Layman's Law School
Could Female Olympic Boxers Sue?
(upbeat music) - Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the layman's law school, where three Southern German lawyers sit around and discuss the legal issues of the day, and hopefully do so in a way that you can actually understand. I'm joined by my guests, my co-host, I should say, Reed and Sean Merge, like as usual. - I'm happy to be a guest or a co-host. - Yeah, yeah. - Anyway, and Sean, no matter what we call you, you're still a star, I mean, that's just obvious. - Hey, you know, it's right on top, but he swings both ways. - Exactly, that's true. - Good, guests and hosts. - That's very true. But before you introduce my favorite part of the week, and we haven't been able to do this recently, so I'm gonna let you. There you go, sir. - Well, there was an episode recently with Chasen, our father, figure, Victor, and there was absolutely-- - I know. - I was disappointed. - I was disappointed. Disappointed in both of you. - I don't remember that. - Cheers. - I don't know what you're talking about. - Denied enough. - Yummy. Cold. - Yeah. - It's not super cold. - No. - Just right. - Had to be left in the truck for a long time. - You know, I think they should stop calling Bud Light and just call it water heavy. - Or drunk water. - Drunk water. - That's better. - They have like dark water or whatever. - Yeah, they got what's a liquid death. - Yeah, they're trying water. - Vitamin water. - Let's make it simple, guys. - Yeah. - Yeah, well, today, the Olympics are in the news. And you know-- - And what United States is leading in the metal count currently. Not in the gold metal count, but in the metal count, they have a-- - Australians are all up in arms. - They have a giant lead. - Americans are counting just the metals, not they should count the gold. - I can't do an Australian accent, but they sound like money based right now. - That was a great job. - I know. - Well, they're beating Australians in the gold, too. - Well, this is-- - I think China has, as the first position with gold metal is currently-- - Currently. - And United States has second in gold metal. - Yeah, yeah. - How Australians have got a little stick up. They're bum for the American swimmers. - Well, we're gonna talk about an issue that has recently arose in the combat sports arena of the Olympics. And it involves an Algerian boxer. I'm gonna do my best to pronounce her name. Imani Khalif. She is competing in the women's boxing. And there's actually another one that has-- - Another one from Taiwan. - Yeah, as she's Taiwanese, Ling Yuting. And these women are, or formally, actually disqualify from the World Boxing Championships due to gender eligibility. And I know that the Italian boxer after losing very quickly to Imani, complained that she'd never had been hit that hard in her life. And it sparked a lot of issues revolved around the rulemaking and allowing women, and it's an issue in this country in the United States. It's entered into the politics of the presidential race about transgender men and women competing in each other's sports. And so I just wanna talk about some of that stuff today and with regard to what we do, what are some of the issues that could arise from this particular situation? So have y'all heard about this? - Yeah, and just to clarify one thing, I'm not sure about Ling Yuting, but I know Ms. Khalif, just to make, before we have people screaming and shouting in the comments, that she was born a female, but there's a, I can't remember the acronym, but there was something that's essentially-- - DSD, right. - DSD, you know, that adds another layer of controversy into this type of argument, for both sides, whatever the-- - Well, and that's the thing, then you have people that are raising a huge stink about it right now, and that's what they reference is, oh, this is a transgender person. I think that based on at least what I know right now, these two individuals are quite different from the male who just swam with females in America. That was a transgender individual who changed sex or believes they're a different sex than they were born. These individuals are from all accounts so far that I've seen are people that were born as female. And raised as female, and I've always done female things, I always participate in female sports, and for some reason, they have some type of medical anomaly that just got a ton of testosterone. - Well, yeah, they both, well, I know in Imani's case, she has both the X and the Y chromosome, and usually that does not occur, but what it causes is basically an imbalance in her endocrine system, where she actually produces more testosterone than normal for a woman because of her genetic, I guess I'm gonna say disorder, but her genetic condition. - Now, is testosterone a performance-enhancing drug, would that be illegal? - It can be, right? And it can also be a naturally occurring thing. - That's how I mean, how do they tell? - You have different levels, I mean, you can tell if it's naturally- - If somebody's boosting, you can- - So, yeah, so the IOC has come out on this and explain just that. She is a woman, she's always competed as a woman, she's lived as a woman, she was born as a woman, registered as a woman when she was born in the hospital. And- - As a uterus and the emoji of the body? - Exactly, all this stuff, right? But it just happens that her body produces excess testosterone. And if you look at her body, her body physically looks, but we've all seen women like that. I don't know if you guys have seen the UFC and seen cyborg. - Yeah. - You know, she, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - I have seen women that look like men, and I've seen men that are very, very feminine looking. - Right, right, right, but yeah. - The thing for us is not to get into, like I said, we're not here to talk about what the right and the wrong of it, but what are the legal implications in a contact sport where you have a, you know, a genetically born female versus genetically born male, even with a transition. And if they get severely injured, you know, if I transitioned, I could destroy some of the women, right? - Right. - So if I do that, who could be liable if anyone? I think that's a very interesting conversation to have. - Right, so. - And I'll just say that if I transitioned, I might be able to handle any normal female that's out on the street in a fight, but I still don't think I would have a chance against any of these female boxers. - I got you, Sean, I got you, man, I think you can do it. - Well, this is a very important distinction, and it actually reared its head back in like 2015, 2014. There was an MMA fighter by the name of Fox Fallon, and this was a person that was born a male that transitioned into a female. And in particular with regard to contact sports, it really does provide a huge, huge advantage. - Absolutely. - Yeah, so. - Well, it's not like even the, you know, sprinting and track and field sports, it can provide you an advantage. But the difference to me is that that advantage is a win or loss, and when you have contact sports, that advantage is you injure someone. - That's right. - And that's a big difference. - Yeah, and you score points for scoring more damage. And so with Fox Fallon, one of the issues that came up was basically women, champions in organizations were refusing to fight her, right? And male bodies and female bodies, as much as we don't, I don't know a whole lot medically, but I do know just from studying this particular part, that bone density in males is much higher than women's. And when people talk about looking at hands, man hands, you have stronger, more dense, larger hands to throw punches with your body, your upper body is built more heavily than a female's. All the muscle structure that-- - Yeah, you're able to build muscle easier. - Much easier. - Maintain muscle easier. - All those tendons that-- - Yep, my wife is always angry about that. She's like, you know, stop drinking for a few weeks, you lose 10 pounds, I got to kill myself to lose 10 pounds. It's the same thing. - Right. - It just on average men are gonna be bigger, stronger, faster, they just are. It's just the way that we're built. So that goes into, then you start balancing the fairness, right? But like I said, I was looking at it with the Italian lady. It just popped into my head of like, if she suffered brain damage, right? - Yeah. - There is routes of, you know, culpability, maybe out there. - Sure. - So, you know, let's say hypothetically, this is in just America, right? And this is an American-- - In Georgia. - In Georgia, that's fine. But, and if this happens, the who can you go after the person individually? Or do you go after the department that allowed for this fight to happen? What are y'all's opinions on that? - Well, I know that at least as far as, the law, you know, says in amateur sports, the people conducting amateur sports, they're called sports officials, are immune from any civil liability for injuries that occur to the athletes or the spectators of those particular sports. Now, it defines, you know, sports officials as like the referees, things like that, it doesn't necessarily say anything about, you know, the president of the league or the governing body. - Right, the governing body. - Yeah, the governing body of the league. We have to take into consideration assumption of the risk. - Yep, key, right. - People, you know, that can be a bar to civil claim. 'Cause if you are doing an activity, some activities are inherently dangerous, inherently prone to receiving some type of injury. If you're voluntarily taking part in that activity, you can be said to have assumed the risk. - Yeah, Sean, I'm gonna have to stop here. You said bar, you said voluntarily. Bar civil claims, you know, voluntary, involuntary assumption explaining the common sense language. Like what that basically means, all of that. Bar would mean that it would be a defense that would be raised and a court would have to decide whether or not you can proceed with the prosecution of your civil claim. Civil claim being your lawsuit, your claim. - Okay, you're suing him for different money. - You're suing somebody for money for the damages that you incur, but I think it's important to know what, along with what you're saying is, and this happens a lot in the talk summary, judgment motions, this kind of thing is, the general public doesn't realize this, but that, these things happen to make it where you don't even get your case into, in front of a jury or a trier of fact. That's what all what bar means, statute of limitation, it's to say, hey, y'all don't have what the law requires for you to be put in front of a trier of fact. Your case never gets there. You lose before you get there. - Even based on what you have said, the law does not allow you to proceed. - And that is a, that's not about the facts of the case, and that's people get mad, well, this happened, this happened, this happened. That doesn't really matter. We're not there yet. - No, and when we talk about summary judgment, it is a legal opinion given by the judge, or a legal judgment, where he is assuming that everything that the plaintiff, or the person seeking damages, says is correct. And he just says, even though you said all these things, it still doesn't meet the legal threshold to have, you know, someone have to pay you money for this. - For instance, that'd be like a car accident. Man, you get in a car accident. You're, I'm moving for summary judgment. You say the light was green. I say the light was green. They just say, okay, well, whatever Sean says is right, since I'm moving for the summary