Transphobes Now Attacking Cis Women* For Participating In The Olympics
Transphobes Now Attacking Cis Women* For Participating In The Olympics
JK Rowling and others don't even know what they're mad at anymore.
Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is a cis woman. She was, as they say, “assigned female at birth.”
Nevertheless, on Thursday, JK Rowling, Elon Musk, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and every other transphobic twit on earth who can’t calm down long enough to look anything up, went absolutely hysterical over the fact that she easily beat Italian boxer Angela Carini. Why? Because they thought she was trans.
“Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better?” Rowling wrote on social media. “The smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.”
No one was smirking. Nothing that Rowling thought was happening in that picture was actually happening in real life.
“[E]xplain why you’re OK with a man beating a woman in public for your entertainment,” she wrote in another. “This isn’t sport. From the bullying cheat in red all the way up to the organisers who allowed this to happen, this is men revelling in their power over women.”
The “confusion” was caused by the fact that Khelif and another female boxer, Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, failed a “gender test” in 2023 — the test, notably, was run by the International Boxing Association, which, the AP reports, “has been banished from Olympic boxing since before the Tokyo Games.” (Which Khelif and Lin both competed in without issue.)
Part of the reason was that Khelif was reportedly found to have some XY chromosomes. While XY chromosomes are something we typically associate with men, there are conditions in which cis women can have them as well — notably androgen insensitivity syndrome and Swyer syndrome. These women have functional female genitalia and, often, reproductive systems. We do not know what condition Khelif has, but also it is none of our damn business. In fact, she may not have any XY chromosomes or any condition at all. The IBA is notoriously corrupt, which is why they were banished from the Olympics in the first place. They won’t even say what kind of test they used to determine this.
The International Olympic Committee has released a statement on their position.
We have seen in reports misleading information about two female athletes competing at the Olympic Games Paris 2024. The two athletes have been competing in international boxing competitions for many years in the women’s category, including the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, International Boxing Association (IBA) World Championships and IBA-sanctioned tournaments.
These two athletes were the victims of a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA. Towards the end of the IBA World Championships in 2023, they were suddenly disqualified without any due process.
According to the IBA minutes available on their website, this decision was initially taken solely by the IBA Secretary General and CEO. The IBA Board only ratified it afterwards and only subsequently requested that a procedure to follow in similar cases in the future be established and reflected in the IBA Regulations. The minutes also say that the IBA should “establish a clear procedure on gender testing”.
The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years.
There’s also a lot that is shady about these tests and the IBA itself, which is closely associated with Russia — which, you may recall, is also not allowed to be part of the Olympic games this year.
Via Washington Post:
A person with knowledge of last year’s disqualifications from worlds but not authorized to speak publicly called Khelif and Lin’s banishments “classic IBA disinformation.”
Three people familiar with the details of the women’s case pointed out that the disqualifications came three days after Khelif defeated Russian Azalia Amineva and a day after she won her semifinal bout in the 63-66-kg (139-145.5-pound) category.
Fed up by a history of judging and bribery scandals involving the IBA even before Kremlev was first elected as the organization’s president in 2020, the IOC took control of Olympic boxing at the Tokyo Games.
The abuse these two women have taken from hysterical TERFs who are convinced they are “men” is horrifying enough — but even more so because it could actually put Khelif in serious danger. It is illegal to be openly transgender or to transition in Algeria. Gender roles tend to be very strict in that country and Khelif has faced no small amount of sexist opposition even just due to her interest in sports.
“Imane recalls how at 16 she managed to excel in football in her rural village in Tiaret in western Algeria despite football not being seen as a game fit for girls,” read a March 2024 article published on the UNICEF website (Khelif is a UNICEF ambassador). “Moreover, the boys in her village felt threatened and picked fights with her. Ironically it was her ability to dodge the boys’ punches that got her into boxing.”
Her father opposed her getting into boxing, as he said it was not a sport for girls — and she and her mother had to sell scrap metal and couscous to raise money so that she could compete.
All of this being said, it is worth noting that there is basically zero evidence available to suggest that transgender women and girls who have not gone through male puberty, or who have been on hormone replacement therapy for a significant amount of time, have any kind of physical advantage over cis women or girls in sports. This is why these sorts of things should be decided on a case-by-case basis.
Part of what a lot of transphobes cling to, just in general, is an elementary-school level understanding of human biology and genetics. This is why one sees them cite Kindergarten Cop far more often than they cite any advanced scientific studies on the subject.
I guess that one isn’t particularly helpful in this case.
The more you learn about any given subject, the more nuance you find. This is true of anything and it’s certainly true for human biology. Sure! For the most part, those assigned female at birth have XX chromosomes and what we consider “female” reproductive organs and those assigned male have XY chromosomes and what we consider “male” reproductive organs. But that’s not always the case! Cisgender women can have some XY chromosomes. They can also have XXY chromosomes, also known as Klinefelter Syndrome. There are people with XXYY, XXXY and XXXXY chromosomes. There are cis women who have a lot of testosterone for a variety of reasons, including health issues like polycystic ovary syndrome or congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Cis men can have overly high estrogen levels. If you understand that there are biological sex variances, it’s not remotely hard to understand that there are, of course, also gender variances.
It’s not hard.
Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting both deserve to be at the Olympics, just as anyone else who has qualified does. They do not deserve this ridiculous abuse from people like Rowling who have to scream about this nonsense because it is all they have left of a personality now.
*Elon says “cis” — which just means “not trans” — is a slur, so we doubt you will be seeing this story on Twitter.
The boxer needs to SUE the hell out of them all.
Thank you for posting this article. As a believing Christian, I have been horrified and saddened by all of the misinformation and slander being spread about these two athletes. It seems that as you said, people cannot get beyond their own phobias to actually see the facts as they are. Or else, they don’t want to see the facts, but want to spread a political agenda.