For the past decade, “Is sex binary?” has become one of those questions to which one is not supposed to know the correct answer. Like “What is a woman?”, or “Is the Emperor naked?”, it functions as a test: the smarter you are, the more effort you will make to feign confusion.

As countless “enlightening” articles have taught us, it is gauche, unsophisticated, perhaps even a little bit racist to believe there are only two sexes. It’s like thinking only men can do maths, or only women can look after children.

This argument might be amusing to careerist academics, but it is less fun, one imagines, if the consequences of claiming there are no sex boundaries mean getting your head caved in by someone with 2.6 times greater punching power than you. Nonetheless, the International Olympic Committee has decided that two boxers who are biologically male shall be permitted to fight in the women’s categories in Paris.

Both Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Chinese Tapei’s Lin Yu-ting have previously failed biochemical tests for gender eligibility. Both were removed from last year’s Women’s World Boxing Championships for having XY chromosomes. It is not altogether clear whether their claims to be female constitute a deliberate act of deception or relate to differences in sex development (DSD), as neither boxer claims to be transgender. Nonetheless, it is not just unfair but unsafe for female boxers to have to compete against them. This is a moment when one might expect the sex denialists to admit that they’ve gone too far, but such a course of action is highly unlikely.

The inclusion of male people in female sporting categories might have started out as a complex, delicate question. One can feel great sympathy for those with DSD, who may have been raised as female only to be told they are biologically male. In recent years, particularly in the wake of increasingly aggressive trans activism, male inclusion in female sports has started to feel more like plain old entitlement. Unambiguously male competitors such as Lia Thomas, Laurel Hubbard, and Veronica Ivy have dared observers to point out the obvious. They have taken women’s places and prizes with the smug air of those who aren’t even trying to convince anyone that this is fair.

Those of us who expected male sports journalists not to stand for this — on the basis that women’s prisons and refuges might be unimportant when it comes to setting sex-based boundaries, but sport is sacred — have been sorely disappointed. Some have seemed to actively want male inclusion in female sports, a category they might not have seen as particularly authentic in its own right. Perhaps it has felt like payback for women wanting in on sports as a male domain. It’s that familiar anti-feminist argument: “you wanted to be the same as the men? Well, then, we’re only taking you at your word”.

This is, surely, the point at which we say enough is enough. You’re not smashing the gender binary; you’re putting male fists in female faces and smashing them instead.

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Victoria Smith is a writer and creator of the Glosswitch newsletter.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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