judgment. - Right. - So that's a, you know, just a part of the law that a lot of people, I think, misunderstand, and that it's always, you know, you can get your case in front of a trier of fact, but there's a lot of times you can't, you know. And I think that this whole situation, especially with contact sports, and who is allowed, if you brought a claim against the governing body, you would not get in front of a jury or a trier of fact until this is resolved legally, meaning go ahead. - Whether or not it's an amateur, if it's an amateur official, then he has protections. He has an immunity in this because you assume the risk, you know it's an amateur event. They're not really regulated in any way. And so therefore they're immune. - And of course there's always exceptions in that. Those exceptions being, you know, a known, dangerous condition. And most of the cases in Georgia that deal with that, that's a condition of the actual premises. A soccer field that had a giant hole in it that they knew about and didn't feel prior to somebody playing on the field and, you know, broke their head. - A ring that had a roof that breaks any time somebody leans against the top roof and then they go fly out. - Yeah, something like that. But, you know, I could see the argument that a dangerous condition, you know, could be allowed if you allow someone who is, or, you know, I don't know what the scientific term, physically, scientifically, you know, a male who's physically stronger and they do cause, you know, serious damage that likely wouldn't have been caused by if there was another female. - Well, I'll give you a thing that does happen is there's been cases on this where you have boxers, especially in the lower tiers are coming up that are not really trained correctly and they were allowed to box with really no, not knowing what they're doing. And if you take a shot into the back of the head, it can paralyze you, obviously that's illegal in boxing. And there have been multiple boxers who that has happened to from untrained boxers. And so in that situation, yeah, you're assuming the risk, but I would make a claim against the governing body in that this person should not have been allowed to fight because they don't know, they haven't gone through what you're supposed to go through. And so there's still an issue, like you said, I always like to talk about the water rafting hypothetical. That's the easiest thing for me to make sense of when you have assumption of risk and immunity. Water rafting is inherently dangerous. I've gone water rafting, I'm sure you'll have. - Absolutely. - And if I go and I turn the boat or whatever and hit a rock, that's my fault. I've signed a waiver, I can't sue, blah, blah, blah. But that doesn't mean that the people who owned the raft that I'm renting can just give me a piece of crap and give me oars that are broken or things that are terrible. - And let's go down to category five. - Yes. - And I don't even know what I'm doing. - Yeah. - I've never been and they send me down. - Let's go left versus right. - And I want to go down the five today. - Absolutely. Well, if I get injured then, yeah, I did assume some risk, but they put me in a danger. It sways the knowledge, right? I don't have knowledge of that, they do. And they're the one who put me in that situation. They didn't tell me that we were doing that. And so that's kind of how I view this. And the contact sport is, yes, you're going to have assumption of the risk. It would not raise to the level of a criminal aspect. But civilly, I think you could have a claim in that, listen, I got into this sport thinking I was fighting biological female opponents. And this person was biologically born a male, now they're female and I have brain damage due to them being allowed to fight me. - How does the assumption of the risk factor into it when I guess these people had advanced knowledge? - Exactly. - You know what I mean? I guess the Italian boxer knew exactly what she was going in there for. - Absolutely. - And in the first 30, 40 seconds, one punch was thrown essentially, and she said, I'm out, I'm done. Like if she would not have tapped out and left just qualified herself, and she would have been severely injured, how would it play into the fact that she knew that she was going up against someone who was suspected of being a male or suspected of having these male characteristics or chromosomes and testosterone and stuff like that. Is she assuming the risk, you know, no one's forcing her to compete in the Olympics. - I mean, I think that's the crux of the issue. - Honestly, that's an issue for the jury. - Yeah, and I think that, I mean, that is truly, I mean, 'cause the argument against that, the other side of that is, you know, this person's been training and their country's relying on him and all this pressure to actually force them to do it. And I'm sure there'd be coaches and people from that country saying, no, you gotta do it, you gotta do it. I mean, Simone Biles went through it in 2020. And back last she had from having the spins, there are the spinny's I think we're gonna go. And so you have all this pressure twisted things. - Just to let you know that I've had the spinny's before on numerous occasions. - Last night. - Usually, you gotta just take one foot and step out, put it on the floor while you're in bed. I don't think I've ever had the twisties though. - Yeah, I don't know if you, and once the last time you did it, like, you know, triple, you know, tuck, you know, back. - I don't tuck at all. - Okay. - So let's just be clear about that. But like I said, those are all just these issues that are gonna come up and, you know, I foresee this being in the, not this situation, but I mean this specific Olympic situation, but I see this being a case in the United States fairly soon, I really do. Because you just, with the heat on this issue, courts are gonna have to decide something. - Absolutely. - But this is my favorite part about the law and that like, when I got a, I went to, I guess, law school initiation, I went to the week long introduction to the law ahead of your first day at law school and all that stuff, right? And one of the interesting things - First prior to law school. - Prior to law school. - Yeah, I'll just say you, I went to that too. And you know why they invited me? 