Despite what you have been told by the International Olympic Committee and its backers, the Olympic women’s boxing scandal is not complex. It’s very simple.

If, as I am, you are horrified at even the possibility of a woman being punched in the face by a male boxer, the answer is to operate women’s sport of the basis of sex. If you are worried about the scrutiny on the Algerian and Taiwanese boxers, the answer is also to operate women’s sport on the basis of sex. Both issues would be resolved by clear single-sex rules, properly enforced.

The Olympic boxing scandal is the result of the IOC’s absolute refusal to guarantee single-sex sport for women. It's a scandal which demonstrates exactly why women including myself have been campaigning for years to keep female sport single-sex.

Because of the IOCs failure to do so, it has no policies in place to investigate allegations or evidence presented to it of male competitors in a women’s event.

Women’s sport exists because males and females have different physical capabilities. Of all the performance gaps between males and females in sport, punching power ranks at number one. Researchers have found that males can punch 2.6 times harder than females. This makes boxing one of the most obvious examples of a sport where it is not only unfair, but extremely dangerous, for females to be forced to compete against a male competitor.

Instead of making the sensible call that the governing bodies of swimming, athletics, rugby and cycling did, to base eligibility for the women’s category on biological sex, the IOC has adopted an activist position that anyone identifying as a woman should be eligible for women’s sport. As a result, it refuses to countenance undertaking sex screening – a simple cheek swab – to ensure controversies like this don’t occur in women’s sport. 

Instead, the IOC insists the most rigorous eligibility screening they can undertake is checking passports – an obviously untenable criteria when Australia and many other countries allow biological sex to be replaced by a preferred gender identity on official documents. And in relation to people with DSDs – relevant to the two boxers at the centre of this scandal – it is not uncommon for males to be misidentified as female at birth because DSDs can cause differences in how genitals develop.

By refusing to operate women's sport on the basis of sex, the IOC has backed itself into a corner. Its official position is not that the two boxers in question are of the female sex, but that it has no idea what sex they are, doesn’t want to know, and nobody else should ask either.

It’s a simple and common sense ask to expect that women and girls are entitled to play sport in their own sex category. But the IOC, like most of Australia’s major sporting bodies, have failed to put fairness and safety for women at the forefront of their decision making. The result is the dangerous farce we have seen in Paris this week.

Originally published in the Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun.