It feels like conservatives have to find a new non-existent struggle to complain about during each Olympics event, and today’s non-problem is truly a doozy.
Swimmer and Joe Rogan lackey Riley Gaines—along with Libs of TikTok—recently went on X to decry the problem of “male” boxers competing in women’s events. But what male boxers is she talking about, you might be asking. Is this the old familiar trans panic rearing its ugly head? Sort of, but not quite. This time, the bullies are picking on a cis woman.
For the record, Imane Khelif is an Algerian boxer who’s been competing for years, despite having “failed” the transphobic “gender eligibility” test that she was put through at last year’s Women’s World Boxing Championships. As journalist Alejandra Caraballo quickly pointed out on Twitter, Khelif is a cis woman who happens to have higher than average levels of testosterone. Everyone has a combination of estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone in their body, and it’s normal for that combination to be different from person to person. Khelif is a woman with XY chromosomes, which, again, doesn’t make her any less of a woman. But nobody needs this biology 101 lesson, except for folks who have literally nothing else to do but create trans panic out of thin air, even when it concerns cis athletes.
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To make matters even more hypocritical, Gaines discussed Khelif’s participation in terms of her concern that allowing “men” to box against women would cause women physical harm. But there’s an actual convicted child rapist, Dutch volleyball player Steven van de Velde, currently at the Olympics, and Gaines hasn’t said a peep about him.
So yeah, it’s your basic garden variety TERF hypocrisy at work. Unsurprising, but definitely depressing.
