I’ve been paying attention to gender issues for quite some time, so when J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter series had enriched my life since high school, was put under the media spotlight for her controversial tweets on transgender and biological-female rights, I started trying to understand the overall situation. After listening to her thorough interview on the podcast The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling by The Free Press and articles regarding on the hidden danger of allowing tansgender women into female facilities, of puberty blocking, etc., I thought that most of her concerns on the possibility of women safety deprived by the intention of few transgender women(with real records happened), and on children suffering from gender identities were quite fair and worth discussing. The recent news on the gender tests on two of the boxing competitors, one of them from Taiwan, in the Paris Olympics, however, to me raised another wider and deeper discussion on gender equality.
I saw J.K. Rowling’s tweet of July 31st, of “What will it take to end this insanity? A female boxer left with life-altering injuries? A female boxer killed?" linking to the article by The Guardian, named “Boxers who failed gender tests at world championships cleared to compete at Olympics." In the article, the author mentioned Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan being allowed to participate in the boxing game by IOC, despite the fact that they both failed the gender eligibility tests from last year’s world championships. It is worth speculating the standards of gender tests(including Differences of Sexual Development) from different sports committees, but I think Lin Yu-ting’s case was not about “transgender female trying to get advantage in the woman’s boxing game," since she is a biological female, which was declared by herself before and was confirmed by her identity information.
The inconsistency of Lin’s gender tests might be caused by the testing methods, her natural body factors, or the medicine intake by athletes. We have already known that some people are born female with higher-than-normal testosterone or with incomplete male organ, and the genetic factor of XY chromosome does not determine the biological gender in certain cases, suggested by Science magazine in 2018. We’re not sure what exactly caused the test failure in the world championships, since the report didn’t go into detail. Nowaways most of the sports measure testosterone level to ensure the fairness of the game. From here I ask myself: Is it fair to cancel the qualification of certain female players who are born with higher testosterone levels? If a female was born with an immatured male organ inside her body, was it right to remove it to be allowed in female sports games, despite her will? It is difficult to answer to be honest.
The criticism from J.K. Rowling and other boxing athletes about the fairness of the game and safety of the players gave me a wider sense of gender equality. But I think they also remind us not to judge an incident based on incomplete information.(not to say those who judge a person based on his/her appearance). That’s been a challenging test for us human.
River on Baltic Sea 
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