Plenty of the debates about transgender “rights” during the last decade have hinged on the theoretical, the exceptional, and the personal. But in Paris, the most practical, immediate, and apolitical circumstance is making the case against the notion of gender as a subjective identity. Two boxers, Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, have been allowed to compete in women’s boxing at the 2024 Olympics despite both being disqualified from previous competitions over multiple rounds of laboratory testing confirming the two have XY, or male, chromosomes.

While the boxing brouhaha first attracted online critics of the overreach of transgender rights superseding that of women, watching Khelif and Yu-Ting clobber the heck out of biological women had nothing to do with the politics of gender identity and everything to do with an XY person, one who may be intersex but likely went through some chemical and physical process of male puberty, beat up women with the standard XX chromosomes. For some odd reason, stripping the situation of the political context made some ostensible conservatives less angry about the situation, rather than more so.