"A significant error was made in a headline on a story in Friday’s print sports section about Algerian boxer Imane Khelif incorrectly describing her as transgender. She is not. Additionally, our initial correction of this error neglected to note that she was born female. We recognize the magnitude of this mistake and have corrected it in the epaper, the electronic version of the printed Globe. This editing lapse is regretful and unacceptable and we apologize to Khelif, to Associated Press writer Greg Beacham, and to you, our readers."
So wait. They're saying she is a trans woman, or a trans man? Now I'm confused. Saw a man saying she was born female, but how could she have X/Y chromosome unless she's intersex at birth? This is getting crazy now. So much crap thrown in every direction.
Unlike what the religious zealots and/or trans-exclusionary bigots would prefer to believe, biology is extremely complex, incredibly intricate, and often gets a little messy. Whereas the willfully ignorant haters like to crow about the sex and gender "binary", pretty much everything complicated in biology is actually distributed on a curve or spectrum. That includes biological sex, gender, sexual orientation, et cetera.
Between genetics, epigenetics, random mutations, and various anomalous coding "misprints" and disorders, the most recent study I saw estimated that nearly 1 out of every ~5,500 or so human births can technically be classified as "intersex" (defined as "chromosomal sex [e.g., "XX" = typically female and "XY" = typically male] is inconsistent w/ phenotypic sex [observable sexual characteristics, e.g., female genitalia]") in one way or another.
Obviously, I don't know many details about this particular female athlete, but here's one simple example of why the hatemongers' attempts at "biological zealotry" are both a fool's errand and nothing short of sex and gender fascism:
Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) is a disorder in which a patient whose chromosomes are "XY" (typically male) happens to have the inability to properly respond to androgens such as testosterone. Since (simplistically) all humans begin development as essentially female, someone with "Complete" Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome will be born with all the easily observable indications of being a healthy young female, including (often) completely normal female external genitalia. It would take an entire separate article to detail how and why this can happen, but suffice to say that unless the parents opt for genetic testing or advanced imaging, no one will have any idea that this hypothetical baby girl has CAIS until she hits puberty. So her birth certificate says "F", she's lived her whole life as a girl, and unless you look at her chromosomes or do an in-depth examination of her reproductive organs, you wouldn't even know that she is technically intersex. Nearly all CAIS patients live as women...just women that can't conceive.
See? Biology is complicated and messy. The whole intractable "binary" positions staked out by the haters makes any legitimate biologist roll their eyes and shake their head sadly at the ignorant hubris on display...
[Edited to remove the unnecessary HTML from the provided hyperlink]
I've grown tired of arguing with boomers on the blogs that insist that our understanding of biology has not changed since they took biology in highschool. These folks are desperate to keep their obsolete world view intact at any cost.
Honestly, I'm seeing people my age and younger repeating the same shit. Please don't put an age onto this, because there is a reason why the fascism that fuels this transphobia (in the form of extreme-right exclusionary politics) has managed to land so well in multiple European countries which are now backsliding democracies as a result.
The problematic thing for me is also that it does the thing that transphobes do to transpeople: label people.
Let's simply call out racism, discriminatory behavior, bigotry, sexism, gay- and transphobia without labelling the group of people that regurgitate it.
Because if anything: the people affected by their hateful views know who is being talked about.
Oh now, why you dig at boomers when many generations are being shits about trans people? I had a young man in my house treating it for bugs. He said the dumbest things that all those people in the echo chamber are saying. He didn't know I'm trans. I set him straight. He couldn't have been more than 30 years old and I'm a boomer.
I see. Well, since I made that comment, I went and read up on it a little bit. I hate science, but it was interesting. Yes, she's intersex. So what. Thing is, she's Muslim and racism is crawling up in here about her beating that white woman. She's got more testosterone in her system than average women, which is why she's so muscular and has masculine features. Thing is, there are many Olympic female athletes with bodies like hers. That never stopped anything. I bet those women had more testosterone in their blood, too.
They just mad because she beat her opponent terribly. It happens. Especially with boxing or even kick-boxing.
She's not intersex. There is no factual accurate knowledge about this. All we know comes from a highly unreliable source, lead by a Russian guy that has close ties to the Kremlin. And we know how the Kremlin thinks about sexual diversity.
Why do you think World Aquatics has been promoting anti-trans viewpoints after being bribed with a new headquarters in Hungary? Also not a big proponent of gay- or transrights?
I agree with the racism part, but concerning the facts that we have, there's actually little to absolutely nothing that we know.
