The Megyn Kelly Show - Deep Dive: The Science of Protecting Women's Sports From Men, and the Olympics Boxing Controversy | Ep. 862

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Megyn Kelly is joined by Ross Tucker, co-host of "The Science of Sport" podcast, to discuss the men competing in the female boxing category at the Olympics, the dispute between the IOC and the IBA that led to this moment, how an athlete found to have XY chromosomes would not be allowed to compete in women's sports in swimming at the Olympics, how easy it would be to keep biological women safe in sports with new technologies in testing, how testosterone influences athletic performance, how the IOC's antiquated rules hurt competition, and more.More from Tucker: https://open.spotify.com/show/3g71AuFYy6FnYHEI1GO9A0 Birch Gold: Text MEGYN to 989898 & get your free info kit on goldFollow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and this deep dive special episode. Today, we are taking a hard look into the controversy surrounding the two male Olympic boxers who won gold medals competing against women. My guest today is Ross Tucker. He's an expert in sports science. He's also a consultant to World Rugby, the official governing body of rugby, and has advised the Association on sex eligibility in that sport. Tucker has taken an in-depth look at the Olympic boxing scandal and has been explaining the science behind it

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saving strategy. Again, text MK to 989898. Birch Gold has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and thousands of happy customers. Text MK to 989898. Message and data rates may apply. Ross, welcome to the show. Hi, Megan. Thank you. So this thing completely exploded to the point where a lot of people are out there saying, I don't know what to believe. The IOC just keeps telling me that they're female and that somehow it's misogynistic to say they're not female. And yet I hear reports about the International Boxing Association. And so the average citizen may be walking around out there saying, I guess we'll just never know. I guess they're women. To which you respond what?

That I suppose what one would have to say is that we don't 100% know because none of the parties who can confirm it with beyond any reasonable doubt at all are saying exactly what they know. And so to some degree, you choose whether you believe the International Boxing Association and the series of events going back to 2022, 2023, when these two boxers were disqualified from world championships fights for failing what they called their eligibility tests. And then you arrive in Paris where the scandal, as you mentioned, exploded. Or you choose to dismiss what International Boxing Association is saying. And you go instead with what the IOC are saying and refusing to say, and what the boxers themselves

are refusing to disclose. And then you can decide. So in some senses, it's probably a little bit of one of those inkblot tests that reveals to you what you felt before the time. But from my perspective, the sequence of events and what we know seems to indicate that these boxes were tested. They had XY chromosomes, and perhaps we'll get into exactly what that means. They were deemed ineligible by the International Boxing Association because the chromosomes they were found with are typical of males, and therefore they were disqualified from competition. We then know that neither of the boxers appealed that decision, which I think is quite telling because it would be quite an easy case to win if you were actually telling the truth with regards to not being male. And then we also know that people who are close to those boxers, one of the sports scientists who was involved in conditioning the Algerian boxer

has revealed that they did tests and confirmed once again, the chromosomal and the testosterone levels were those of males. So I think collectively there's enough there to say with a very high degree of confidence that they are in fact male biologically, but they've been cleared to compete as women because of what basically is a governance dispute around the sport of boxing in the Olympic games. Right. Because other sports that competed at the Olympics did not allow biological males to compete against women because the Olympics said it would be up to the individual sports. But through this weird series of events, the IOC took over women's boxing directly and eliminated the head governing body. And they say it's because they're corrupt and some connection to Russia. Yeah, so this is where the misinformation accelerates, right? So

to understand this, you have to go back a few years. The sporting landscape at the moment is more fragmented with regards to eligibility than it ever has been, because up until about 2019, all sports were compliant with what was the IOC policy at that time. And what that policy said is that provided you lowered your testosterone levels and you declared your gender identity to be that of a woman, you were allowed to participate in women's sport. And I think starting in about 2019-20, rugby was one of the sports, athletics, cycling, swimming, there's this realization that

that policy didn't work. It simply does not achieve fairness and safety for females by allowing biological males into women's sporting spaces. And so one by one, different sports have changed their policy. But the IOC hasn't fulfilled its role as a leadership organization and given the world clear direction. And so instead, it's almost told the member unions, the sports, that you're on your own now. You need to go and figure out how you're going to deal with this problem, which the International Boxing Association duly did. But now we get to the Olympic Games, and it's not unique to Paris because the same thing happened in Tokyo. There've been so many scandals over the years in Olympic boxing with respects to judging of fights and corruption and judges taking payments and bribes and so forth,

