What would you do if you had the body of a member of the opposite sex for a day? Back in the nineties, this was a classic lad mag question, the most common response to which would be “spend it feeling my tits”. I don’t recall many answers from women, but I’d imagine they’d have been more complex. Having a penis would be interesting, I’m sure, but what about having male physical strength?

In the wake of the current row over women’s boxing in the Olympics, I’ve been thinking about this question more and more. I would love to have the punching power, not of a professional male boxer, but even just a man of my own age and fitness level. There’s no one I’d particularly want to hit (much). Still, I’d love to know what it felt like, knowing that potential was there. There are times in my life when it would have come in so useful.  

Greater male upper body strength is a sensitive topic for feminists. Just mentioning it can feel like an admission of female physical inferiority, a confirmation of gender stereotypes, or a needless revealing of one’s own hand (why let the enemy know he has the advantage?). It is of course none of these things. Men are better at running and punching people; women are better at creating new humans and surviving to a very old age. None of this says anything much about our personalities, intellects or personal desires. Nevertheless, sometimes the fact that it is far easier for members of one sex to kill members of the other with their bare hands is socially and politically salient. 

Right now there are two athletes in the female boxing category in Paris who are alleged to have XY chromosomes. Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting were both disqualified from world championships last year for failing sex eligibility tests (neither pursued an appeal). Rather than insist that both have gone through the same puberty as those of us with XX chromosomes, the International Olympic Committee is defending their current inclusion on the somewhat flimsy grounds that their passports say “female”. 

Whatever the truth, I would argue that this debate has exposed something deeply disturbing about attitudes towards male strength and female susceptibility to violence. Namely, far too many people seem to believe — or at least pretend to believe — that female physical vulnerability is a posture, a choice, a prissy performance of femininity. Even if it transpires that Khelif and Yu-ting do not have DSDs and are biologically female, the very fact that this view is so widespread should worry us all. 

Many of those seeking to defend Khelif and Yu-ting’s inclusion have wilfully conflated concerns about female safety with prejudice regarding the boxers’ supposedly unfeminine appearance. The Labour MP Zarah Sultana has declared they are under attack for not conforming “to conventional standards of femininity”. In an article for the Independent, Kat Brown claims that being 6’1” and having her “dad’s jawline” would put her in the firing line, too, due to not being “your classic example of 1950s femininity”. These are ludicrous arguments. Not one female boxer can be described as gender conforming (the clue is in “being a female boxer”, something the Olympics did not even allow until 2012). The red flag isn’t hair length or jawlines; it’s those failed eligibility tests. 

It’s about the myth that male people don’t physically dominate female people because they can but because we let them

These women’s arguments do more than trivialise a serious issue, though. They insult every single female victim of male violence who has felt shame at not being able to fight back, not because they were too feminine, but because they were female and their attacker was male. It becomes about so much more than two individuals, or boxing in general. It’s about the myth that male people don’t physically dominate female people because they can but because we let them — because it is in our natures. 

The stranger who attacked me was no prime specimen of masculinity. Even so, I couldn’t move his arms — his basic bog-standard arms, stuck to his basic, non-athletic body — off me at all. This is not because I was too busy “conforming to standards of femininity”. The fact that I had half the upper body strength of my assailant is not evidence of some secret desire to join a Facebook tradwife group. That I am writing about it now is not some performance of feminine victimhood, aimed winning male protectors. There is nothing “feminine” or “conforming” about noting the strength disparity between male people and female people. Once you start claiming there is, you are inches away from full-on victim blaming. 

Femininity, as feminists have long noted, is constructed around ideas of weakness, masochism, willful submission. While we see this as the problem with femininity, others – from conservative patriarchs to porn-obsessed progressives – don’t tend to see it as a problem at all. Behaviours which women perform because they do not feel safe – submitting, weeping, pleading, wheedling — tend to be recast as evidence of our “true” feminine natures (witness, for instance, men lining up to mock Italian boxer Angela Carini, who abandoned her fight with Khelif after 46 seconds). When I realised I couldn’t push my attacker off me, I became what even I would consider a pathetic specimen: high-pitched, desperate, snivelling. So feminine! There on the ground, weaponising my tears! I do feel angry with myself, because I would have loved to punch him in the face instead. Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I just move my stupid arms? I know the biological reason for this, but even I drift towards the “feminine” one, especially when I look at the arguments of Sultana and Brown (who presumably wouldn’t have been so “1950s feminine” as me). 

Whether or not Khelif has XY chromosomes, it is not whiny or manipulative to note that it matters — in the boxing ring, on the street, in enclosed spaces — whether or not someone does. This is an issue that goes way beyond sports. Women and girls are not subjected to an unprecedented degree of male violence because we are too busy policing the boundaries of heteronormative patriarchy to fight back. We don’t identify with being weak; we don’t love it really. There is no connection — none whatsoever — between not being able to hit as hard as a man and being gender conforming. 

Part of the problem, I think. is that there is nowhere to locate male physical advantage on all of the privilege hierarchies and charts so beloved of the modern progressive. That a socially marginalised male person can still smash in the brains of the most privileged female person has become unsayable — or maybe we have decided the latter deserves it. While women are permitted to complain of toxic masculinity, we are ridiculed when we point out that all male people — regardless of background or identity — can hurt us. It doesn’t matter how nice they are. It doesn’t matter how they identify. It doesn’t matter whether they want to have this capacity. They have it all the same. 

And I, for one, would love to have it too, but I don’t and never will. It is stupid to pretend this isn’t the case. What’s more, it doesn’t mean women can’t prove how exceptional and remarkable our bodies are in their own right. Female boxing categories have offered one means of demonstrating that we are in fact willing to hit back, and hit hard, when we can. To portray biologically female boxers as “delicate little flowers” for wanting fairness is utterly absurd. There’s nothing weaker than giving in to lies about who we are.