News item: Not a minute had passed in the boxing ring Wednesday at the Paris Olympics when Italian boxer Angela Carini raised her hand to stop the bout. Carini, who would leave the ring in tears, had absorbed gusts of powerful jabs from Imane Khelif, an Algerian boxer barred from the 2023 world championships after failing a gender eligibility test.

And so I ask: Is THIS going to be enough to awaken not merely our country, but the world as well, about biological males competing in women’s sports events?

Is THIS egregious enough to inspire meaningful discussion and change, or do we want to maintain the rage culture that perpetuates culture wars through cheap debate?

The events in Paris continue to sustain that for transgender issues in sports, we sink deeper into the abyss. The reasons we can't agree are numerous, including a fundamental confusion over transgender issues in general, thus imperiling the necessity of gaining common denominator information.

Example: Per Yahoo sports, Khelif was disqualified hours before her gold-medal bout last year at the World Championships in India, resulting from International Boxing Association rules that prevent athletes with XY chromosomes from competing in women’s events. The IBA also disqualified Chinese Taipei’s Lin Yu-Ting before her bronze medal bout for the same reason.

Except that the International Olympic Committee, again per Yahoo, stripped the IBA of its status as the global governing body for boxing because of long-running governance issues and a series of judging scandals. It leaves boxing in Paris under the umbrella of the IOC’s Paris 2024 Boxing unit, which has chosen to disregard the results of Khelif’s and Yu-Ting’s gender eligibility tests last year.

What marvelous consistency.

And so let me ask: Suppose Khelif belted Carini so hard that it caused Carini permanent health damage? Or death? Would THAT be heinous enough?

Our antiquated, one-size-fits-all laws on transgender athletes do not address the inherent concerns of equity, morality and biology. They need to be rewritten because they do not sufficiently and specifically address the unique requirements and vagaries of sports as they relate to life's other engagements and competitions.

Why can't we consider a sports-centric law that acknowledges sports' unique challenges and accommodates the physical component for success that exists virtually nowhere else in society?

I’ve asked this question many times. I’ve asked it in print. I’ve asked lawmakers. The result? Too many people too scared of appearing insensitive. Meanwhile, we imperil the safety of women in sports, in a time when the women's sports revolution is among the country's greatest athletic distinctions.

We should all agree that sex discrimination in education, health care, housing and financial credit have no place in this country. But we must — must — realize and accept that sports require a physical component to succeed that calls for different guidelines.

Put it this way: Applying to a school or for health care, housing or financial credit requires no physical component to succeed. Sports require speed, strength and agility and do not fit under the same umbrella. And yet sports are routinely shoved into the same arguments about unfair treatment. Injustices get piled on for rhetorical usefulness, even though they're not applicable.

The male born composition has inherent physical advantages, rare exceptions noted. But in the aggregate, there are physiologic differences between biological males and females. We should respect a person’s pronoun of choice. But that doesn't mean we have to blindly agree with claims that are not supported by science.

I support someone else’s desire to evolve into another gender. But that decision imperils the opportunity to compete in sports, unless the competition is part of a transgender division.

A research institution from the northeast studied transgender men and women who had undergone hormone treatment for a year. The conclusion: “Despite the robust increases in muscle mass and strength in TM (transgender men), the TW (transgender women) were still stronger and had more muscle mass following 12 months of treatment. These findings add new knowledge that could be relevant when evaluating transwomen's eligibility to compete in the women's category of athletic competitions.”

I’ve quoted Duke University Law professor Doriane Coleman many times on this issue. Coleman, who is immersed in both the academic and athletic spheres, not only writes about sex and the law, but won the NCAA championship running the 800 and 4x400 at Cornell.

"Inclusion of trans women and girls without regard to the extent of their male physical development or their hormone status reduces opportunities female athletes have to win podium spots and championships," Coleman wrote in an email.

"To secure the enormous value that girls' and women's competitive sport produces for individual female athletes, their communities, and society, lawmakers need to ensure that eligibility for competitive teams and events continues to be based on biological sex or at least on sex-linked biology," Coleman said.

"This is critical, because if trans women and girls who have the male sex-linked advantages that matter for sport — testes and bioavailable testosterone in the male range — are permitted to displace female athletes on girls' and women's teams and in girls' and women's events, lawmakers lose the only viable rationale for separate sex sports.

“Think about it: The law doesn't provide for separate sex sports so that athletes have a setting in which to express their gender identities. It provides for separate sex sports because if it didn't, we'd never see females in finals or on podiums.”

We have been at the forefront of such issues in Connecticut high school sports. Debates have raged and lawsuits were filed and argued over whether two transgender female runners, Terry Miller of Bloomfield and Andraya Yearwood of Cromwell, should have been allowed to compete against their cisgender (a person whose gender identity corresponds with that person's biological sex assigned at birth) peers.

Cisgender competitors filed a Title IX complaint in June 2019, claiming Miller and Yearwood, who won a combined 15 championship races, had an unfair athletic advantage. Which they did. Just look at newspaper photos taken from the races. Your conclusions will be drawn for you.

But while we had a chance to enact specific sports-centric laws that guaranteed rights and freedoms — but considered sports and their physical nature with deeper scrutiny — Connecticut copped out.

Too many people who are simply too afraid.

I ask all of you again: How can any lucid human being look at what happened to Angela Carini the other night in the boxing ring and believe that to be fair, just and a symbol of progress?

We need to get off our ascots and address this. Now. Before somebody gets hurt. Or worse.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro

Editor’s note: According to a statement by International Olympic Committee spokesman Mark Adams this week, Algerian women’s boxer Imane Khelif “was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female and has a female passport. This is not a transgender case.” The IOC defends Khelif’s right to compete at the Olympics.