And that's the problem with the people going off on tangents now.
Which is especially troublesome given how it's now showing that people like Rowling don't care: they just as well shame a cis-woman for being transgender, while claiming to be "about protecting women in sports" and "protecting women's rights".
It also shows the double standard of people like Rowling first saying men can't have uteruses, and now that's somehow possible...
If only people would wake up to the ease at which these people are able to change their narrative, and the way they hate...
Her DNA was tested. That's a fact. Did you read the other link I put around here somewhere? She was tested the previous year, disqualified from competing, then they decided to let her compete the following year because they're not supposed to discriminate based on chromosomes. I forget the name of their organizations out there in charge of the competitions, but I'm not pulling that out of my ass, Iris. How do you think they know she has XY chromosomes? Her training beat that woman, not her chromosomes. Well, most likely, because she has lost before. I think they didn't like that she looks so masculine and is a Muslim. She looks very tall, too. Towered over the woman she beat.
It doesn't seem quite that cut-and-dry, on a closer look...
The only source for the claims made about Imane Khelif's chromosomes and testosterone levels, even in the article you posted earlier, is Umar Kremlev, the president of the International Boxing Association. No supporting evidence seems to have been presented at all, and he wouldn't even offer specifics on exactly what tests were performed, or by which labs, or what their methodology was, so that any of it could be verified.
Kremlev is an associate of Vladimir Putin's; he was installed as IBA president after a highly suspect proceeding; since his takeover, the organization has had its headquarters relocated to Russia, and Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom has provided a majority of its funding (the IBA has also apparently changed its name, but that's not relevant to the discussion at hand). But wait, there's more! Imane Khelif's disqualification from the IBA's 2023 Women's World Boxing Championships occurred a few days after Khelif broke a previously-undefeated *Russian* boxer's winning streak. Heck of a coincidence, that...
The IOC- the International Olympic Committee, that is- had no involvement in the 2023 championship from which Imane Khelif was disqualified; the International Boxing Association (which did run said championship) was banned from the Olympics prior to the 2020 games (and well before Russia invaded Ukraine; it wasn't a retaliatory decision), so the two organizations' ties with each other had been effectively severed years prior to the events in question. No ruling was reversed to allow Khelif to qualify for the Olympics, and it doesn't have anything to do with the IOC's position on chromosome testing- it's simply that the IOC doesn't recognize the validity (or integrity) of the IBA's ruling on her, as per their own statement here: https://olympics.com/ioc/news/joint-paris-2024-boxing-unit-ioc-statement
I'm not usually one to wear tin foil hats, but... all of this strikes me as smelling somewhat like the downwind side of a tuna cannery during a power outage in July, and I don't think we can draw any conclusions about anyone's biology based on the IBA's claims- which, again, appear to be unsubstantiated by any verifiable evidence. Of course (standard disclaimer) everything I know about sports I learned at Google U, but... I'm far more inclined to trust the AP and the IOC on this, because everything I'm finding about the IBA while digging into this story is sending up all sorts of red flags.
Not enough news outlets are talking about the racism involved in the complaint against Khelif. White cis womanhood is socially constructed to make women of color "unfeminine" by comparison. From there it's a short step to accusing them of being men in disguise. A woman of color who defeated a white woman can't possibly have done it fairly, according to them.
Yeah, remember when they accused Michelle Obama of being a transgender woman? That was disgusting. They went after their children, too ... claiming they were adopted or something. They also went after our beloved Serena Williams, claiming she was a transgender woman as well.
I meant to say they do these things to them because they can't practice racism OUT LOUD anymore. Not without getting a bunch of flack. So, they start attacking them in other ways. This is one of those ways. SMFH
Honestly, looking at a former lawyer in The Netherlands who went hardcore anti-trans and racist, transphobia tends to go hand in hand with rabid racism.
This woman I am now talking about started out being transphobic, and in April or May this year called all muslims antisemites....
She even said it like this: "You see that it is baked into their culture, into the religion of islam."
Oh, and to make things worse, she tried to do the "Look, I have research that says I'm not racist!" thing by linking to 2 pieces of research.
To bad for her was that both pieces, one written by a problematic pro-Israel professor of some university, and another that was actually much better and factually much more accurate than the first, nowhere included the word "religion of islam" or "muslims".
No, both pieces talked about feelings (or lack thereof) in Arabic countries following the attacks of October the 7th.
