Algerian female welterweight boxer Imane Khelif.
There’s 90 days to go until the Nov. 5 general election and I know at least one thing for certain. Team MAGA will continue to demonize, denigrate and degrade the transgender community to the bitter end, across the country and right here in River City.
Latest case in point: Female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who will fight China’s Liu Yang for the gold medal in the welterweight division at the Paris Olympics this Friday.
Last week, Khelif advanced to the semifinals after Italian boxer Angela Carini withdrew from the match 46 seconds into the first round. Khelif landed a solid left jab to Carini’s face and the Italian retreated to her corner, where her coach adjusted her headgear. When she returned to the center of the ring, Khelif landed a solid overhand right to Carini’s head and the Italian abruptly quit the fight.
Carini complained that her nose hurt and she’d never been punched so hard. A review of the short fight reveals that Khelif landed several solid blows shortly before Carini exited, but nothing spectacular, no blows with Leon Spinks-ish knockout power. There are no welts on Carini’s face, her nose appears intact and there’s no blood.
Imane Khelif, in red, punches Angela Carini in the face.
But here’s the deal. Khelif, 25, was born a female, raised a female and has boxed in the female amateur ranks for nearly a decade. Nevertheless, last year at the International Boxing Association World Championships, Khelif was disqualified mid-tournament after the IBA claimed she didn’t meet the eligibility requirements for female competition.
The disqualification came after Khelif defeated a Russian opponent, and perhaps not coincidentally, the IBA has been banned from the Olympics as a sanctioning agency for alleged corrupt practices that include ties to Russian oligarchs and the Kremlin.
What female requirements Khelif didn’t meet has never been specified by the IBA. Last year, one IBA official claimed a test revealed Khelif has XY chromosomes, more typical for males, as opposed to XX chromosomes, more typical in females.
Earlier this year the IBA rescinded that claim and an allegation Khelif failed a testosterone test, stating the results are confidential. The truth is, no one outside of the IBA knows for certain.
But no matter. Khelif’s seemingly easy defeat of Carini sparked an immediate social media firestorm as thousands of anti-trans posters, a la Austin Powers in the 1990s comedy film, raced to out Khelif to the online world: “It’s a man, baby!”
Those posters included such luminaries as “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, X owner Elon Musk, and former president Donald Trump.
To be certain, Imane Khelif has androgynous qualities. At 5’10” and 145 pounds, she is stick-slender, like many boxers who have to diet to compete in their respective weight divisions.
With her short-cropped black hair (sometimes streaked with blond) and angular facial features she might be mistaken for a man by strangers.
Nevertheless, Khelif is a woman, as recognized by the International Olympic Committee, her boxing peers, and her family and friends back home in Algeria.
It’s possible (though not by any means proven) that Khelif has some differences of sexual development, a medical term that refers to a vast array of conditions known to the public by the catch-all word, intersex.
For example individuals with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome can be born with XY chromosomes, a clitoris, a vagina, breasts, undescended testes and testosterone levels higher than the female average. They are generally raised as females.
South African runner Caster Semenya.
Caster Semenya, the female South African middle distance runner who won the gold in the 800 meters at the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, was born with a similar intersex condition known as 5?-Reductase 2 deficiency.
She has XY chromosomes, a clitoris, a vagina, undescended testicles and male levels of testosterone. Semenya, who was raised as a female, was required to take medication to reduce her testosterone levels in order to compete in both Olympics. The medicine, which she described as poison, made her quite sick, but she still managed to win two gold medals.
No one knows if Khelif has differences of sexual development; the results of the IBA test have never been publicly released and are tainted in advance, thanks to that organization’s alleged corruption.
Khelif is definitely not a trans female, since their very existence is banned in her home country. But that hasn’t stopped Rowling, Musk, Trump and the MAGAverse from piling on the Algerian boxer, particularly on Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Lacking any scientific evidence, their allegations that Khelif is a man competing against women seems to be entirely based on the boxer’s androgynous appearance. This is a disturbing social media trend that currently cuts across all women’s sports.
