Female Boxers Sound Alarm on Men in Women’s Division: ‘You Could Die’

French Canadian boxer Katia Bissonette was an hour out from a championship fight put on by the Quebec Boxing Federation when she learned that she would be facing a man.

After a coach from another region tipped off Bissonnette’s coach about her opponent’s sex — the Quebec Boxing Federation never saw fit to inform her — she withdrew from the October fight for safety reasons.

The governing bodies for Canadian sports have led the way in erasing the boundaries between male and female competition, and now U.S. sporting organizations are following suit, placing American boxers in a dangerous situation like the one Bissonnette narrowly avoided.

“We are in an era where confusion reigns,” Bissonette said. “I believe the women’s sport just ate a jab directly to the back of the head. This is a big step backwards for women in combat sports.”

USA Boxing, a major governing body for Olympic-style, amateur boxing, announced last week that it would be officially adopting a “transgender policy” as part of its 2024 rule book which allows male athletes who identify as women to compete against females, with some constraints.

In order to qualify to compete against women, males must undergo gender-reassignment surgery and submit to blood testing for four years before competition to ensure their testosterone levels remain below 5 nmol/L, well above the average female level above 1.5 nmol/L.

The USA Boxing policy makes no mention of requiring male athletes to disclose their sex to potential competitors before a fight is scheduled.

Unlike in other sports in which males have encroached on female competition, such as swimming and powerlifting, the stakes in boxing are as severe as injury or death.

Like other sports bodies that have opened female competition to men, USA Boxing has maintained that hormone modification will level the boxing ring for female and transgender-identifying male fighters. But it is now well established that testosterone reduction does not negate natural male physical advantages, which are especially pronounced in boxing, former USA Boxing fighter Cara Castronuova told National Review.

“With boxing, you have to be able to go into wind sprints really fast and then bring it down,” Castronuova, who has won two Golden Gloves championships, said.

“Everything is an explosive anaerobic thing, and men have better anaerobic capacity than women,” she added. “If you’re boxing, you can’t go 100 percent the whole time. You have to go 100 percent, then 30 percent, 100 percent, then 30 percent. Men have a higher capacity to do that, and that really counts in boxing.”

For those high-intensity bursts of punching followed by rest, an athlete’s cardio fitness is extremely important. Males have a larger chest cavity, larger lungs and a larger heart, more muscle mass, and a denser skeletal structure. These attributes allow men a significant advantage over women in endurance and strength, according to the most recent Competition report from the Independent Women’s Forum and the Independent Women’s Law Center.

One scientific study from the University of Utah, citing an article titled “Sexual dimorphism in human arm power and force: implications for sexual selection on fighting ability,” found that “even with roughly uniform levels of fitness, the males’ average power during a punching motion was 162% greater than females’, with the least-powerful man still stronger than the most powerful woman.”

“If we analyze fossils dating back thousands of years, we will still be able to know its sex at birth,” Bissonette said. “So, there is some injustice, definitely. Even if tons of medical tests are done. The boxer has a biological history that cannot disappear. Sport is not linked to feeling like a woman or a man. We talk about physical strength in combat sports.”

Aware of those risks, the World Boxing Council, one of the four major professional organizations which govern the sport, is taking a different path. In December 2020, it announced it was considering creating a separate category in which transgender athletes can compete in order to protect the women’s division but accommodate men who have undergone sex changes.

“It is the time to do this, and we are doing this because of safety and inclusion,” Mauricio Sulaiman, the president of the WBC, told the Telegraph at the time. “We have been the leaders in rules for women’s boxing — so the dangers of a man fighting a woman will never happen because of what we are going to put in place.”

Sulaiman acknowledged that trans entrants identifying as women still can overpower and potentially endanger women.

“In boxing, a man fighting a woman must never be accepted regardless of gender change,” he said. “There should be no gray area around this, and we want to go into it with transparency and the correct decisions. Woman to man or man to woman transgender change will never be allowed to fight a different gender by birth.”

The official rule barring men from the female competitions came down on November 28, when Sulaiman presented Bissonette with a medal for her advocacy to protect women’s sports.

Experienced female fighters are well aware of the advantages conferred by testosterone and male puberty, as many of them have competed against opponents who are taking performance-enhancing drugs and have sparred against men in training.

“They don’t get tired,” Castronuova said of female opponents who are taking steroids. “And it’s terrifying when you’re fighting someone who’s almost like a superhuman because everybody else gets tired. You wait for them to do an explosive ten punches, then you jump on them.”

But being on those drugs “takes away natural law,” she said. That artificial endurance for women is akin to what men naturally experience due to their biology.

When she competed for five years in the early 2000s, Castronuova practiced with men because there were fewer female boxers. Male competitors often use such matches against females as an opportunity to refine their defense and technique.

