Rant or Rave Wednesday

2024 Summer Olympics Controversy

Although still garnering a large audience, the number of people who watch the Summer Olympics has steadily declined since 2008. With the frenzy of Netflix, YouTube, and an excess of other options exploding over the past decade, the drop in viewership makes sense. People are distracted, and the Olympics does not seem to have the same appeal it once did.

Ratings, however, for the 2024 Summer Olympics are seemingly soaring. It’s important to point out that NBC, the network that airs live coverage of the Olympics in the United States, has changed the metrics it uses to measure audience size, and total viewership has yet to be determined, but it is fair to say that the summer Olympics this year is gaining a log of attention. From the offensive opening ceremonies to the participation of biological males in female events, this year’s summer Olympics is becoming a heated and politically charged subject.

This is not the first time transgender participation has been an issue with the Olympics. Transgender athletes have been permitted to compete in this international event since the early 2000’s. However, it wasn’t until the 2020 Olympic games, played in 2021 because of COVID, that the first openly transgender individual, Laurel Hubbard competed. Hubbard’s participation sparked outrage then, as he had an unfair advantage over his genetically female counterparts.

In 2003, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) enforced strict guidelines for a transgender individual to compete, including surgical anatomical changes having been completed. This rule, along with a few others, was dropped in 2015. Hubbard’s case in 2021 required testosterone levels to be below a certain amount. This still disregards a biological male’s obvious advantage with muscle mass and bone structure among other things, but it attempted to level the playing field, at least to some degree. This doesn’t seem to be the case in 2024. It is important to note that the IOC does allow different sports to set their own policies and the guidelines are regularly evolving, which further complicates the matter, but the one sport that seems to be stirring the most outrage in the summer 2024 Olympics is the women’s boxing event.

It’s one thing to debate the merits of trans women in sports like running or swimming, it’s a totally different animal with fighting that involves punching another person in the face. This year the boxing match between Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif and Italian boxer, Angela Carini provoked a variety of thoughts, feelings, and comments. This event goes beyond issues of fairness and involves concerns like personal safety, and potentially life and death. In less than a minute, after only a few punches from Khelif, Carini was forced to quit the bout, something she had trained her whole life for.

Once upon a time, a man punching a woman in the face earned you prison time but not today, not in 2024. This, my friends, is not the most bizarre thing either. It gets worse. The media is in full-blown psycho mode claiming that although Khelif has XY chromosomes, he is a woman. Now, to be fair, Swyer syndrome is a real disorder affecting individuals who have female genitalia but XY chromosomes; however, this disease is extremely rare. Maybe Imane Khelif does have this disease, but I simply cannot trust what the media is saying – they’ve lied too much on too many important things. In my opinion, it is irrelevant if he has this disorder. He should still not be allowed to fight against women because the XY chromosomal makeup, the biological marker of a male, gives him an unfair advantage and can have fatal consequences for his female opponent. Period.

It’s interesting that there are no issues on the opposite end. Notice how there is no standard for women going into men’s sports. There are many biological women, who now consider themselves men. Why aren’t they becoming trailblazers and vying to compete in men’s sports, that is to say competing against those individuals who were born with XY chromosomes? I think everyone knows the answer to that – it would be a futile exercise, as winning would be nearly impossible.

The ridiculousness of what is occurring at the 2024 Summer Olympics is a microcosm of where we are politically in the United States and the world today – the Twilight Zone.  We’re not approaching it and we’re not teetering on the edge. No, we are smack-dab in the middle of a disturbing episode with Rod Sterling’s voice resoundingly declaring, “You’re traveling through another dimension…”

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Professor Giordano sits down with Professor Wilfred Reilly

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