Many female athletes have long been pressured by the male gaze to not only excel at their sport but to look beautiful doing it. Social media merely amplifies this rancid misogyny.
Female basketball superstar Caitlin Clark.
For example, basketball phenom Caitlin Clark’s demolition of the NCAA scoring record for women and men and her rise to the WNBA is arguably the biggest sports story of the year. But that’s not enough for some men, and it usually is men who harsh on Clark’s looks online.
Like Khelif, the six-foot-zero, 154-pound Clark is tall, slender and androgynous. The basketball prodigy plays like a guy because her skills were next-level from grade school on, so she grew up practicing against the boys. The training regime worked to spectacular effect. She’s now the white female analog of Steph Curry. She’s glorious to watch.
But Clark’s detractors can’t see the beauty when she swishes a three-pointer from virtually anywhere outside the line on her side of the court. They don’t chuckle when she befuddles taller players with the crossover dribble and no-look passes. These joyless weirdos have only one thing on their mind: tearing down successful females.
Therefore the many social media posts about Clark proclaiming, “she’s a man, baby!”
USA Rugby team star Ilona Maher.
USA Rugby women’s team member Ilona Maher knows the territory. She’s 5’10,” 200 pounds and a formidable tackler on the field. She helped USA Rugby win a bronze medal in the Olympic Women’s 7 in Paris last week.
Maher is equally famous on TikTok as a body positive influencer, where she’s been posting her often humorous reflections on gender since the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Despite her successes since then, online trolls still reduce her to tears sometimes, as she shared last week.
While no one in the reality-based community has ever officially challenged Clark and Maher’s gender, in the MAGAverse they’re often lumped together with androgynous female boxers like Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, who was also disqualified at the 2023 IBA World Championships, and transgender female American swimmer Lia Thomas.
Transgender swimmer Lia Thomas in 2022.
The anti-trans community remembers Thomas as the “fully intact male” swimmer who won the women’s 500-meter freestyle at the 2022 NCAA championships. What they don’t mention is shortly thereafter Thomas, and all transgender female swimmers who have gone through puberty as males, were banned from competition by the International Swimming Federation.
This pattern has been repeated just about every time a transgender female athlete wins her division or event. When two transgender female high school athletes dared to qualify for the California state track and field championship last year, they were forced to withdraw after violent threats to their lives.
Locally, transphobic Christian Nationalist public officials such as Shasta County Board of Education trustee Authur Gorman and Anderson Union High School District president Jackie LaBarbera claim they won’t follow laws — like AB 1955 — designed to protect LGBTQ kids.
That’s the SAFETY act, AKA the forced outing law passed last month that prevents school boards from implementing policies that require administrators, teachers and staff to out LGBTQ students, especially transgender students, against their will.
LaBarbera, Gorman, Rowling, Musk, Trump and his MAGA minions want us to believe, with no evidence, that woke public school teachers are grooming students and changing their gender identities and sexual orientations.
“They’re coming for our children!” is their frequent panicked refrain. We’re sure to be hearing more of it as Shasta County gears up for the November election, which includes more than 60 local school board seats.
In reality, no one is coming for our children. The truth is that a small percentage of people — less than two percent of the population — are born with differences of sexual development. An even smaller percentage is born with gender dysphoria that results in an incongruence between gender identity and the sex given an birth.
Imane Khelif is not some sort of female Mike Tyson who has ripped through the amateur female boxing ranks with an endless string of first-round knockouts. Her record stands at 38 wins, 9 losses, including a loss to Ireland’s Amy Broadhurst for the 2022 IBA World Championship in the welterweight division.
In that fight, the 5’8” Broadhurst overcame Khelif’s height and reach advantage by keeping her defenses up and working inside, tagging Khelif with combinations to the body and the head. The strategy paid off when the majority of the 5 judges awarded the world championship to Broadhurst for scoring the most points in the three-round bout.
This Friday’s gold medal match in the welterweight division pits Khelif against China’s Liu Yang. She’s 32 and like Khelif, 5’10” tall. Consult your local listings for the time and streaming channel, it’s bound to be one of the best bouts of these Olympics.
And have no fear. No one is coming for our children.
