The most stirring sporting gesture of 2024 arose not in victory but defeat. With hands in the air, index fingers crossed and a double-tap motion, the “XX” protest was born. Bulgarian boxer Svetlana Staneva was the first to perform it at the Paris Olympics, anguished at losing to an opponent whose sex tests had, according to the sport’s world governing body, uncovered the presence of XY chromosomes, the male pattern. Esra Yildiz Kahraman, a Turkish fighter dealt the same one-sided beating by Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, followed suit 48 hours later. “I am XX,” their message read. “I am a woman.”

It was a reality that their rule makers had forgotten to respect. Years of acquiescing to ideologues had brought us to this point, where the International Olympic Committee casually allowed women to be smashed in the face by fighters whom they could not even guarantee were genetically female. The functionaries in Lausanne had fair warning. In 2022 and 2023, both Lin and Algeria’s Imane Khelif had been deemed ineligible for the female category at global championships, with the World Boxing Association declaring they had “competitive advantages”. But the IOC, in hock to a fallacy that womanhood was reducible to a passport detail, let it slide.

The ensuing outrage was the scandal that sport needed to have. At last, the consequences of a craven surrender to the cult of self-ID were fleshed out for a worldwide audience, with female athletes suffering not just rank unfairness but disregard for their safety in the most perilous sport of all. If you were in any doubt as to where a blurring of the boundaries between XX and XY could lead in boxing, Khelif and Lin won every round of every fight en route to Olympic golds.