The media however, was dead silent on her lies, one newspaper (which has a problematic amount of employees working there who also live in the the village this former lawyer, who is now a minister is from) even went so far as to humanize her in one of the most cringeworthy ways.
Pointing out how good she was at making her own clothes, how she was together with the love of her life since the age of 15.
It was absolutely disgusting, but the remark showed very well how transphobia typically is not where it stops: when people are bigots, it tends to transfer over to other areas of discrimination.
She, by the way, personally let me know that "she can't be transphobic, I know several transpeople".
SMFH ... ridiculous. No, her racism bled over onto her transphobia. Racism is the most hideous of them all and starts when they're very young. At young ages, they don't know about trans people.
Here's the thing. If she's running out trying to prove she's not racist, then she's racist. Same with being transphobic. Either way, those people are proving to be dangerous to our culture. A study can't prove or disprove how you're being in life. That's a matter of awareness, not denial.
Sadly, newspaper journalists are never, ever in charge of their headlines. That’s always the editors job to write and if I was that journalist. I’d be furious to have my name tied to a headline like that.
The controversy surrounding Khalif is awful and deplorable. It is more proof (as if we needed any) that gender policing and transvestigations based on physical appearances, stereotypes and misinformation hurts cis women too, and by extension ALL women. It is disgusting. Journalists should be ashamed. Transphobia by the press is just out of control at this point. How did we get here? This mess would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.
Agreed except the final sentence: the misogyny of athletic gender policing that mixed often with transphobia has been around since the 1930s at least. It is a long and sordid history, with many women falling victim. But now the people who benefit from it have a new twist to keep it going, just as the IOC was beginning to show some sense.
Personally, the IOC still shows sense. They have been defending her and backing her.
And they explicitly called out the problematic behavior of the IBA.
I will agree on the situation of transphobic people milking the absolute last cent out of controversy, clearly showing they do not care about women's rights, but the IOC has taken a clear position here.
I did not mean to imply that the IOC was at fault here. I agree with what you've said. I've been studying the entire history of "gender policing" in the Olympics (as part of a forthcoming book on trans women in athletics), and the "show some sense" has been a gradual evolution. Let's hope it continues.
Just like the New York Times, this is another example of base pandering for dollars. The writer of the headline (and managing editor who had to approve it) know quite well what they're doing, and are unlikely to be Matt-Walsch-type transphobes. But they know what can get them a few more clicks. They have no concern about the amount of pain they cause others. And there is no consequence for it.
Clearly I don't know what goes on in the minds of large news company executives, but that's my guess based on years of experience with other such executives. It is sad indeed, but I think people who get into such positions are selected by the system to have very short-range vision (just like those in Exxon-Mobil, etc.). One might have hoped that the news business would have a better moral compass, but I think it's gotten lost.
The thing I find most frustrating about this whole hullaballoo is that boxing already has the most sensible method of categorizing competitors: weight classes. Khelif is a welterweight and she is competing against other welterweights, that's how the sport is organized.
Along with the fact that the Italian boxer apparently has quickly given up fights a couple of times before, and this isn't exactly new.
And that's next to the boxer now accused of all kinds of things having fought 2 years a go, lost a couple of fights but didn't have any controversy surrounding her participation.
Just like the opening ceremony's depiction of a Greek mythology scene, it merely made conservatives do the "OMG We can be angry about this as long as we create a narrative!"
To quote a columnist in my country (The Netherlands): "They are hiding behind the Bible as a shield for everything they don't like. And they hope the shield is big enough so people fail to see what really is going on behind it."
This is no surprise. Mis-/dis-information is a staple of those who have an anti-trans agenda and so these people show little to no understanding of science and little remorse when they are shown to be entirely wrong. The problem is these lies spread like wildfire on social media inflaming those who are already filled with hate and those who are just ignorant. There is never a retraction, an apology or a change in how things are vetted. The bulk of the "news" media whose responsibility is supposedly in conveying the truth is more interested in being first regardless of the truth and even if falsely salacious, don't care because "if it bleeds it leads", as the Boston Globe headline shows. Perhaps she has a legal option to sue for defamation. This could have been an opportunity for media to condemn how controlling of women's lives is as well as condemning Algeria for its anti-transgender laws. Sad and frightening at the same time.
I don't consider that a well written apology and how small do you think and what page did they bury the retraction on. The damage is done. Bottom line, was anyone fired or demoted as a result, I doubt it.
