted 'DEI' agenda by allowing these athletes to compete as they have been, knowing full well that something like this would happen so they could stir the pot of divide and conquer stew. What makes them look totally stupid is their pathetic allocation of the prize money to the loser to assuage the masses who pushed back on them. A good thing because they have been taught a lesson that the masses are not buying into their authoritarian, gender driven dystopia. Welcome to the Olympic Hunger Games.
Well said
They can be women without being biological women, which is what sports should be based on. While we don't have confirmatory evidence (due to right to privacy), I don't think there's any confusion about the DSDs they're most likely to have making them biological men with testes. (Swyers and androgen insensitivity syndromes are the candidates I've heard about that provide performance enhancing male biology)
I need to read again to pick up the broader symbolism of your piece which I am sure points to something deeper but surely this is an instance where scientific rationalism is useful. Having a fundamental structural functional setup designed for sperm production does indicate a biological male (non functional in these cases) even if a genetic abnormality stops the process from realising secondary sex characteristics. They may have been brought up as women but they are not biologically women and this would become very real in a hypothetical where someone was attracted to them and wanted children. Im not talking about your piece but more generally from what I have seen in the culture, but if we fall into nominalism and preclude the ability of science to tell us something about reality, we lose an important orientation in trying to navigate broader cultural accomodations.
What it boils down to is that two men are going to fight the gold medal match in women’s boxing in the olympics this year
Another interesting and illuminating interview on the subject and a short summary: "Why would an XY chromosome appear in the genetics of someone who is female? - There are rare occasions where people are born with disorders of sex development. So you can have the male XY chromosome and obviously then your genetic sex is male and the intended body plan is male. But there are some disturbances in the normal development of sex organs and sex glands, which can lead to ambiguous external genitalia, for example, which then occasionally leads to some infants actually been mistaken as girls instead of boys … If we talk sort of more generally about the issue that has been within sports, it has concerned a mainly a specific DSD called Five ARD, which is basically a lack an enzyme that converts testosterone. So this essentially means that your external genitalia doesn't develop and come out as it should, which essentially means that you can be identified as a girl at birth, and it may, in some cases take all until the years around puberty when you don't get your menstruation or you can notice this more masculine development of the body. And so sometimes this is detected around pubertal ages rather than at or around birth,
How would having DSD or this kind of sex difference impact the body of someone who has grown up supposedly female? - This was discussed and analyzed in detail in the in the process with Caster Semenya. And the case went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and the expert there witnessed about the condition and scientific consensus at this time and basically concluded that this condition mainly affects the development of the genitalia but also things like body hair and stuff, but they conclude that in terms of the attributes that we associate with better sports performance such as the more male development of muscle mass, etc, these athletes should be viewed as males."
https://youtu.be/ntzGOUug-1w?si=9sVbPzSaYrrwQP2_
Here is a good Judith Butler interview to ponder on w.r.t. the gender issue(s). I found it to be an interesting discussion that clarified some questions I had: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChLv2wK0Eqs
Interesting, thanks for sharing the link.
It's all quite strange, full of contradictions....
But one thing keeps repeating itself: confusion.
It look like that she is lost in the world of thought, which can never coincide with the real, which is nonconceptual. Thoughts only produce a lack, which is why "I" can never find a place of complete identity, it cannot be selfidentical. Her position becomes absurd: she says her I is not that or that. This is neti-neti strategy, but then she cannot withstand the abyss this opens for the ego and creates a new narrative - a non-binary identity.
She never comes to a conclusion that will collapse her/his question, wrongly posed to begin with. The journey is only completed when we recognise ourselves as the unborn, what we have been all along.
Oh well 🤭 I'm lost 🤷♀️
He's got a point, I'm no Peterson acolyte but her whole goal is subversion of norms. I don't know why these people never make the leap to wondering if their own ideas are socially constructed and what that could mean for their epistemology. She is one of the few people in the world I would consider evil.
Are you referring to Judith Butler? If so, I am certain she is a totalitarian and Neo-Marxist. I would believe that it comes from Psychopathy in her case.
She is a truly odious person. Reminds me of Jim Jones. Only Butler's kool-aid was a different flavour.
Oh yes, that sounds just right. I am normally pretty reticent to cast aspersions on people I don't know, redeeming features etc but there's some dark power archetype going on. Why else would she create such a paradigm that leads to children having mastectomies and not even have an iota of humility about her own ideas.
She has no conscience. She has caused decades of destruction through her evil gender ideologies, and she is proud of it.
Another of that gender-ideology Psychopathic cabal of the 70s was Kate Millet. Her own sister has written that Kates's Psychopathy was actually diagnosed before that time, and that she took great pleasure is siding with the Communists while duping women into feminism.
Of course there are still a great many women who believe in feminism, and will defend it to the hilt. They never stop to actually think what it really is. Or the history of those who created the ideology.
That's ok. I'll read up on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Thanks 👍