'Cause I was a non-traditional law student because I was 30 years old when I was going to law school. - Maybe that's why I got invited, I don't know. But what was the interesting thing was, was that they actually just said, okay, they created an island. We all got put there. There are no rules, no are no laws. You don't really know anything about criminal code or Georgia or South Carolina or whatever. And they say, okay, this is what happened. How do we fix it? And so everybody in that room-- - A hypothetical, you know. - A hypothetical, yeah. We got guys, their job is to go out and fish. They stay out in the water and they get washed, you know, taken out and there's a bad storm. They get lost. And there's three people. One of them gets injured very bad in the storm. Their leg becomes gangrenous. And they got, he says, look, I'm not gonna make it. I'm gonna die out here and y'all, y'all can, if y'all will just finish me, you know, whatever. Y'all can, y'all can live off of my body for a while. Y'all go ahead and do that before I just rot. - Sure. - And he says that, right? And then two weeks later, they come back. The two guys, they find them. They give, what happens in that situation? Do we charge them with murder? Did they kill that man? There's a lot of issues that come up there. What kind of, you know, you got two guys. So, you know, one of these guys could be actually culpable. And so, what are the issues with hearsay? What are the issues with? I mean, there's a lot of issues just in that little area. Then we got into property and all that stuff. But what it did was, it was a microcosm of what's happening here. It's like when people come into a new area and they have a new kind of experience, they have to figure out philosophically, what is the baseline level of fairness that we have to treat one another with in order for people in our country to feel like they live in a just society. Because that's super, super important. Because if you don't feel like that, this is not a country you'll fight for. This is not a country that you will go out and participate in and try to build your community. And this is an issue we're gonna have to try and resolve because, you know, it's a new issue. And so, we're gonna have to wrestle with this idea of, you know, us wanting to be inclusive of all of our citizens and be sensitive to, you know, people's differences and sensitive to the fact that people are often discriminated against because of their differences. - Right. - But how do we treat those people fairly without actually, I wanna say, giving away the store without, you know, just having a lot of free fraud. - Possibly infringing on the rights of other people. - Others, yeah, terribly. That's really the issue. - Yeah, my dad always used to say your rights end or someone else's begins. It's kind of that way, but anyone who tells you they know the answer to this is lying. Because it's not, it has not been resolved in front of the courts. So you can feel real strongly about this one way or the other. But that doesn't mean you're right. And we're not here to talk about what's right and what's wrong. We're talking about how this is going to progress through the legal system. And, you know, essentially how it could affect any one of us sitting here. - Yeah, yeah. - You know, especially with, you know, being personal injury lawyers, this is a certain situation that absolutely could arise. - Right, and it's going to eventually, okay, because, you know, there's a, you know, a national conversation going on about transgender including people in sport and stuff like that. And everybody's going to push and it's when you reach the limit where people will say, okay, then, this is where it stops. And combat sports is like a very good place to talk about that. - Absolutely. - With Fox Fallon, we eventually had promotions that were unwilling to have her come and fight. And it was because she was breaking the orbital bones and breaking the skulls of people that she was fighting. And it was like, oh, well, you know. - Maybe that's not fair. - She's got, well, and it may turn out that we figure out some nuances. So let's just say, for instance, the person transitioned 10 years ago, right? They hadn't had testosterone pumping through their body. The way a male was for 10 or 15 years, okay? And their testosterone levels now are on par with what a females is. They meet the weight class requirement. Once you see that, there's going to be other things that they would have to analyze. If their testosterone is in line with women, then the other things that you mentioned, bone density and muscle strength, muscle ability, things like that would have to be looked at or are going to be looked at to see that it's a fair playing field for everybody. And to make sure that everybody's safe. - It's a strange dynamic, it's kind of, it's a little bit like baseball and steroids, you know. - Sure. - But what makes this situation with the Olympics, even stranger to me, is that, you know, all these people are bigger, stronger, faster than me, right? So they all are born this way, right? So where do you draw that line on testing if it's naturally occurring? Now, if you're doping, if you're doping, that's a whole another thing. But this isn't doping. - Right, right. - This is naturally occurring. So, I mean, I don't know