The WBC’s transgender boxing division is another money grab
Zachary Faria
The World Boxing Council is creating a transgender boxing division. The decision is little more than an attempt to drum up publicity and squeeze more money from even more fighters.
WBC President Mauricio Sulaiman correctly decided that “in boxing, a man fighting a woman must never be accepted regardless of gender change.” Instead of allowing men to fight in women’s divisions, the WBC has decided to create a transgender division, where men claiming to be women can fight men claiming to be women or women claiming to be men. This will allow whatever few transgender boxers exist (even Sulaiman admits the WBC doesn’t know) to fight without jeopardizing the safety of female boxers.
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Of course, what it is really about is two things. The first, and most obvious, is the publicity that comes from such a move, especially in the United States. Boxing is mostly an afterthought on the American sports scene, but this move has brought some media buzz back to a sport of which most common American headlines are about drunken car accidents and domestic violence arrests.
The second reason for this is money. Boxing sanctioning bodies that provide championship belts (not to be confused with boxing commissions, which oversee rules and safety regulations) are leeches that draw money from the purses of their champion fighters. If you want to win a WBC belt, for example, you must pay money from each of your fights to count toward your WBC ranking, and your promoter must pay an annual fee.
Of course, the WBC then decided to add more champions, so it could take its cut of money from even more boxers. The body has multiple champions in multiple weight divisions. The WBC created a brand new division, the “bridgerweight” division, so it could crown more champions and extract more money from more boxers. (None of the other sanctioning bodies recognize this new division).
The WBC even created a “franchise” championship, which transcended weight divisions and was not necessarily a belt that could be won by an opponent. It then awarded this “championship” to some of boxing’s biggest stars, ensuring that the body could take a cut of their purse in perpetuity, regardless of the division they were fighting in.
This transgender division accomplishes the same thing. Undoubtedly, the WBC will give out a championship belt (or three), allowing it to skim even more money off of even more boxers competing to call themselves champions. Combine that with the morbid promotion of transgenderism among establishment media, this is primarily a money grab disguised as inclusion. In other words, it’s just another day in the sport of boxing.
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