VILLEPINTE, France — It is not new, this matter of endocrinology that has brought so many of us to the boxing hall in the industrial prairies of the Paris suburbs on a Friday afternoon.

It has been a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world for a very long time.

I spent the morning reading about the Galli of the Roman Empire, the male attendants of the Goddess Cybele who performed self-castration and whose gender identity, I read in one scholarly paper, “was somewhat ambiguous.”