that the International Olympic Committee had stepped in and said, we're going to take over boxing because of the judging issue. But it's now spilled over. And the implication of that is that the IOC also run eligibility. So the IBA, which runs the world championships, had one policy and disqualified these two fighters. And the IOC has a different policy, and therefore they're allowed to fight. And that's why it's a mess, because you effectively have a fragmented, confusing landscape in which different bodies assess eligibility in different ways. Yeah, right. Exactly. And that's why you have male bodies fighting in the boxing, but barred in the swimming and other sports because the IOC is directly overseeing boxing and refused to acknowledge these tests that were done at the world's competition in

boxing the year before. Um, and that a word on those tests. So the summer suggesting you can't trust those tests again, because there's something having to do with that. Maybe a Russian is associated with IBA and there was a Russian boxer. I don't, and we've heard all sorts of rumors, but I will tell you, I have no doubt in my mind that they did text test X, Y, when they were tested both of these boxers at the world. And one of the things that led me to reach that conclusion was not only that doctor who was on the board of the IBA saying it on camera this past weekend, but there's a sports journalist who you may know, Alan Abramson, who did 17 years with the LA Times, who was with NBC sports, respected journalist. He's now got his own independent media company. And, uh, I'll make sure that I mention what it is so that people know.

Let's see. Hold on. He's actually a professor at USC, and he's the founder of Three Wire Sports, which he's run since 2010. He's the premier Olympics-focused media outlet. And this guy was the only journalist to lay eyes on the tests that the boxers took, we interviewed him. This is brand new, the first time we're airing it. And here is what he said. The New Delhi test is three pages long. And the first part of it, like any test you would have if you went to the doctor, says who you are, what time the blood sample was collected, so on and so forth.

I believe, if memory serves, the blood samples were collected literally within a minute of each other. And then it says result. It says abnormal. And then it says evidence of male karyotype. So a karyotype refers to your chromosomal evidence. And here says male with a capital M male. So he saw it with his own eyes, Ross. He has absolutely no reason to lie.

He's a respected journalist. And in my mind, there's absolutely no question that they did take this test, which the two boxers were later forced to sign, not forced, but asked to sign acknowledgement of. And he saw it too. They're X, Y. Yeah. And that's one of the telling points. If the only thing we had to base all our conversation on was the word of one person at the IBA saying something and then it becomes an argument of he said versus she said or he said and it's a different matter but I think that's a telling statement from Abramson I read the articles that he wrote from Paris there was a little bit more to it you could track back the correspondence between the

IBA and the IOC that dates back to the first time these boxes were tested in 2022. There was a letter that was sent before the IBA was moved aside for Paris in early June. And you could see that they were trying to communicate this to the IOC. So you would have to go to some pretty great lengths to argue that they were creating this all as a ruse or some sort of fallacy around these boxes as part of some Russian plot, when in fact the more simple conclusion, I think, is that they did in fact test. And we could discuss and critique the way the IBA go about doing that test. How did they identify the boxes? Did they target test on the basis of allegation? I think there are sports governance matters that need to be addressed, but I would see that almost as a parallel discussion. I think that

the point that matters really for the sake of women's sport is, was the test result legitimate? Yes or no? And then what is the sport going to do about that? Because once you've identified male competitors in a sport, then the sport has to say, well, what do we do with that? Boxing chose one way, the ISD has chosen another. The response by some has been, this is somehow bigoted because if these two boxers have DSDs, differences in sexual developments, we used to call it intersex. At one point, we used the word hermaphrodite. It's different from trans, where you're just a biological man who thinks he's a woman and starts acting like a woman and starts having surgeries to try to make himself resemble a woman more. This is different. But they say if they have these DSDs and they're born with

female genitalia, but inside they're male, inside they have testes, and you can explain some of this because I've heard you explain it very well, then they're women. Then there's, what's the problem? Like if they're not faking, you know, thinking that they're women or having been raised as girls, what's the problem? Well, the problem is that from the perspective of sport is that during puberty they are going to undergo all the same development that males do as a consequence of having testes that produce testosterone that can be used by the body and it's it's one of those things where sport doesn't ever really need to take on this issue of defined sex and is sex binary. I think it can and it should.

