Eleven eight

 One thing that is wrong with me is that I can't just ride with a convenient lie. That's a particular disadvantage when it comes to politics, where you *ought to* believe a certain thing because of the bad company you're in if you don't.

But stupidly, I'm committed to the truth. And this isn't something you just sit and *do*. It's something that happens to you. So obviously, I know that in the recent furore over the Olympic boxing, the boxer in question is male and shouldn't be supported by right-thinking people. After all, I doin't countenance men hitting women ordinarily, and whatever the reason for that -- probably just the ingrained sexism of a childhood in rural Cornwall -- it's meaningful to me.

Here are the facts as I understand them. Two boxers had aroused suspicion among their opponents. We should understand the world of women's boxing as a fairly closed circle. There's something of a "tour" and the women pop up at events all the time. And look, I'm well aware that there's a bit of a trope in which white people accuse women of colour of being manly, but I don't think this applies to boxers who spend time in each other's company. 

So the IBA asked the two boxers in question for a blood sample, which the boxers freely gave. It was tested in an accredited lab in Turkey and the result came back for both: XY.

The IBA did not straight away ban the boxers. In sport, you are rarely punished for the result of one test. The IBA decided to test them again. But it needed them to be under its "control". They don't have any jurisdiction over the boxers out of competition, any more than any body does. Boxing is not covered by WADA in this respect. 

The IBA told the IOC about the test but the IOC took no action.

So the next year it tested them again in India. Again they were found to be XY. The IBA banned them.

The IOC demurred from action and allowed the boxers to take part. It was satisfied that the national authorities of both boxers certified them as female and that is the IOC's criterion.

These are the facts. Nothing else is known as far as I'm aware. One of the boxer's fathers presented a birth certificate, which I haven't studied. I'm perfectly content that the boxer was thought to be female at birth.

None of this is very interesting. A lot of shit has been talked but the facts seem clear enough. These boxers are males but the IOC doesn't actually care. Some of the boxers' opponents have protested but there's nothing they can do.

***

What's interesting is how much misinformation there is and how quickly it spread and changed.

First, it wsa claimed that the boxers had been tested for testosterone. At one point, the IBA president had said the issue was high testosterone (which in a certain respect, it is) but he was put straight. No, they had not tested the testosterone. They had tested their sex. 

So the story was that they had high testosterone.

Then it was claimed the father had said Khelif, the Algerian, had a vagina. This is very unlikely to be true, but you can imagine that the baby was "sexed" in the same way any child is: the midwife looks for a penis, and if she finds one, it's a boy!

I don't know what condition Khelif has but it's likely one that left him with undescended testicles and a micropenis. That can be interpreted as "female" by an onlooker quite easily.

Anyway, it soon spread that he had a vagina.

Next up, people claimed he has Swyer syndrome. In Swyer, a baby is XY but has a defective or absent SRY gene, so it does not develop any male characteristics and can be considered female.

I should point out at this stage that human babies are not in fact "all female" in the first few weeks. But what is true is that our *default* is female. If the SRY gene does not operate, we develop as females, simple as that. 

Why can Khelif not have Swyer? Well, these are not just words. There are outcomes. Someone with Swyer will present as entirely feminine. They do not produce testosterone at an appreciable level so they will not be at all virilised at puberty. Khelif clearly is. Even if he was a female, he is one that has been strongly affected by testosterone. He is very well muscled, broad shouldered, flat chested. Of course, women can present that way but not women with Swyer.

Nor is he likely to have CAIS, which might have provided him with said vagina. In CAIS, a genetic male is not sensitive to androgens. But again, Khelif very much looks like someone who has responded to androgens during puberty. His voice is broken. His features are virilised, not just "manly". Still, it's not impossible, just extremely unlikely. And I do think we can apply Occam's Razor.

Next up, some claimed he had XXY chromosomes and this meant he would show up XY on a test. This is beyond nonsense. XXY males have Klinefelter's syndrome and are clearly male. They have penises and visible testicles. And they do not have XY chromosomes!

Along with bullshit about his genetic makeup, stories about Algeria's anti-trans stance also spread. Algeria would have killed him! It would not permit a man to pretend to be a woman.

Now, not to impugn Algeria but that's obviously nonsense. There's no reason to imagine that Algeria is either all that integrated in its thinking or unwilling to go with the flow and just accept the gold medal. Algeria has only ever won a handful. 

And no, it's not going to kill its gold-medal helpful, or imprison him, or whatever people imagine, just because he tests male. What it's more likely to do, and Algerians on the whole seem to have done, is simply ignore it, call the IBA racist, and cheer Khelif on to glory. Or just ignore it. I haven't seen anything official from Algeria. Like any place, it's not a monolith. Women do not scuttle around the streets of Algiers in burkas. Or even hijab. It's not Iran (which also does not kill troons).

***

None of this really matters. But it's become a political thing. A lot of people on the "left" have taken Khelif's side and spread this bullshit because the right have of course taken the other side. But sometimes the right are correct about things, albeit rarely, and sometimes the "left" are just wrong. Their hearts are sometimes in the right place but often they just want a good reason for hating other people. Troon bothering has become one of those things.

It's a difficult subject because after all, who cares? There are men who don't like being men for whatever reason. Let them don a dress and call themselves Dolly and why should we care? It doesn't matter if they are following a fad, or have a mental illness, or are just made that way -- whatever it is, who cares? 

But it's not just that, is it? It's a brutal culture war. It's believe this or be burnt. It's get sacked if you don't agree that Sally is a woman. It's my primary schoolkid being taught that she has a "gender identity". It's drugs, surgeries and above all it's people screaming at each other. And above above all it's money. People make a lot of money out of it, pro and anti.

It's become something of a shibboleth of the "left". And you might ask, why do I keep putting "left" in quotation marks? Because there's nothing really left about hyperliberalism. The left traditionally did not in fact favour self-expression particularly. It saw it as a luxury that bougie people had the leisure to indulge in. But that strand of leftism that sees identity as important came to the fore as leftists realised how totally impotent they are, and how little the working class likes them or their politics. Leftism became a preserve of the middle class and became simply a marker of what fine people middle-class liberals are because they don't want to interfere with other people's individual expression.

Now it's become an entirely incoherent worldview that sees capitalism as an inchoate evil that somehow does not exist within people but controls them. A bit like evil in religion. But capitalism is not a simple force for bad. A lot of people have comfortable, happy lives within it. They cannot connect their own happiness and material wealth with the exploitation of poorer less happy people and the "leftists" can't either. Most of them have no answers except to destroy what there is and somehow imagine that socialism will grow in the rubble.

Having said that, there's no point getting all No True Leftist about it either. Leftist thought is worthless in today's world. It is largely too backward -- imagining that postcapitalist economies can be analysed as though they were the emergent industrial economies of the mid-nineteenth century -- or wishful -- don't ever allow yourself to get dragged into a conversation with an "anarchist" about how they will arrange the sewage in their brave new world. It is now itself just a luxury belief, just another way of expressing unease at a world in which you are somewhat, but not much, favoured. 

posted by Dr Zen @ 4:19 pm 0 comments

Ten Eight

I recently watched After Life. Like all things by Ricky Gervais, it's a little uneven, but it was in parts touching. One thing Gervais is good at is pointing at things and saying, Look what this is. Not really insightful but he does evoke recognition.

The main character's grief was not real -- didn't ever really feel real -- but what Gervais got right was the way grief can rob you of something intangible. I have felt it and that was why the show had meaning for me.

It doesn't make any difference that what you grieve isn't real. In the same way that my sisters make up versions of my mum that never really existed, I grieve for a wife I never really had. I have grieved for how she felt rather than how she was.

Sometimes I think about how we should be watching our child grow together, and how much giving that up ought to have hurt. But it didn't hurt her. It broke me in two but left her unmoved.  I don't know how you decide that. I still can't reconcile any of it; cannot really accept who she is.

It feels so important to me to love people that I cannot undersand someone who doesn't. Can't. Never will. I remember vividly her telling me that she had never felt love, and I didn't take that as a warning.

I was vain enough to think I was different. Now I know I'm not.

And when I say I'm not, it's like something in me has been extinguished. My belief in my own worth went out like a pilot light in a hurricane. I feel like my whole self drained away, down the plughole, and I wasn't able to find anything to rebuild it with.

I hoped that given time, I would recover. But maybe that would have needed stability that I just don't have. Maybe I have to accept that the stability is not just a thing others give me -- not just a product of a good job and a girlfriend or whatever I imagined it might have been. It's a thing inside yourself.

***

The worst thing is that it made me feel hollowed out and I couldn't refill myself. So I feel I have nothing to offer. I feel I deserve it. Where once I would have believed I was a stained glass window and pieces of a particular colour were broken and then another and then another, now I just think I'm the same grimy uncared-for glass it seems everyone sees.

In After Life, Ricky Gervais' character is perceived by everyone around him as special. But he isn't. He's not kind, not witty, not willing to be a good talker. There's no reason that people should see him that way but Gervais writes it like that. He responds to other people in the end, proving their belief in him well founded. Or well founded ish, let's say. There is no twist. It ends happily. Gervais is not a particularly good storyteller so it's ultimately predictable that he'll have a happy ending.

Maybe I will. Maybe I need to recover and stop lying to myself that I have recovered first. But I don't know how I can. I don't know how you fill yourself if you've been drained away like so much dirty dishwater.

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:36 pm 1 comments