Stealing Women’s Medals

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In the 2024 Paris Olympics, a controversy has arisen as a reportedly male competitor just won the women’s gold medal in boxing.  And by the time you read this, there may be two biological males with gold medals in women’s boxing.

This wouldn’t be the first time that men have stolen deserving women’s medals, as it turns out.  Many years ago, I happened across the story of Heinrich Ratjen, who competed in the women’s high jump in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and competed on behalf of Nazi Germany.  As a 17-year-old, he placed fourth in those Olympic Games, but he managed to raise eyebrows after breaking the women’s world record for high jump at the European Athletics Championships in 1938.  Afterward, on a train from Vienna to Cologne, he was outed when the conductor reported “a man dressed as a woman.”

What made the story fascinating to me was a rumor that persisted for many years.  Heinrich supposedly spoke out in his later years, admitting that the Nazis had forced him to compete as a woman named Dora.  They did this for two reasons, according to the rumor.  The first was to defeat all the other female Olympians and win more gold medals for the glory of the Reich, and the second was a conspiracy theory suggesting that Ratjen was “planted by the Nazi Party” to ensure that Jewish athlete Gretel Bergmann wouldn’t make the German Olympic team.  (The Nazis did conspire to prevent Bergmann from competing, and, when interviewed in 2009, Bergmann still insisted there was a Nazi plan to disguise Ratjen as a woman to compete in her place.)

The real story appears to have been quite different, as I later discovered while researching the Ratjen story as a possible parallel to the Will Thomas story a couple of years back. 

Will, AKA Lia, Thomas was born a man and lived as a man, even competing in men’s NCAA swimming in his early college years, before pretending to be a woman named Lia in 2019 and robbing several deserving young women of their rightful medals and opportunities.  Both he and the University of Pennsylvania pretended that he was a woman to get an edge against the female competition and to feign personal and institutional athletic excellence. 

For obvious reasons, it reminded me of what I had once believed to be the Heinrich Ratjen story.  What I discovered while revisiting the story, however, is that it was entirely unfair to Heinrich Ratjen to compare him to Will Thomas.  

According to the Olympics website, Heinrich’s “gender was mixed from birth, and his parents raised him as a girl, although he had hermaphroditic sexual characteristics.”  He was born Dora Ratjen, and he was raised as a girl.  The Vintage News reports that his father, when pressed on the matter in 1938, said that he was in the kitchen during his birth, and that the midwife’s first report was that “it’s a boy!”  Five minutes later, he was informed that “it is a girl, after all.”  

The story of Dora/Heinrich Ratjen is a far more complicated one than the story of Will/Lia Thomas.

Will Thomas is a degenerate who lived and competed his entire life as a male, and later pretended to be a girl to win accolades and steal competitive glory from women who rightfully deserved it.  Ratjen, on the other hand, had lived his entire life as a woman.  The reason for the confusion about Heinrich’s sex at birth likely stems from a genetic anomaly resulting in a “piece of redundant skin,” “going backward from the underside of the male organ.”  But after a life of having lived as a girl and competing as such, he reportedly showed “honest relief for finally being able to address the issue that had forced her to conceal her true identity.”

The jig was up, and the world knew he was a man. Not much is certain about his later life, but he is supposed to have understandably had some difficulty living life as a man after having spent “most of his life thinking and acting otherwise.”

In what is by far the best analysis of the gender-bending controversy in this year’s Olympic Games at Quillete, Doriane Lambelet Coleman recognizes that fairness in women’s sports is “a century-old problem in elite sport” that we’ve “somehow not managed to solve in a uniform way.”  She doesn’t specifically mention the Ratjen parallel, but it would be safe to assume that it’s a key example of the “problem” she describes.

This year, however, the controversy had “explosive” elements.  It wasn’t just “competitive fairness” that was at stake as two suspected males were given the green light by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to compete in boxing against a field of women, but the competitors’ physical safety was at risk in a way that it has not been with track and field events, for example.

Both Imane Khelif (25) of Algeria and Lin Yu-Ting (28) of Taiwan competed in the 2021* Tokyo Olympic Games, but this year’s appearance was after the International Boxing Association (IBA) had barred them from competing against women on the grounds that tests had confirmed that both athletes are not female.

The IBA reports, based upon two tests in Istanbul 2022 and in New Delhi in 2023, that not only did both have very high testosterone levels, but they have XY chromosomes, making them genetically male and functionally more akin to men than women.  Given that neither athlete successfully appealed the decision (Khelif began the appeal process but withdrew it), the decision was legally binding. 

Therefore, it’s safe to assume, as famed biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins does, that “genetically male boxers such as Imane Khalif (XY undisputed) should not fight women in the Olympics.”  Dawkins says that his Facebook account was deleted for having made this entirely reasonable observation publicly.

The IOC disregarded the IBA’s reports, claiming that it never received them — a claim that appears to be false, given that reports show the IBA having sent the results in June of 2023. 

That’s the crux of the debate, and everything else is smoke.  If the boxers have XY chromosomes, they are males.  And if they are males, then they should not be competing against females.  Furthermore, if the IOC looked at the IBC’s results, they would have confirmed or denied that the two boxers are males with XY chromosomes.  If they didn’t look at the files, their decision has no basis in science at all, and it was a purely political decision.

And we now know that it was the latter.  The IBA has revealed that the IOC was made aware of test results showing that the two boxers are male, but they “chose to ignore the issue.”  The IOC determined their eligibility “based on passport and not gender,” according the IBA statement.

It seems insane, but it’s true.  IOC president Thomas Bach said that “we have two boxers who were born as women, who have been raised as women, who have a passport as a woman, and who have competed for many years as women.”

But how reliable is that assessment, really?  After all, Heinrich Ratjen’s papers, when he was asked for them on that train from Vienna to Cologne in 1938, said that his name was Dora and that he was a woman.  He was born a woman, raised a woman, and had competed for many years as a woman.  Yet we now know that he was a man, and his competing against women was entirely unfair.

People say this isn’t a trans issue, as it was with Will Thomas.  But that’s untrue.  Looking back at Heinrich Ratjen proves that.

When Ratjen was caught, he was personally relieved that he didn’t have to continue living a lie.  And perhaps more important, he was made to give back his gold medal, and his world record was removed from the annals of women’s high jump history.  From Olympics officials to athletes and fans worldwide, and including Ratjen himself, that was immediately recognized as the only morally just outcome for those women who were made to compete against a man.

Today, it appears, one and possibly two males will proudly hoist their gold medals for having beaten the you-know-what out of a field of women.  The officials of their countries will celebrate, as will the IOC, who will pat themselves on the back for their steely devotion to non-discrimination.  The media and leftist radicals will also celebrate, and they will do so precisely because they believe this to be a victory in their effort to advance the nonsensical trans agenda, which holds that sex and gender are not immutable characteristics determined by one’s genetic nature, but some malleable societal construct that individuals can change on a whim if they can just imagine hard enough. 

And they’ll all call it “progress.”

The rest of the world, which includes me, you, and the vast, vast majority of human beings on this planet, will view all of this nonsense as we go about our day to day lives and realize that this international circus we are watching represents anything but “progress,” and it becoming more ridiculous and less relevant with each new spectacle.

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