Author J.K. Rowling has fallen silent on her usually busy X (formerly Twitter) feed, after Olympic gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif filed a legal complaint in France for alleged cyber harassment over statements regarding her gender.
On August 9, lawyers for Khelif filed a lawsuit with a special unit of the public prosecutor's office in Paris, stemming from false statements that spread online about her gender after the Algerian boxer defeated Italy's Angela Carini in her first fight of the 2024 Olympic Games. Carini pulled out 46 seconds into the bout and told reporters afterwards that she had "never felt a punch like this."
You can take any other boxer, I specifically chose black and "masculine" athletes as examples to show that even race/body type alone was not the determining factor.
In these Olympic games you have just Imane's example: how can you call this a trend or make general statements with one case (not even the Taiwanese boxer got attention)?
What do you mean? Comparing the rate at which women are subject to such effects vs men is a worse statistic than saying “but many successful women are not subject to such effects”? If there is a systematic bias towards women’s success being downplayed, you cannot call this an isolated incident of stereotypical bias.
Men don't have a category to which they are wrongfully assigned when they win sports. This is also because men are the higher category in most sports (i.e., higher performers), so it is a parallel that simply doesn't make sense.
So yes. It is a worse statistics because men who are victim of gender stereotypes are generally not the ones who excel at sports (men who are called women in general break the masculine stereotype of the muscular and competitive guy - and these unsurprisingly are not characteristics common in elite athletes).
If there is a systematic bias towards women’s success being downplayed
But this was not your claim either. Your claim is that downplaying is done by specifically saying those women are men. The whole point here is on the cause, not the existence of the phenomenon in general.