It shouldn't shy away from that. But it actually doesn't need to because for the purposes of a sports conversation, really all you have to understand not benefit from testosterone's role in the body to be able to compete against one another. And in order for that to happen, the boundary between them has to be closed and it has to be defended. So that boundary is basically, has this individual gone through life with the ability to use and benefit in the context of sport from testosterone's job. Now, everyone watching this will have heard of testosterone. It is the male hormone. It's not the only one, but it's the main one. And at puberty, not uniquely, but particularly at puberty, males are suddenly flooded with this male-making hormone. It's called an androgen. The word

literally means andro-male-gen-making. And we are flooded with it. And all the changes you see in boys at puberty, the increased muscle mass, the growth in height, the change in the shape of the skeleton, the strength, the power output that they can generate. Those are all attributable to the role of testosterone. And that's what female sport has to keep out. So in the case of DSDs, absolutely, you can trace back where the difference happened and how the external genitalia didn't develop in the typical male way. And as a consequence, that baby is born and the midwife or whoever it is says, well, this is a girl. That's not a biologically accurate identification because later in life, that person will go through male puberty because they are XY with testes and testosterone. So biologically, they are the same. They're male and they experience all the same

benefits from the perspective of sport that males do. So if you have XY, do you develop any female internal organs? Do you develop breasts in puberty? Female internal organs, no, in most cases. Now there are some conditions where you can be XY, but then you don't have the gene that normally is found on the Y chromosome and is, think of it almost as the master switch that drives male development. If that gene is found on the Y chromosome and is, think of it almost as the master switch that drives male development. If that gene is absent or malfunctioning, there's a condition called Swyer syndrome, for instance,

where you then don't produce testes. And as a consequence, you don't have testosterone or another hormone, which is called anti-malarian hormone. This is getting into the biological weeds in a way. But I think from the perspective of this conversation, if you are XY and you have the signal that creates testes as opposed to ovaries and therefore testosterone, then you also shut down the development of the female reproductive system. And that includes internal and external. In the case of DSDs, depending on which one it is, you don't develop the external genitalia. And it's interesting, if you go back to the Castus and Mania case,

World Athletics argued that at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. And one of the sticking points was, by all means, you can have this argument that they've got external female genitalia, but it's absolutely irrelevant to sport. What matters for the purposes of sport is whether you can use testosterone for the performance advantages it gives you later in life. Well, how do we know which one these two boxers have? We don't. And that's because it's their right as it's their medical information. So they can choose to disclose it or not. If you go back to even with Castasomenia and all the DSDs that track and field have dealt with, they very rarely do.

So I don't expect that we ever will. And that's one of the realities of the situation. And that's why I think one needs to be a little bit cautious because there are some DSDs where you don't get full male development. And in some cases, you don't get any because you can have one of the conditions is called complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. So you are completely insensitive to androgens like testosterone. So you can have male testes with testosterone levels of a typical male, but you can't use

it at all. And in the World Athletics case, for instance, they made a specific allowance that that condition is not part of what they regulate. So they would allow someone with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome to participate because there is no advantage, even though they are biologically male. And I think as a broader point, this is one of the reasons why a conversation and a focus on a specific individual or case makes it more difficult, I think, to argue the principle around women's sports

and how it should remain closed to male advantage because you can very quickly spiral into these very nuanced details and find exceptions and you start talking about edge cases and rare conditions that actually obscure the reality, which is that the IOC, as it stands, believe that female is what's written in your passport. And so the president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, can tell the world's media that he has no way of identifying who's a man and who's a woman. And it's an unsolvable

problem for them because they've chosen to value identity above biology. And all the preoccupation with one individual here and there probably allows them to do that. Yeah, that's literally what he said. I mean, we've played the soundbites, but he said chromosomes don't determine sex. That's just not true anymore that, you know, you can have X, Y and be female. You can have, I guess, XX and be male. And that what's important here is that they listed themselves as female in their passports. Exactly. And he knows that trans woman can also be listed as female in their the passport. He knows that the condition that was documented to have occurred in the athletes in track and field is 5-ARD, where you can use testosterone in the completely normal, typical way. And so there's a full male advantage.

