“A dog, a woman and a walnut tree…

…the more you beat them, the better they’ll be” – so goes the old ditty. Before I proceed, I want it on record that I unreservedly repudiate this sentiment as utterly objectionable (Penelope agrees).

But apparently the International Olympic Committee (IOC) doesn’t share my distaste for the message of that rhyme. I don’t know what position that august body takes on dogs and walnut trees, but it wholeheartedly approves of men beating women.

That’s why it sees nothing wrong with Algeria’s Imane Khelif, and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting competing in the Olympic boxing competition – for women.

Now that I’m sharing with you my tastes and distastes, women’s boxing definitely falls in the latter category. Call me an inveterate romantic or, if you’d rather, a male chauvinist and report me to the Equalities Commission, but my ideal of femininity doesn’t leave much room for two damsels pummelling each other to a bloody pulp.

That said, those dainty creatures fight against my stereotypes with gusto, in pubs. According to a recent statistic, women are involved in pub brawls more often than men. And they take up boxing with alacrity – why, even our French friends’ daughter is a pugilist.

However, as far as I know, she only fights other women. The opponents of Khelif and Lin don’t enjoy the same privilege. Because – how can I put this without offending anybody – those two boxers are, well, men.

That’s why they were both disqualified from last year’s World Championships for having XY chromosomes, which makes them biologically male. That decision was taken after the International Boxing Association (IBA) introduced what the press unanimously called controversial DNA tests at its championships.

IBA president Umar Kremlev couldn’t quite understand what was so controversial about those tests. They were introduced, he said, to expose “athletes who were trying to fool their colleagues and pretend to be women”.

That troglodyte is well behind the times if he thinks that men identifying as women pretend to qualify for that honour to cheat their way into women’s competitions. Doesn’t he know they are women, bred if not necessarily born?

We are what we say we are. If someone with a black great-grandparent identifies as black, that’s what he is. And, as the American teacher Rachel Dolezal insisted some 10 years ago, even having no black ancestry whatsoever didn’t mean she wasn’t genuinely black if she said she was.

Now, you can think whatever you want about such abominations, but I’ll say one thing for them: they’re unlikely to have lethal consequences. That sort of thing may offend the sensibilities of people of taste and conservative disposition, but at least no one will die.

Biological men boxing against women is something entirely different. Research shows that, all other things being equal, men pack 162 per cent more punching power than women do. As anyone who has ever laced on a pair of boxing gloves will tell you, that difference may well be a matter of life or death.

But hey, any revolutionary movement must have its heroes, and so must every religion. Sanguis martyrum semen Ecclesiae (“the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church”), as Tertullian wrote.

The current transsexual madness barely makes it to a pagan cult, never mind religion. Yet it too demands the lives of its adherents as a building material of its ethos. So if men pretending to be female kill a few women in the ring, those girls will die so the ideology can live.

In that spirit, the IOC has withdrawn its recognition from the IBA, citing good and bad reasons for that censure. The good reason is that it’s apparently funded by Russia. The bad reason is that the IBA has those antediluvian ideas about men and women.

The primary sex characteristics are these days seen as irrelevant details getting in the way of a creed that towers over mundane concerns. The chief of them is that men and women aren’t just equal but, barring some architectural fixtures, the same.

This is a self-fulfilling ideology, for men are growing increasingly feminised, with women meeting them halfway. The hope is that eventually the differences will disappear, and if those appendages get in the way, well, it’s nothing that an expert surgeon can’t handle.

This is just one reason the Paris Olympics look more and more obscene from where I’m sitting. That started with the opening ceremony that belied the French reputation for good taste. I wrote about it the other day, but I forgot to mention one nice touch.

By the looks of it, one athlete set out to prove, consciously or otherwise, that some physical differences between the sexes still survive. During the ceremony, he wore such skimpy shorts that one of his testicles fell out for all to see. The public gasped and applauded, and the press treated that testicular episode as a major sensation.

Not as major, however, as its burst of hysterical enthusiasm about the French diver Jules Bouyer, whose tiny swimming trunks emphasised his bulging masculinity. Judging by the reaction in the media, Pierre Coubertin’s Olympic slogan, citius, altius, fortius (“faster, higher, stronger” should now be augmented with et maxima (“…and bigger”).

I wonder if the French have made such a big deal out of this because they see Bouyer as a reassertion of national virility, an asset that lately has been somewhat compromised by their president. If so, more power to them – and to Mr Bouyer.

Meanwhile, the triathlon competition has had to be cancelled because the water in the Seine is too polluted for the swimming part of the event. That’s not surprising because in France, unlike Britain, both sewage and drainage use the same conduits. (A few years ago, we found that out the hard – and malodorous – way in our own house, but I’ll spare you the details.)

Just before the Games, Anne Hidalgo, Paris mayor, publicly swam in the Seine to prove its water is pristine. Now all our Parisian friends hope she drinks it next.

One last detail before I get off the subject of the Olympics. I haven’t seen any statistics on the number of tattoos per competitor, but the briefest of looks suggests it’s higher than one – even if we regard a whole tattooed arm as just one such ornament rather than several of them together.

Treating the human body as a canvas to paint on has traditionally been associated with the primitive tribes inhabiting faraway fragments of the earth in various oceans. Now Olympians are making a visual statement asserting that all tribes on earth have become primitive.

Conversion is proceeding apace not only between men and women, but also between civilisation and barbarism. Actually, the two processes are parts of the same thing.