Via Sex Matters, I learn that the IOC has a Portrayal Guideline [pdf] so I hasten to read it.

It is, of course, a sour joke.

The Introduction starts with:

Sport is one of the most powerful platforms for promoting gender equality and empowering women and girls, and sports coverage is very influential in shaping gender norms and stereotypes.

So…that’s why they insist that some men are women. Okaaaaaay…

The two weeks of Olympic coverage are a rare time when women’s sports and sportswomen – irrespective
of nation, race, religion, sexual orientation or socioeconomic status – are likely to make the headlines. But outside that period, both the quantity and quality of women’s sports coverage remain inconsistent and limited in

Sex Matters zooms in on the problem:

…with disorders of sex development (DSD) that led to them being registered female, and that they are bringing male advantage into the female sporting category, which is precisely what the female category designed to exclude.

— Sex Matters (@SexMattersOrg) August 2, 2024

This is the condition Caster Semenya has, which leads to a male child appearing female or of ambiguous sex at birth, but going through normal male puberty and developing a male adult physique. It appears likely that this is also the condition that Khelif and Lin have.

— Sex Matters (@SexMattersOrg) August 2, 2024

Which is why the IOC’s flapping its hands and telling us they’ve always identified as female is … Read the rest

Time magazine lets us know Taiwan is super mad at JK Rowling.

Local politicians and journalists are taking jabs at Rowling, some Harry Potter fans have vowed to boycott her products, and social media users have defended Lin Yu Ting, the 28-year-old Chinese Taipei women’s boxer who has found herself at the center of a raging debate about biology and sports.

As boxing events kicked off at the Olympics in Paris this week, the eligibility of Taiwan’s Lin as well as Algeria’s Imane Khelif has been questioned by critics claiming that they are men pretending to be women for competitive advantage. (Both have identified as women since birth, and both have competed and lost to women in international

Second man wins women’s boxing round.

Lin Yu-ting, one of the boxers at the centre of a gender row at the Olympics, won her opening bout in the women’s featherweight category by outpointing Sitora Turdibekova.

The participation of the Chinese Taipei fighter and Algeria’s Imane Khelif at these Games has invited intense scrutiny, with the pair disqualified from last year’s World Championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA) for failing to meet gender eligibility criteria.

…

Lin, the top seed in the women’s -57kg category, breezed into the quarter-finals with a unanimous decision win although Turdibekova proved a tough opponent and won one of the rounds on one of the scorecards.

Ultimately, the taller and rangier Lin recorded victory

Trump was outraged to be expected to tell the truth.

Moments before former President Trump took the stage at the National Association of Black Journalists annual convention in Chicago on Wednesday, the organization’s president was called back to address an issue.

Why it matters: Trump did not want to be fact-checked live and was refusing to go on stage, NABJ president Ken Lemon told Axios.

• “[Trump’s team] said, ‘Well, can you not fact check? He’s not going to take the stage if you fact-check,'” Lemon said.

That’s so interesting. Why would he not want to be fact-checked? Silly question. Because he lies constantly, so he would look pretty ridiculous being interrupted every few words for a fact check.

The Q&A

The insults just keep rolling in.

Former president Donald Trump is facing criticism for recent comments made about the Jewish community in which he claimed a Jewish American who votes for a Democrat is “an absolute fool.”

The American Jewish Committee (AJC), a global Jewish advocacy group, condemned Trump’s comments. “At a time when antisemitism is at record levels, the statement by the former president is divisive and potentially dangerous,” the AJC told ABC News in a statement.

What did the insult comic say this time?

In a July 30 interview with New York radio host Sid Rosenberg on the radio station 77WABC, owned by Red Apple Media, Trump said that “any Jewish person that voted for her or

Of course he was.

The official at the centre of the Olympic boxing gender row was one of Sir Keir Starmer’s best men at his wedding.