That was the conclusion from the court case around Castasomenia. And he knows that. And it comes back to what I mentioned to you earlier there, that in about 2020-21, the sports landscape fragmented and the IOC went in a direction where it chose inclusion of trans women and DSD athletes over fairness and safety for female athletes. And it was a conscious choice. I mean, you could go back to the conversations that World Rugby had.

You can talk about how athletics and swimming and cycling framed it. They all realized that you cannot have all three. So if you think from the perspective of sport is inclusion into the category of your choice. So in other words, I'm male, but I identify as a woman and I want to play women's football or women's soccer for the American audience, women's basketball. Safety for the participants and fairness. And what World Rugby recognized, for instance, is that you couldn't balance those. And so you had to instead prioritize them. And the priority was safety first, fairness second, and inclusion cannot be achieved.

And so therefore, trans women cannot play women's rugby. And I think the same decision was reached by swimming, was reached by athletics, and it was reached by cycling. So the president of the IOC knows that. Those are three of the big sports at the Olympic Games. And so they've had this conversation. And when he sat and told everyone that no one has offered a solution and that they are unable to do it, that's, it's simply dishonest. Is it a blood test that they have the players take to figure out

what the chromosomes are? Yeah. You don't even necessarily need blood because you can just take a scraping from the inside of the cheek and you can examine those cells because there's a specific structure called the bar body, which only exists if you have two X chromosomes. So if you took a scrape from the inside of my cheek, you wouldn't see it, whereas the inside of yours, you would. And so if mine was absent, I would call a test negative, whereas you'd test positive. And so that could be used as a first screen, for instance, if they wish to go in that direction. That's what used to happen. In the 1968 Olympics, I believe it was, was the first time that they used that test. Prior to that, sex verification or gender testing, if you wish, used to involve having all the female participants

parade in front of a panel of judges nude. And you can imagine how that was perceived. Right. Exactly. How do you factor in on the subject of whether the testosterone is getting used by the person with DSD or it's not getting used because there's a blocker? There's the old fashioned process of eyes. And I mean, you look at these boxers, in particular, the one from Algeria, and this person looks like a man. They have the height

advantage. They have the physicality of it. There are no breasts. And then we have the testimonial of several women who have boxed against Khalif saying it was unsafe. I did not want to box against him further. And I'm, I feel lucky to be alive, said one. Another one came out, the one who the Italian who said it was just too strong. This is not nothing I was used to. Um, we've seen repeatedly women say there was something different about him and our own eyes suggest there was something different about Khalif. How does that factor in? Yeah, I think from a policy governance perspective, you would want to be careful to make that the basis for a decision, obviously, because even though it's probably very accurate, it may be 90%, in which case 10% of the time it's not. And then you run the risk of accusing someone when they are actually not male.

And so that becomes a problem for the sport. And one of the issues I think that track and field faced was the implementation of the policy around DSD athletes did over-rely on the subject of assessment. And I by no means want to diminish that because I think in particular, and I've learned this in the last five or six years in this discussion, is that women are quite good at making that assessment because they almost have to a lot of the time. And you have to respect that. But I think there's a better way to do it where you don't ever need to even rely on subjectivity because if you can do an initial screen that identifies an XY, or as I was saying, there's now even more sophisticated genetic tests that can identify the specific gene, that SRY, that sex determining region gene. And if you find that, then the person is male. And then you can

follow that screen up with a series of diagnostic tests that are completely non-invasive and will give you an understanding of the diagnosis without ever needing to pass judgment. Because you've probably seen the moment there's a subjective assessment, it opens up all kinds of doors for, A, you're going to do the nude parade and you're going to judge women based on their genitalia, which no one is proposing. Or it opens up allegations that women who don't conform to some Western gender stereotype are going to be judged and targeted. That's what the papers are arguing right now, that that's what's happening to these

two boxers, that because they don't conform to a, you know, I don't know, 1950s stereotype of appearance on women. That's why we're saying that they're male. And it's been very frustrating for me because that's not it at all. We're saying they're male because they tested X, Y, and there are credible, many people who say they've seen the tests. And to your point, they didn't appeal them. If I, if I were set, if I were told I can't compete in the gold medal round, like happened to Khalif at the world, because I tested X, Y, I would have 10 different testing companies test me again and say, please promise me you'll make the tests public because I know I'm female. I know I'm XX. And I certainly would see the appeal through. And if I happen to have a DSD that prohibited me from getting the male advantage, like all that testosterone was blocked in me, same. I'd say, let's do the tests. I'm telling you,