where you draw the line, but I also do know that I don't want anybody to get seriously hurt, and that's what's gonna happen. And I don't know the answer, but that's, you know, that's the question for the courts, right? - That's right, and it's gonna be interesting to see how we deal with this. But, you know, what I think what you'll see, especially at least in the United States, with the legal system and everything that I've seen going, you know, in the past, is that there is a deep and serious focus by people that really care about this. These issues that see the law as the philosophy of the people that it governs. And so, I think that ultimately, we're gonna come across with some rules and tests, like you said, to attempt to be fair to everybody. But at the same time, there's always these exceptions. There's always a line that we draw. And like Reed said, I think it's gonna be incredibly difficult when it comes to drawing the line. When a person just so happens to produce. - People in this way. - Produce, exactly. And so, we have 9 billion people on the planet. I mean, that's 9 billion variations of human being. And so, in there, you got strawberry blonde, you got dirty blonde, you got, you know, bleach blonde, or-- - Beautifully bald. - Or whatever. - Beautifully bald. You got all these variations. - Beautifully thinning is what I go with. - Your-- - Skin tone, everything. And it just makes sense that if everything else varies from person to person, that maybe testosterone, you know, for a woman is gonna vary a little bit. - Well, there's more testosterone in certain men than there are in other men. I don't know where you draw that line. You know, I just, it's a tough situation. But I think, you know, my feeling on it is, it all comes down, it's very similar to premise liability. In my opinion, I do a lot of premise liability. And so, that's what flash boy, you know, like Bob's went off in my head when all this was going down is knowledge, who has the knowledge, and then what do they do with the knowledge. So, the IOC is saying, you know, they're following the rules, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff, so you go, there's no culpability. But what if the IOC has knowledge that we don't have? And then, that's what you look at. What did they do with that knowledge? If they knew or had, or should have known that someone was going to get injured with their own policies, they still can be liable. - Yeah. - And it's all, and it goes, like Sean, it goes back to what you were asking too, 'cause then you have to balance, well, what's the knowledge of the fighter? - Yeah, sure. - They knew that this person had higher testosterone levels. They were bigger, stronger, faster. You know, that's a legal question and a jury question. - So you talk about knowledge, and there's a law school set of facts that occurred, I think it was in the late 1980s, and it was a fighter done by the name of Louis Resto and Billy Collins. - A fighter? - Yeah, a fighter, yeah, boxer. Louis Resto, he's a, I think he was a Latin American fighter. And prior to the fight, Billy Collins was incredibly talented guy, up and coming. - Louis Resto was kind of like a journeyman, not expecting to do very well. Louis Resto went out and rearranged his face. - Rocky. - And it looked absolutely horrific. His eyes were both on the swollen shut by the end of it, and Billy Collins, it was a terrible, sad situation, just stop boxing, and yeah, just went down a really dark path after that. But it came out, and Billy Collins' father picked it out after the fight. That Louis Resto and his trainer had taken his wraps, these were hand wraps to protect the hands they put underneath the boxing glove and dipped him in plaster. And so basically he made his fist basically just cement inside that solid, and then they went in and removed the padding in front of the knuckles on his glove, right? And in that situation, you have the fighter that's culpable. Why? Because he knew exactly what he was doing, right? And then, but you also have the promotion because the promotion actually had a responsibility. They're supposed to watch them wrap. I don't know if you've ever seen the guys prior to the UFC, or boxing or whatever. - They're never official there. - There's an official watching him wrap his hands. That's because of this type of thing going on. That's because of cases like Louis Resto, and you'll see the actual referee, the person that watched him wrapping, they sign the person's wrap. - Oh, okay. - Okay, before they go in the glove. So those are all things that happened to make sure that none of that kind of stuff actually goes on, but in that situation, both of them had, I would say, pretty equal culpability. - In that situation, you're looking at criminal as well. - Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, he knew he was going there into assault that guy. - Yep. - So, but this is a hot, hot button issue, please. Let us know what you actually think in the comments about how this type of issue should be dealt with, whether you think the IOC is correct in their decision and basically allowing Imani to actually box based on her being able to meet the requirements of the testosterone levels. - Can I be curious out there, if y'all have any opinions on if there is a situation where this leads to a serious injury, if that's just a assumption of the risk or if somebody should be culpable, I don't know. So, I'm just curious what y'all think out there. - Well, that's gonna do it for us this time. Please, if you like what we're doing, like, follow, subscribe. And if you're actually injured in a premises liability case in Georgia, South Carolina, please sign right over here. - I'm your man. - Keep the right man for the job. But thank y'all very much for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]