Author J.K. Rowling has fallen silent on her usually busy X (formerly Twitter) feed, after Olympic gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif filed a legal complaint in France for alleged cyber harassment over statements regarding her gender.
On August 9, lawyers for Khelif filed a lawsuit with a special unit of the public prosecutor’s office in Paris, stemming from false statements that spread online about her gender after the Algerian boxer defeated Italy’s Angela Carini in her first fight of the 2024 Olympic Games. Carini pulled out 46 seconds into the bout and told reporters afterwards that she had “never felt a punch like this.”
You can take any other boxer, I specifically chose black and “masculine” athletes as examples to show that even race/body type alone was not the determining factor. In these Olympic games you have just Imane’s example: how can you call this a trend or make general statements with one case (not even the Taiwanese boxer got attention)?
Men don’t have a category to which they are wrongfully assigned when they win sports. This is also because men are the higher category in most sports (i.e., higher performers), so it is a parallel that simply doesn’t make sense. So yes. It is a worse statistics because men who are victim of gender stereotypes are generally not the ones who excel at sports (men who are called women in general break the masculine stereotype of the muscular and competitive guy - and these unsurprisingly are not characteristics common in elite athletes).
But this was not your claim either. Your claim is that downplaying is done by specifically saying those women are men. The whole point here is on the cause, not the existence of the phenomenon in general.
You are thinking it is a worse statistics because you are still too fixated on the particular example that I gave which that she was called a man. We are currently discussing the ridiculous ways in which women’s success are generally downplayed more than men and men are embraced more than women. That is because you think the cause ia gender sterotypes where as I think gender stereotypes is a particular tool/excuae used in this particular case whose cause is unwillingness of particular types of people to accept women’s success. And then you will again say they have embraced a lot of women’s success in this particular event and we will circle back to me talking about incident rates and other historical examples and how compared to men incident rate of downplaying the success will be much higher so perhaps we can stop here, I dont know.
If you think the point of my original statement is really about “successful women being called men all the time” then you have really missed the point. It just points out to a particular way in which a woman’s success was downplayed in this particular event vs all the other men’s were embraced. Many other women’s were embraced as well, however the impact of downplaying this woman’s success was profound.
How did I miss the point? To me it seems clear that what you were saying that women can’t be successful, if they are, they are considered men (because men have success).
I am not fixating on the example, sorry, it’s the whole thesis you condensed into this sentence that I am fixated on. Women’s success can be downplayed in many ways. Either way, in sports in 2024 I don’t think this is as much of a problem as it is - say - in business. Most importantly, I think this case had not much to do with downplaying Imane’s success (the whole case started waaaay earlier she won the medal), but simply with other factors.