Mark Adams, the spokesman for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), has known the Prime Minister since the two men were at school together.

Naturally. They grew up together in the leafy suburb of Womendontmatterby (pronounced Smugbro).

Mr Adams expressed concerns earlier this week about a “witch hunt” against boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, who have previously failed gender eligibility tests.

Mr Adams expressed no concerns about the consequences to women of allowing male boxers to fight women. Mr Adams expressed irritation at being pressed on the subject.

Khelif and Yu-Ting were

Welp, if you can’t defend the indefensible, just hide it.

The @iocmedia has blocked all sharing of the unfair fight

Even on X pic.twitter.com/rXzXri3LWp

— Kellie-Jay Keen (@ThePosieParker) August 2, 2024

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Artymorty on The public is fickle.

I don’t love the media’s reporting about Truth Social because it often misses the bigger picture. The bottom line is that Truth Social was created for one purpose and it succeeded wildly at it: it is a sham product, a vehicle to sell shares on the Nasdaq stock market. How much money Truth Social itself generates or loses as a business enterprise is irrelevant. How many consumers actually use Truth Social is also irrelevant, at least in terms of Trump’s income.

As of this moment, Donald Trump’s 114,750,000 shares in Truth Social are worth $29.60 apiece, for a total of $3,086,775,000. That’s three billion dollars, generated virtually out of … Read the rest

Oh dear, people are getting bored with Trump. How sad.

Donald Trump’s social media venture is losing users every month, hurting his bottom line and possibly showing that his rhetoric is losing appeal even among his own base.

The Guardian spoke to a right-wing media analyst, Howard Polskin, who said that Truth Social had only 2.11 million unique users in June, a decline of 38 percent from one year ago.

…

The venture was supposed to be Trump’s cash cow, as the former president and convicted felon owns 60 percent of the company. But a series of setbacks since launching have ruined Trump’s financial fail-safe. The company had a net loss of $58.2 million in 2023, numbers that had

Wrong.

Imane Khelif, according to Reuters, is not transgender. She's a woman with a DSD. It's perfectly possible to talk about what the eligibility criteria should be for sports, and especially combat sports, without cruelly monstering someone with an intersex condition as a violent… https://t.co/I8xsUVRCQb pic.twitter.com/tPJWe0cLz9

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) August 1, 2024

He’s a MAN with a DSD. Not a woman with a DSD but a man with a DSD.

Khelif is male with a DSD ONLY males can have. It can occur with ambiguous genitalia at birth. In sexist countries, they refuse to raise the male child as a boy because he’s “not right”- so they raise them as a girl.
But then he goes through male puberty.

It just gets worse and worse.

The BBC is now, I’m very much afraid to say, filth. https://t.co/MgbXzxejea

— Gareth Roberts (@OldRoberts953) August 1, 2024

Who is Alex Kay Jelski? This guy:

Director of BBC Sport faces his critics… pic.twitter.com/LLGLNXGpyj

— Guy Thompson (@GuyThom29406006) August 1, 2024

https://twitter.com/JournalismSEEN/status/1818988157326778873

This was updated with Carini quotes but even still omits ‘I’ve never been hit so hard before’. @BBCSport would not even have covered this match but for the scandal. Now that it’s forced to, it has tried to make it as anodyne and uninformative as possible.

— SEENinJournalism (@JournalismSEEN) August 1, 2024

Worse and worse and worse. … Read the rest

Horrible.

The moment the Olympics died. pic.twitter.com/S0qK8Jc8iw

— Bill Moon (@BigBillMoon) August 1, 2024

Updating to add Oliver Brown in a live report from the Telegraph:

Angela Carini was in floods of tears as she stopped to speak in the interview area, having abandoned her bout with Imane Khelif after only 46 seconds. Her voice quavering, she said that she pulled out because she had never been hit so hard. Imane Khelif swept through the mixed zone without saying a word. It is staggering to think how only yesterday, Mark Adams, the International Olympic Committee’s spokesman, had said that everyone should just “dial down” the issue and not instigate a “witchhunt”. To reiterate, Khelif had failed two sex tests

So. I guess we can be glad she’s still alive.

#Angelacarini rightly followed her instincts and prioritized her physical safety, but she and other female athletes should not have been exposed to this physical and psychological
Violence based on their sex.

— Reem Alsalem UNSR Violence Against Women and Girls (@UNSRVAW) August 1, 2024

… Read the rest

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph on the IOC’s reckless endangerment:

At 11.20 on Thursday morning, inside the North Paris Arena, Italian boxer Angela Carini is going to be punched in the head by an opponent who has failed a sex test to fight against women. We already know the punishment that Imane Khelif is capable of inflicting: in 2022, the Algerian landed shots of such force on Mexico’s Brianda Tamara that the beaten fighter said she was grateful simply to escape the ring alive.

The International Olympic Committee is aware of all this. The dispute over Khelif’s biology is recorded in its official Games notes. And yet in a sport where the danger of death is ever-present, and

Well this has put the cat among the pigeons.

Very interesting the international boxing association’s statement. The IOC have been told repeatedly this is unsafe. They just don’t care. pic.twitter.com/L3NwMezbAe

— Sharron Davies MBE (@sharrond62) July 31, 2024

Statement made by the International Boxing Association regarding Athletes Disqualifications in World Boxing Championships 2023

As stated, the International Boxing Association (IBA) feels it appropriate at this prevalent time, to address recent media statements regarding those athletes Lin Yu-ting and Imane Khelif, particularly regarding their participation in the Paris Olympic Games 2024.

We wish to make the following points in these regards:

On 24 March 2023, IBA disqualified athletes Lin Yu-ting and Imane Khelif from the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships New Delhi

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Remember the swing voters.

Of course we all live in our own little bubbles these days, and despair can distort the perspective of anyone including me. Still, from where I stand, the general tone of the conversation still sounds too much like 2016, when so many liberals and lefties were talking and acting as if Trump’s followers were supporting him by mistake, because they just didn’t know how awful he truly was, and would start abandoning him in droves as soon as they realized their mistake, hence the many confident predictions that his base would turn against him whenever he said or did something outrageous (i.e. whenever he said or did … Read the rest

Eli Stokols at Politico on the other hand thinks Trump’s game of Tease the Black Journalists blew up in his face.

“She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said, prompting audible gasps and murmurs, according to reporters in the room. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago until she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.”

Trump continued to make the same point about Harris’ ancestry even as one of the moderators, ABC News’ Rachel Scott, interjected that Harris attended an historically Black college and has always identified as Black.

“She was Indian all the way and then all of the sudden

The hangout with Black journalists went as expected: Trump being as rude and disgusting as possible for points or attention or both. He wins even if he loses, because he gets his jollies being rude and disgusting.

Trump falsely asserted during an event with Black journalists that Harris was “Indian all the way” and suddenly “became a Black person.” He also gave credence to those suggesting Harris doesn’t deserve to be vice president by saying she “could be” in the job because of a push for diversity, equity and inclusion. And he lambasted one of the events’ Black moderators as “very rude,” turning the event into a spectacle that could refocus attention on his own 2024 White House campaign.

I’ve never understood why boxing is a sport in the first place. I still don’t.

Semenya was not a physical danger to other competitors.

The entire point of boxing is to cause a (hopefully temporary and mild) brain injury.

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) July 31, 2024

Even a temporary and mild brain injury is a brain injury, and brain injuries are bad. Really bad. It’s not like repeatedly getting a bruise to the shoulder. Brains are vital to human functioning and they are easily damaged and the damage doesn’t just go away. That’s why boxers end up with brain damage – it’s cumulative.

That’s why I’ve never understood why we consider it a sport and entertainment.

That of course goes … Read the rest