After USA Boxing announced that a male fighter who claims to be a woman would be eligible to fight in the female category, a former female competitive boxer and Olympic-level boxing coach called the decision “deadly.”
At the beginning of January, USA Boxing released its 2024 rulebook, in which the organization stated transgender women over 18 could fight women if they had undergone genital reassignment surgery and had submitted quarterly hormone tests for four years after the surgery. The guidelines defined normal ranges of testosterone for women as less than 3.1 nanomoles per liter and asserted that transgender women show their testosterone serum level rested below five nanomoles per liter for four years before their first competition.
“When I heard that they were allowing transgender people to box women, I could not believe it,” Cary Williams told Fox News Digital. “I know it’s been going on in a lot of sports, which is not right on any level. But when you’re talking about people punching each other in the face, in the body, in the head, I really was surprised.”
Speaking of her experience as a 30-year-old fighter fighting a 16-year-old male, Williams continued:
I was preparing for a fight, and, at the time, there were a lot of teenage boys on the boxing team at the gym. So, I sparred with a lot of teenage boys, and there weren’t as many women boxing in the sport around that time. So, I was sparring with a 16-year-old boy, and you know they all still went light on me. Even though they were boys, they still went light on me, and he just threw, he flicked in a body shot and fractured one of my ribs. It was hairline but hurt like hell, and he didn’t mean to do it. I just thought, wow, like the power behind a teenage boy.
“I couldn’t imagine, you know, being hit by a grown man,” she speculated. “So, yeah, that experience, it takes me to this whole other level of thought, you know, thinking if they’re really going to allow men to go in there and box with women. That is just deadly.”
“We’re living in crazy times right now,” Williams asserted. “There’s just no way that a man should be able to come into a boxing ring and box with a woman. No matter what, if they’re born a man, then they’re a man. Doesn’t matter if they have gone through transition. I think most of the people that I have communicated with feel the same way. But a lot are worried to speak out. You know, we live in a weird cancel culture, and so I think a lot of people don’t want to voice their opinions on it, which is really sad because we need more people to stand up on this.”
The Association of Ringside Physicians stated last December, “Allowing transgender athletes to compete against cisgender athletes in combat sports, which already involve significant risk of serious injury, unnecessarily raises the risk of injury due to these differences. Hence the ARP does not support transgender athlete competition against cisgender athletes in combat sports.”
Williams said she had been “racking my brain” to understand why USA Boxing ignored the Association of Ringside Physicians’ perspective: “This is going to be a huge barrier for the young women coming up, the young girls coming up in the sport of boxing, because, first of all, boxing is a very challenging sport. Actually, ESPN did a study. It is the toughest sport out of all sports. So, you look at that, and obviously you can get hurt. It’s a little painful when you get hit, so you already know there’s a lot of girls that aren’t necessarily interested in getting into it. But once they do, they’ve overcome that part of it. Now, you’re adding this layer of, ‘Oh, now you might have to box a boy or a man.’ You put that in front of them, and they’re going to say, ‘Well, then I don’t want a box.’”
“For individuals to be emotional and base things off of ideology instead of, you know, actual reality and science, It’s beyond my belief,” Williams declared. “I can’t really comprehend what goes through their minds. But I’ll tell you what, if they’re going to say that I’m this, that or the other thing, the issue is if somebody decides that they want to transition, a man wants to transition to be a woman, that is a big decision in life, and they can make that decision. But when they make that decision, there are consequences that come with that decision. And one of them is that they cannot compete as a woman in the sport of boxing or any other sport. They have to take that into account when they make that decision in their life. I think that is only fair. So, again, it’s just we all make choices in life, and there are consequences of the choices that we make.”
“Women are going to lose their space. Women, we have had to work really, really hard and for a very long time to have our space in the sport. A very long time. Why can’t transgender athletes do the same thing? You know what? They can create their own space, but it takes time. You can’t just go, ‘Oh, I’m transgender. I want to box women.’ That is unfair as well. You know, there are a lot of different layers to this,” she concluded.