By Suzanne Bowdey

For all of the heroic performances, all of the heart-tugging Olympic stories and emotional medal ceremonies, the saga of two boxers has managed to cast a long shadow over the Paris games. It’s the latest chapter in the global war over gender, and a string of women just lost everything they trained for at the hands of it.

By now, most Americans have heard about Italy’s Angela Carini, who quit her match earlier this week after a 46-second pummeling at the hands a boxer with male chromosomes. Telling reporters later that she had “never been hit so hard in her life,” she fell to her knees and withdrew. “She’s too strong,” Carini told her coach about Algeria’s Imane Khelif. “I didn’t give up,” she insisted, “but a punch hurt too much, and so I said I had enough. I go out with my head held high.”

She’d been warned it was dangerous, even pressured to drop out before fighting Khelif, but Carini was determined to do what she’d come to Paris to do. Watching from America, women’s sports activist and former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines said she felt “heartbroken.” “It was very clear that this athlete was different than the athletes from the fight before.” In reality, Gaines said of Carini, “She is the winner. She is a hero for every young girl watching…”

A handful of days later, on Friday, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting overpowered Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova to advance to the quarterfinals of women’s boxing, despite being disqualified from the 2023 World Championships for also having XY chromosomes. Although Sitroa managed to last three rounds, she ultimately couldn’t match Yu-ting’s strength and went down in defeat. Since then, both men have clinched medals.

Since Carini’s fight, the international uproar has been deafening, even boiling over into the U.S. presidential race. “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!” Donald Trump thundered on Truth Social.

But the situation that’s grabbed headlines from New York to Taipei is a little more nuanced than a lot of people realize. As Denny Burk explains, whereas Lia Thomas is absolutely a biological male pretending to be a woman, Khelif’s situation is more complicated. “… [N]either fighter regards himself as transgender, and yet both fighters believe themselves to be female in spite of having XY chromosomes. If these reports are accurate, then it would suggest that they both have some sort of intersex condition,” which, he goes on to explain, would make them men with “malformed reproductive anatomy.”

And while “not all intersex conditions are the same,” Burk notes, their sex “is not ambiguous.” In these instances, the boxers would still be producing “male-level amounts of testosterone,” which would make them dominant in sports like boxing. A lot of children who are born intersex are raised and treated as female, which should, he urged, “evok[e] our compassion and sympathy.” That said, “It is neither compassionate nor helpful to pretend that the biological situation is somehow unclear when in fact it is not. And of course the discovery of a genetic male should have implications for athletic competition. Because they are biologically male, people with [this condition] should compete in male divisions, not in female ones.”

And that, critics argue, is where the International Olympic Committee (IOC) went wrong. In the uproar over Carini’s rout, committee spokesman Mark Adams claimed, “I would just say that everyone competing in the women’s category is complying with the competition eligibility rules. They are women in their passports.”

The International Boxing Association (IBA) vehemently disagreed, which is unsurprising considering that they disqualified both Yu-Ting and Khelif last year. “While IBA remains committed to ensuring competitive fairness in all of our events, we express concern over the inconsistent application of eligibility criteria by other sporting organizations, including those overseeing the Olympic Games,” the organization said in a statement. “The IOC’s differing regulations on these matters, in which IBA is not involved, raise serious questions about both competitive fairness and athletes’ safety.”

Regardless of the sympathy these athletes deserve for their condition, no one with XY chromosomes should be fighting women — in a contact sport like boxing or otherwise. “[T]he majority of Americans know it’s wrong,” Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Thursday’s “Washington Watch.” “And you saw on full display the how upset that female boxer was. She probably worked her entire life for this moment. And she has to go up against a male, [and] … the Olympic Committee even admits that he’s a male.” To Steube and others, “It’s just absolutely horrifying that the Left has perverted all types of women’s sports, whether it be Olympic sports, whether it be kids in schools, whether it’s women that are losing scholarships in Title IX in the United States, they have perverted it. And we now are seeing it on the world stage. And it’s really disgusting.”

It’s “unjust,” Perkins agreed, “but it’s also dangerous.” A male punch, he wanted people to know, “can carry about 162% more power than a woman.” That’s what experts mean by a “biological difference.” And yet, he shook his head, “We’re playing this charade, and now it’s here in the United States. You’ve tried to stop it,” he acknowledged in a nod to Steube’s Save Women’s Sports Act that passed the House earlier this year.

But the Biden administration “doesn’t care,” the Florida legislator argued. “They don’t care about … the safety of women in sports, and they don’t care about the fact that there’s going to be biological men in your daughters’ locker rooms in middle school or in high school or in college. They don’t care about that because they are pushing this progressive agenda on the American people. And you saw that with the recent release of Biden’s Title IX rules, which flies in the face of why Title IX was created in the first place.”

Those new rules, which put trans-identifying students above real girls’ safety, privacy, and opportunity, has been a constant source of frustration for the states, almost half of whom have sued — many successfully — to stop the White House from hurting America’s daughters. “Over 50 years ago … Title IX was created for women to have an athletic playing field to play each other in sports … and now they’re allowing biological men to compete. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I hope it enrages every American and they show up with their feet and they vote against these types of policies, because this is what the Left is today, and this is what the current administration pushes on our kids,” Steube fumed.

The Floridian, whose bill with Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) would have also leveled the Olympic playing field for U.S. athletes, put the blame for what we’re seeing on the world stage squarely at the feet of the American Left. When the time came to vote on his legislation, he points out, not a single Democrat could bring themselves to protect girls’ sports. “The argument from the Democrats was, ‘This never happens. [Girls don’t get hurt.] You never see that. [You’re] making this up.’ And we had example after example that was happening then. And now we see it all the time, and now we’re seeing it on the world stage. And they want to push this progressive ideology on America, on the world. And it’s just wrong,” he insisted. “It’s frustrating. It’s upsetting. Women have come so far on the athletic playing fields to now have such a setback, and it’s completely embraced by the Left. And this is exactly what they want to push on the American people.”

For Kamala Harris, that reality will be a difficult one to overcome in the general election. Her longtime advocacy for the trans movement won’t sit well with voters, 80% of whom are disgusted by the Biden administration’s bulldozing of girls’ sports. Already, it’s providing ample firepower to the GOP, who’s pounced on the Olympics as proof that Kamala is well outside the rational mainstream. “This is where Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender lead,” Republican vice presidential candidate and Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) posted, “to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match. This is disgusting, and all of our leaders should condemn it.”

Others, like Gaines, want women to know that this is a female candidate who doesn’t represent them in the slightest. “Crickets from Kamala,” Gaines told Fox’s Jesse Waters on the boxing controversy. “And if I could implore you,” she said, “a vote for Kamala is a vote against your daughter’s future. I see lots of people on social media saying they’ll be voting for Kamala because she’s a woman. Well, let me tell you, Jesse, I will be voting for Trump because I am a woman.”

So is this a rallying cry, these Olympics? Is this one of those times, Perkins wondered, where people will say, “Enough of this insanity?”

Steube certainly hopes so. But to be honest, he acknowledged, “The only way that we can change this and save women’s sports is [to elect] Trump president. We flip the Senate, and we keep the House. That’s the only way that this is going to happen.” Otherwise, he warned, all we’re going to get is four more years of a White House claiming they care about women — only to do everything in their power to erase them.

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.