A Kamala Harris victory in the U.S. presidential election would spell the end of female competitive sport, according to a former NCAA athlete.
Kaitlynn Wheeler, a women’s rights campaigner and former top college swimmer, told Fox News that a “vote for Harris is a vote for the end of women’s sport”.
Wheeler was commenting on the controversy surrounding the Paris 2024 Olympics after Angela Carini, a female Italian boxer, yesterday abandoned her fight after just 46 seconds against an opponent who had previously failed a gender eligibility test.
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Wheeler, an ambassador at the Riley Gaines Center, told Fox News that Imane Khelif’s victory at the Olympics was “not surprising.”
“This is the exact same thing you see happening in our own country.
“Take a long, good look. This is what the Biden-Harris administration sees as the future,” Wheeler added.
“A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for this exact thing. It’s a vote for the erasure of women in women’s sports,” she said.
Newsweek has reached out to Harris’ team via email for comment.
The incident has sparked controversy as Carini fell to her knees in the middle of the ring and said: “This isn’t fair,” according to the BBC.
Khelif is one of two female boxers who had previously been banned for failing gender eligibility and testosterone tests. The other was Lin Yu‑ting of Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), who is due to fight Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova on Friday.
The pair were barred from competing in the 2023 women’s World Championships by the International Amateur Boxing association (IBA). Its president, Umar Kremlev, said at the time that their DNA tests had “proved they had XY chromosomes (the male chromosomes) and were thus excluded,” The Guardian reported.
During 2023 Pride event Harris criticised Republicans behind state laws that impact transgender health care and restrict sports participation and bathroom use, calling the lawmakers “extremists who are trying to do an abrupt, backward march.”
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden-Harris nominee, has previously refused to answer Senator Marsha Blackburn‘s (R-Tenn.) request to define “woman” during her confirmation hearing.
The National Institutes of Health has a policy requiring that sex be considered as a biological variable in research studies because of differences between men and women, such as how they metabolize and react to drugs.
The agency’s guidelines specify that “Sex is a biological variable defined by characteristics encoded in DNA, such as reproductive organs and other physiological and functional characteristics.”