Here we go again — Is there an echo in here? — with outrage at the Paris Olympics, this time stirred by certain people using misinformation and misunderstanding about a female athlete who doesn’t fit their image of traditional femininity competing in women’s boxing in order to push an agenda.
And once again, politicians and others with a point to make, in Utah and elsewhere, no matter how far they must reach to do it, are all over it.
You may have heard that Imane Khelif, an amateur boxer from Algeria, was fighting Italian boxer Angela Carini, and the fight lasted all of 46 seconds, when, after Khelif landed two strong punches to Carini’s face, the Italian quit the fight. She walked away. She refused to shake hands with the Algerian, then fell to her knees in the ring and started to cry.
She wasn’t the only one doing the crying.
An army of folks on social media flipped their lids, claiming what Carini more than intimated by refusing to fight on — that Khelif is a biological male competing with an unfair advantage against biological females. Those international cries, from individuals like J.K. Rowling and Donald Trump, and local ones, too, from Utah politicos such as Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz and Gov. Spencer Cox, included declarations or derivatives thereof that the Olympics — the IOC, in particular — were allowing a man to beat up a woman right there in plain view of the world.
Disgusting, it was called. Disgraceful. Damnable. Demonic, even.
The problem with all of that is: Khelif isn’t a biological male. An IOC spokesperson on Friday confirmed she’s not transgender. She’s a female. She was born female, raised female, identifies as female, all in a country that outlaws being a transgender person.
What a large number of the complaints here are really aimed at, complete with the political whiffs that denigrate transgender individuals and all those who wish to protect their rights, is gender identity. It’s remarkable that so many people are so eager to jump aboard that cause, one that isn’t even properly applicable to what ignited the outcry. Rather, what happened with Khelif and Carini is an excuse to do what is so often done these days — manufacture outrage.
Nobody wants to see a man beat up a woman — in the name of sport or anywhere else.
But how do you imagine that? How do you differentiate between the sexes?
Khelif never had male genitalia. If she didn’t have the traditional appearance or facial/body structure of a woman, is that reason enough to disallow her from competing? And what exactly is that look and structure, anyway? And who’s to judge that? We could argue that even if she once did have male genitalia, it wouldn’t matter. But let’s not fry the narrow minds of people in this space here and now who are convinced that biology is binary and that’s all there is to the issue.
Back to Khelif, the woman who is being torn to shreds for not being and looking female enough. She’s been a longtime boxer, who has been defeated multiple times in her career by other female fighters. She competed in the Tokyo Olympics and lost in the quaterfinals. The trouble for her started when the IBA, a boxing federation based in Russia that the IOC shut the door on as it pertained to any kind of control at the Olympics, allegedly on account of corruption, disallowed her from competing for a gold medal in a tournament it sanctioned in March, 2023. It claimed that Khelif failed a test of some sort, but it did not clarify what that test was or give details regarding her failure.
This caused speculation that Khelif’s testosterone levels were out of whack, and conjecture about her chromosome composition. Was it XY, like a portion of the world’s population is? Was it evidence of some sort of ambiguous gender characteristic? What was it? Nobody on the outside knows.
The IOC had no problem with Khelif, allowing her to box because she rightly qualified, the same as she had in Tokyo and in other previous competitions.
But when Carini ducked out in the fight with the Algerian, suddenly Khelif is a biological male putting wicked hands on, perpetrating violence upon a biological woman. And the cries of injustice come cascading in from those who have the aforementioned agenda to push.
It’s notable that Carini on Friday said she wants to apologize to Khelif for her actions in the ring: “All this controversy makes me sad,” she told an Italian newspaper. “I’m sorry for my opponent, too. If the IOC said she can fight, I respect that decision.”
Others do not respect it.
Far outside the boundaries of boxing, a whole lot of conservatives, political and religious, want to make it simple and put all humans into two boxes — male or female. That’s the way God intended it, that’s the way it is. No exceptions. But in an extremely complicated realm of scientific study, done by people far more educated than I, it is said there are individuals where the line between genders is blurred, emotionally, mentally, physically, individuals in whom XY chromosomes and other ambiguities are a factor.
In the past, to the protestation of those who do not agree, so many conservatives have wanted to strictly use genitalia as the proving point of who’s what. But if, in the now confusing case of Khelif, she has female genitalia, is that no longer proof enough that she’s female? And if that’s not enough, then are there, will there be, cases where if a girl isn’t quite girly enough, doesn’t look or act girly enough, will she be called out and ostracized and discriminated against by that wholly inexact methodology? We’ve already sadly seen that happen in Utah high school sports.
The matter is complicated and it should be treated like it is complicated, not just some simplified, open-and-shut deal where … well, women are women and men are men, and that’s the way God intended it.
The hate raining down on Khelif is tragic. Imagine, a man punching a woman at the Olympic Games. Shame, shame. Um, yeah, that’s not what this was. The suspicion here, as mentioned, is that much of the expressed anger surrounding this hubbub is aimed at transgenderism, a complex, elaborate issue and deep study that baffles minds that want to keep complicated things simple — and regulated. It could be stated that if there are complex cases in which a female with female genitalia is not considered female, that’s a substantive argument for transgenderism.
And if that issue includes an explosive combo-pack of politics and religion, mixed with a question of fairness in sports, all with advantages to gain by those who shout indignation, that’s one more outrageously unfortunate ticket to ride for those so eager to jump aboard.