Olympic Trans Panic: Electric Boogaloo
I wrote about the brewing trans panic at the Olympics two days ago. As of yesterday, that panic seemed to hit a fever pitch. First, a quick recap.
Imane Khelif had a match against an Italian boxer. A little more than 30 seconds into the match, the Italian forfeited the match. She walked back to the media room and gave a tearful interview saying:
I've never been hit so hard in my life. It's up to the IOC to judge if this fight was fair.
Right wing agitators and otherwise gender critical people immediately started spreading the video of the fight and the tears with the claim that Imane Khelif is a transgender woman and was born with a typically male phenotype. There are far too many people to name, maybe I'll make an addendum with screenshots of tweets soon, but a few examples are: J.K. Rowling, Riley Gaines, End Wokeness Twitter account, J.D. Vance, Charlie Kirk, Pat McAfee, Alex Jones, Greg Abbott, Logan Paul1, Elon Musk, and, of course, Donald Trump. This thing blew up and spread like wildfire, that list could go on for hundreds of names.
Then normies started picking up on it, and they've already been primed to believe this is a real issue by years of gender critical propaganda. Then media companies started reporting on it, presenting the claim that Imane Khelif is transgender as a fact. These include Fox News, One America News, Infowars, NY Post, and The Telegraph.
I tried to tell people about what I had researched the day before to write that blog post. That the original claim came from the International Boxing Association, a deeply untrustworthy organization, but it was moving too fast with too many people pushing it. People didn't care that the claim wasn't verifiable. They were far too invested in the trans panic narrative to question the fundamentals of the claim.
At some point in the evening, after this had been burning through the internet for a day, photos emerged of Imane Khelif as a girl, and she indeed has a typically female phenotype. That seemed to break the fever. The normies realized that this wasn't a man beating up a woman, making her cry, and ruining her Olympics she had trained so hard for. Instead, this was two women fighting, one of which was in a completely different league than the other.
There's a new claim now, that Imane has a rare genetic disorder causing her to have XXY sex chromosomes. I haven't seen that reported by a reputable source, and it doesn't even matter if it's true. Either way, the narrative was broken for the normies. Of course the initial agitators woke up this morning and decided that this poor woman they'd spent the previous day defaming and slandering deserves more abuse. J.K. Rowling and Riley Gaines are out there posting that XXY sex chromosomes make her a man anyway, even though she was born with a female phenotype. But bigots are gonna bigot, and hopefully it helps illustrate how obsessive, hateful, and, well, weird these people are to people who aren't too online.
There isn't much of a bright side here. Frankly, it was terrifying to see how quickly and easily people could be convinced to contribute to the targeted harassment of someone they know nothing about, and deeply disturbing that they can't be easily talked out of it. The one bright side was it was encouraging to see some people rally to stand up Imane. USA rugby hero Ilana Maher gave an emotional account of how often she's baselessly accused of being transgender. Brianna Turner, on the WNBA's Chicago Sky and the GOAT Twitter poster, posted multiple times in support of Imane. Gabrielle Union, who of course has a transgender daughter with basketball legend Dywane Wade, was [also](https://x.com/itsgabrielleu/status/1819118034604404842 [outspoken]%28https://x.com/itsgabrielleu/status/1819121129069728065%29 [about]%28https://x.com/itsgabrielleu/status/1819121995789091010) it.
The vast majority of my mutuals on Twitter were primarily found through a shared fandom of the Denver Nuggets, not for progressive politics, and almost all of them were right there with me, trying to cool down the temperature and stand up for Imane Khefir. I didn't necessarily expect that, and in fact I found it very encouraging. One thing that really bummed me out, though, was something a transgender mutual posted (and I won't link to it, I'm not sure they want the attention):
Being a transgender sports fan sucks ass right now. Watching all of your sports heroes and favorite players be openly hateful and phobic is heartbreaking
And that's the goal at the end. To create an out-group that can be dehumanized to form cohesion amongst the in-groups. And it really fucking hurts to see people hurting who already hurt too often.
To all my transgender brothers and sisters and everyone in between: I can't imagine how painful the rhetoric around trans folks is on a daily basis, let alone a day like yesterday. But you are loved, and you'll always have an outspoken ally in me, and I know I'm not the only one. It'll probably get darker before it gets lighter, but I do believe that the future will be much brighter. Until then, hang in there and stay safe y'all.
In fairness to Logan Paul, he has since apologized for spreading misinformation and admitted that Imane is "a biological woman." However, he has not publicly apologized to harm caused to Imane by calling her "the purest form of evil" or characterizing her as man who beats women.↩
