FFS Friday: The Female Athletes Making the XX Symbol at the Olympics

August 9, 2024

FFS (Female Free Speech) Friday honors women and girls who are speaking out about the harms that “gender identity” poses to women and girls as a sex class. FFS Friday posts are free and shareable. If you would like access to content that delves deeper into the movement to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls and to stop the abolition of sex, please consider a paid subscription.

This week’s FFS Friday honors the female athletes making the XX symbol at the Olympics.

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Note: I don’t know who deserves credit for this photo compilation; it’s not me. Someone told me it was Andreia Nobre, author of The Grumpy Guide to Radical Feminism and Women's Sex-Based Oppression. She’s pictured in the lower right quadrant and can be found on X at @Andreia_O_Nobre. But she tells me she doesn’t deserve credit for it either; she just copied what someone else had done and added her own photo to the compilation. So if whoever deserves credit wants to come forward, I’m happy to credit you!

This story concerns the fact that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is permitting two male athletes to compete in women’s boxing. I wrote about the situation after Reduxx broke the story on July 27 in a post titled, “Male Violence Against Women is Now an Olympic Sport.”

Since then, the two male athletes, Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan, have won every single match in which they have competed. Both have now advanced to the finals in their weight classes (Khelif is welterweight and Yu-Ting is featherweight). Both are guaranteed to medial in their weight classes, regardless of what happens in the finals—one later today, one tomorrow. There has been some speculation about whether either or both of them have differences of sexual development (DSD); what is not in question is that both have XY chromosomes. For those unfamiliar with DSD, I highly recommend this article by Doriane Coleman, a professor at Duke Law school and a specialist in interdisciplinary scholarship focused on women, children, medicine, sports, and law. Also extremely helpful for understanding what is going on here is this interview with Dr. Emma Hilton and Andrew Gold. Dr. Hilton is a developmental biologist and is very informed on the topic. 

But this piece is not about those male athletes; it’s about the female athletes speaking out in protest, with their bodies.

It started on August 4, when Bulgarian boxer Svetlana Staneva made a XX symbol with her fingers after being beaten by Yu-Ting.

Readers can watch the inspiring 5-second clip of her doing it here.

Turkish boxer Esra Yildiz Kahraman did the same thing on August 7, after Yu-Ting beat her in the semi-final.

That clip is here. (During that fight, Yu-Ting deliberately used an illegal punch to the back of the head on Kahraman, who had her throat on the rope. As UK feminist Jean Hatchet says, he could have killed or paralyzed her).

Since then, the gesture has caught fire. 

A female runner did it before a track event.

Watch here.

Later that same day, the company XX-XY Athletics called on women to take videos of themselves and their daughters and send the clips to them to compile into a commercial.

Many women responded, and the entire thread is awe-inspiring. I submitted a short video of myself making the symbol while wearing my t-shirt from having completed the 2013 New York City marathon. We’ll see if I make the cut in the commercial!

Big thanks is also due to @moleatthedoor for this excellent image capturing the essence of this powerful movement:

Mole (affectionately known as “moley” on TERF Twitter) is best known for snarky memes that mock the likes of Pink News, the Good Law Project, and other gender fanatics in the UK. But this one is serious.

A lot of people think these female athletes should simply refuse to compete against the men. I disagree with that argument. These women have worked hard for their entire lives for a shot at Olympic gold. It’s hardly their fault that the IOC hates women so much they’ll allow men to beat them up in the ring, for sport and entertainment.

These female athletes making the XX symbol on camera during the Olympics are making a serious show of female solidarity and an important statement about the importance of female-only sports. I celebrate them.

So, to the female athletes making the XX symbol at the Olympics, today’s FFS Friday is for you.