I don't have any of those advantages because I know what my puberty was like. I know what my development was like. The fact that these two just gave it up as soon as the test came up, came up, says a lot. I think so. And that first screen you mentioned, that's, that's within hours. So this is not let's test and wait a week or two. You'd know within hours, if not less, that you were XX or XY. So if that's the claim, then it's so easily provable. And so I think the absence of that proof and the absence of those appeals is probably quite telling. I agree with you on that. What's going to happen next? Because now the Olympics are coming to LA in 2028. Now we're back on American territory. We are, I mean, certainly California, but

I know they don't oversee it, all of this. but what's going to happen with the IOC in this issue now that it's become so prominent? And frankly, they're the ones who put these two boxers in this terrible position. I've heard you say this too, but it's really the IOC's fault for putting these two boxers in the ring. So are we going to expect much more of this in four years? I'm afraid so. I wish I could say that this was a turning point. I think it's a low point, and I'd hope that it would also be a turning point. But when it happened in Paris, I remember thinking, will they now at some point start to retreat from their, this is they being the IOC, from the framework that they'd created, which prioritized inclusion and held that there should never be a presumption of advantage unless it was a non-science and

nonsense document that they produced. But what happened instead is that they seemed to dig their heels in and double down on it. So I've very much lost confidence that the IOC are going to back down from the position that they've created for themselves. So I could see one of two things happening. One is that the sports themselves, because remember, they've been given the mandate by the IOC to look after their own house. And so they may look at this and say, we don't want this controversy and we're going to actually put in place some kind of robust policies. And we're going to imitate, for instance, athletics and cycling and swimming, which again, are the three bigger sports at the Olympic Games. So there's a fair degree of safety in numbers.

They can almost hide behind the three of the four maybe big Olympic sports. So that's one option. The second one that may happen is that women boxers may consider legal action because this situation that developed in Paris, whether it was in Paris or in the future, was reasonably foreseeable. There's no doubt in my mind about that because when the sports bodies were assessing this years ago, it was quite clear that there was a fairness issue, even if you lower the testosterone, which is what the policy used to say. And so if you have a fairness issue in sports like swimming and cycling, then the moment it's

applied in a sport where there's combat and physical contact like rugby, this is the calculus we made, or boxing, now you've got a safety issue. And I think there's a case that could be made to say that we have now been exposed, we the female boxers have been exposed to a risk that we didn't consent to and which could have reasonably been foreseen. And that's the kind of thing that may now happen. I don't know whether anyone will have the appetite. I know how difficult it is for women to take those cases forward, but that's the sort of thing that may be necessary if this situation is going to turn.

Yeah, they need to. I mean, you've been talking about how this is not about testosterone. Even lowering your testosterone is not going to eliminate your male advantage. If you are X, Y, if you're male, it's just not going to eliminate your male advantage. Uh, if you are X, Y, if you're, if you're male, it's just not going to, you've gone through male puberty and you'll have all those advantages, no matter what happens to your testosterone. I will say now, um, Khalif has filed a lawsuit, not a lawsuit. He's got, they've gotten the French authorities to look into whether Elon Musk and JK Rowling committed some anti-bullying or harassment like criminal offense by objecting to their presence in the boxing, the women's boxing,

that's not going to go well for Khalif. I realize this is like the French and their laws are different, but if their laws look anything like ours, they're going to be allowed to actually demand the testing. They're going to be allowed to demand to know what the truth is. And my prediction is as soon as they get that, the case will go away because these two obviously don't want that testing to take place. And there's a reason for that. Ross, thank you for being honest on this and being a voice of reason in the wilderness. It's great to talk to you.

Thanks, Megan. I appreciate the chance to talk to you. Thanks so much. All the best. Again, that's Ross Tucker. He's co-host of the podcast, The Science of Sport. And they had a lot of great shows during the Olympics analyzing all the sports. So this was just one of the many, but it was someplace where I learned a ton and set me down a whole lane of learning on the internet, which is just fascinating. This is

deeply unfair. That's my takeaway on this. Deeply unfair. And this needs to be stopped before more women get hurt. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. Thank you.