There’s a change in the world that we need more people to understand. Most journalists don’t investigate anything (there are one or two exceptions. A shout out to you, if you are one of them, reading this). What they do is see what’s trending in social media today, grab a photo or two that have become briefly famous, then write up what they’ve seen under the banner of their newspaper the next day.

The horrible result of this is that if a lot of people have been spinning a piece of fiction, or a misunderstanding of something, on social media today, it’s very likely that tomorrow, they will see it in the newspaper along with a photo they recognise, and their belief will be confirmed to them as gospel.

The way that story about the IOC’s irresponsible attitude to women’s sport has developed is a glaring example. You can’t sort it out again unless you know what ‘afab’ means. It does not mean female. The idea that sex is ‘assigned at birth’, rather than observed and recorded, belongs to the history of people with disorders of sexual development (DSDs). For males with DSDs, it is very common for parents to believe at first glance that their child is a girl. In some cases, everyone goes on thinking the child is a girl until puberty, when his maleness becomes apparent.

By the time they reach adulthood, those males will have a visibly male physique and the corresponding strengths. Once they understand what has happened to them, they usually drop their ‘assigned’ sex at that point, get their papers changed and live as the men they truly are…

Unless of course there is an obvious advantage to keeping their official, ‘assigned’ sex. In quite a few countries, national and international sporting prowess is so important they have professionals chasing down every possible lead to potentially medal-winning youngsters. Boys who are good at sport, and happen to be registered as girls (that is, ‘afab’), represent one of those opportunities. It’s why people with DSDs are so over-represented in elite sport, and why sex-testing is both necessary and complicated in those circles.

For both safety and fairness, women in elite level sports need organizations to stop acting as though ‘afab’ means female, and for them to return to effective sex testing. Unfortunately, the world has got the DSD issue mixed up with the trans issue, not least because people who like to believe you really can change sex often talk about everyone’s birth sex as ‘assigned’, as though it’s just a formality, and easily altered.

As a result, social media are full of people raging at anyone who point out those obviously male boxers. They respond by posting pics of those boxers as little girls as ‘proof’ that they’ve ‘always been female’, and get even more enraged when in reply, they’re shown pics of those boxers as men.

Does that sound terribly confusing? It’s simple to some – amongst DSD people, males who are assigned female at birth and live as girls until it’s confirmed that they are boys really are no mystery. To them, ‘assigned female at birth’ almost always means male.

It would be really nice to see some decent investigative journalism going on, getting the real story out there – the one about how there is nothing some countries will not stoop to for Olympic medals and world records, the one that would demonstrate that those afab boxers, just as much as the women they punch, are victims of their countries’ Olympic ambitions. Unfortunately, most journalists are settling for copying the ‘stories’ they find on social media.

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Kay

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