It’s a serious faux pas for male boxers to hit female boxers with full power, she said.

“A man who knows how to box, if he starts teeing off on a female, he will be ostracized,” Castronuova said. “People will be like, ‘what are you gaining out of this?’”

Castronuova, who trains female fighters — and refereed and judged fights until recently — said it’s the trainer’s responsibility to assess whether a male sparring partner is being overly aggressive. Even when men pull their punches, however, the physical disparity is overwhelming, Castronuova said.

“Two trained boxers, male and female, their strength difference is incredible,” she said. “It’s stunning how different it feels to get hit from a guy your size. The speed is really different, not just the strength. The athleticism is just totally different when it comes to males and females. It’s like night and day, you can’t even compare the two.”

“I pull in at 119 [pounds],” she added. “If I got flushed by a guy who’s 119 compared to a girl who’s 119? The girl at 119, I could just walk it off. The guy at 119, if it’s a really good punch, I’ll see stars. Maybe I’ll get knocked down.”

While a hostile male sparring partner would be slammed for being a jerk, that man would be celebrated for breaking a new glass ceiling under USA Boxing’s latest rule codification, so long as he identifies as a woman.

“Boxing has risks, but usually we fight on equal terms,” Bissonette.

The implications could be deadly. Castronuova, who has broken her ear drum and nose in boxing, said she’s seen people die in the ring. She judged a fight in which a fighter sustained injuries that sent him into a coma for a month. When she worked at USA Boxing, fighters died due to injuries sustained while fighting competitors of the same sex.

“It’s not baseball where you’re hitting a baseball,” she said. “You’re hitting heads. In swimming, it’s unfair and messed up because women worked their whole lives, and they could lose a title or a place in a competition with a man. In this case, people’s lives are at risk. You could die.”

“This is a life and death sport,” she said.

USA Boxing and the Quebec Boxing Federation did not respond to requests for comment.

Speaking of her coaching experience at USA Boxing, Castronuova said she would advise her trainee not to fight if she ever was slated to go against a transgender-identifying man.

“But it’s not fair because if there’s a tournament, if you don’t fight you don’t advance,” she added.

As more men intrude into women’s boxing, referees will face a dilemma, too. In boxing, their purpose is to keep the competitors safe, Castronuova said. It can haunt them for years if a round results in a death.

“When I was a referee, I was like, ‘my job is literally to make sure these two people don’t die,” she said. “You have to be so observant to somebody getting hit in their eye, and their reaction. It’s so much pressure. I know referees live with guilt their whole lives because somebody died while they were refereeing.”

Some referees may recuse themselves from presiding over fights between transgender-identifying males and females, she predicted.

“The refereeing would be very difficult,” she said. “You have to be hyper fixated to make sure someone doesn’t get hurt.”

The USA Boxing move also undermines weight-class restrictions, which are extremely strict for safety reasons. “This could almost defeat the purpose of a weight class because the purpose of a weight class is to make sure that everything is fair,” she said.

“If you’re a quarter of a pound weighing over, you’re disqualified,” she said. “You live by the scale. If you’re not on the perfect weight, you can’t fight because it’s a safety issue. A 114 and 119, that’s a five-pound difference but they’re two different divisions. So just five pounds, they’re acknowledging somebody could get really hurt by fighting in a heavier weight class.”

Women even take off their hair ties because the restrictions are so stringent, she said.

Men aren’t saddled with the disadvantage of breasts, which add weight that doesn’t help in boxing. Men don’t have to be attuned to a menstrual cycle and the hormonal fluctuations and physical pain that come with it that can impede performance.

“You become so hyper aware of these things when you’re an athlete,” Castronuova. “You know when your body is ovulating, when it’s about to get your period, when it’s going through the luteal phase. When you’re about to get your period, your body is insanely weaker. I was like a different boxer. You’re tired, you have cramps. Men don’t have to deal with PMS. It’s so difficult to make weight when you’re bloated before your period.”

Tacitly implied in women’s boxing is a code of sensitivity for the female body, especially its child-bearing potential. Castronuova said she had built a strong defense against body shots over the years because she didn’t want to get hit in the ovaries.

“Because I wanted to have kids,” she said. “You’ll notice that a lot of women don’t throw as many body shots as men. It’s a weird subconscious thing. A lot of women in the amateurs, when they fight close up, they’re nailing each other to the head whereas guys will try to gut each other. Because every female boxer has the concern that if she gets hit too many times in the stomach it could harm her reproductive system.”

Women only received the right to fight in the Olympics in the early 2000s, starting off with only three weight classes.

“Women have been fighting so hard to get equal rights as men in boxing,” Castronuova said.

“To do this is almost a way to keep the females down.”