Mark Adams, a spokesman for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), declared the committee “fully supports” two transgender athletes competing against women this week, but he also made contradictory statements about how the athletes were approved to compete.
Adams sought to clarify why Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting and Algeria’s Imane Khelif were allowed to compete as women in the boxing events at this year’s Olympics.
On the other hand, he Claimed As long as the boxers’ passports say “female,” the IOC will consider them to be women, the Associated Press reported.
But they also noted that current rules mean that the federations or governing bodies of particular sports set the final eligibility rules for transgender athletes, which would essentially invalidate the gender designation on their passports.
“Everyone competing in the women’s division is complying with the eligibility rules,” Adams said, according to the Associated Press.
He added: “Their passports state that they are women, and yes, that states that they are women.”
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according to @ioc Spokesman Mark Adams said that if male boxers have passports that say “female,” then they are “women” and are free to punch women at the Olympics. @iocmedia.
Also, Mark Adams says that if these men had been forgiven for cheating in other sports before, the IOC would be fine with it… pic.twitter.com/El3EjICgvo
— XX-XY Athletics (@xx_xyathletics) July 30, 2024
But then he went on to make statements that seemed to contradict his own passport standards.
“They are eligible under the federation’s rules, which were established in 2016 and were applied in Tokyo,” Adams explained. “They can compete as women, and we fully support that.”
Despite this, some world sports federations impose very strict restrictions or outright bans on transgender athletes, so the gender listed on their passport doesn’t matter in those cases because the organization is preventing them from participating.
Adams also made the fantastical argument that the two trans boxers have competed as women before, so why shouldn’t the Olympics allow them to compete as women in Paris? A weak point, social media users pointed out, that the trans boxers “have cheated in the past,” which apparently means Adams is willing to forgive them for cheating in the present.
Still, Adams doesn’t appear to be entirely accurate on this point either: Both fighters have been disqualified from the 2023 New Delhi World Championships by the International Boxing Association, Breitbart Sports reported on Monday.
In fact, the IOC confirmed that it was using the federation’s 2016 rules to justify the eligibility of transgender boxers, rather than the updated rules used by the IBA last year to exclude transgender boxers.
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