I think you misunderstood me, in no way do I find the apology makes it ok, I agree that the damage was done, horrid and abysmal. I only commenting to clarify where you said there is never a retraction or apology, I agree with pretty much everything else you said
So much of this discourse is like, “no she’s not trans, she’s a REAL woman!”
I’m glad that this is shining a light on the transphobia hate-machine, but the narrative seems to be that it only matters when they start hurting cis people
Yeah, that "real" woman thing is nuanced. Same with "real" man, which can mean multiple things. Even with their correction, they still said something stupid. SMFH
𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘧𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘢𝘺- an athlete got hurt competing in a sport that centers around two people punching each other until one of them is too badly injured to keep fighting?! That headline should be run on the same page of the newspaper as late-breaking news about the Sun rising in the east!
Come the hell on. It's not as if first-round knockouts, or boxers conceding matches because they're just not up to facing a particular opponent, are things which are unheard of. Because... y'know. The sport is about two people punching each other in the fucking face repeatedly. Boxers have for many, many years routinely walked away from fights bloody and concussed, with detached retinas, missing teeth, fractured jaws... by all rights, the matches should take place adjacent to the nearest Emergency Room, or else the sport should just be banned outright because... honestly, what the fuck, people? Why in the twenty-first century do we still have a sport whose only meaningful distinction from a back-alley brawl is the substitution of little foam pads for brass knuckles?
But no, we must have our gladiatorial games. And if brown lady is better at punching than white lady, that must mean brown lady is actually a man.
What a crock of shit this all is.
*edit- And another thing. None of this would even be happening if this happened in a match between two men. There would be no vilification of the victor going on. None. The very same assgoblins who are demonizing Imane Khelif would be celebrating instead. The conquering hero would be lionized as a paragon of masculinity for punching his opponent into submission in under a minute. The media would probably give him a cool nickname for it that he'd wear with pride for the rest of his career, his home country would put him on a stamp, and he'd go down in history beside Muhammad Ali as one of the greats of the sport. The sexist hypocrisy going on here is... well, no, it isn't unbelievable. Not even a little bit. It is, however, infuriating.
I think what's lost in the misogyny of it all is the will to take care of one's self. The Italian boxer realized that she had a brain injury and she forfeited; this is the correct move if you value the existence of your brain
It is a truly brutal sport but listen. I knew a transman who competed in semi-pro boxing. He's now in a wheelchair from getting head/neck injured in a match. He was in the best of shape, because he had been boxing for quite a while. He said he had no idea how much harder cisgender men hit than cisgender women. Said he saw stars and almost passed out the first time he got hit in the head. The higher they get in that kind of sport, the harder they GET hit. Ask a man going from college football to the NFL. They'll tell you the same.
A cisgender man can kill a cisgender woman with one punch. That's why people encourage men not to hit women. They could seriously harm them. Their muscle-mass is just that different. The hand strength of an AMAB is 10 times that of an AFAB, with variations, of course. That means most other parts of a cisgender male's body are more powerful than cisgender females or transgender males. It's a safety issue when it comes to boxing.
I became a paid subscriber just so I could reply to this nonsense. Look up Hergie Bacyadan, a WORLD CHAMPION trans man boxer. Look up Patricio Manuel, a five-time NATIONAL CHAMPION trans guy boxing in the USA.
Stop spouting cissexist, misogynistic supremacy narratives like this. Of course some guys will get injured in boxing, that doesn't mean trans guys can't compete or do well.
Yeah, okay. Both you and Cara are in that echo chamber where they call people stupid names when their opinion differs from the chamber. You didn't know those people personally, did you? Anyway, they do have to be careful that biological males aren't competing in sports with biological females post-puberty #1. That's all this is about. It's unfortunate that this boxer got caught up in the middle of the hysteria around us, but attacking me won't change me or the issue at hand.
You're full of crap that there's 0 issues with any of this and to call me cissexist, misogynistic, supremacy whatever is stupid. I'm a pro-Black transman. If anybody sounds like a white supremacist, that would be you. I can't stand them. You sound more like a woman than any kind of man, dude. I've also fought a few times with cisgender males, and I agree with the man I knew & my own experiences; not any of you. My father was a professional athlete as well. So, step the hell off Alex. My opinion is valid. Your judgments are not valid to me.
You people who say the same dumb things when someone is outside the box than you is extremely problematic. I feel sorry for your partners who have to deal with this level of toxicity. What you said only put the spotlight on you, and I don't care what you're saying to argue. Go learn how to debate instead of attack. Keep pushing with hostility and the push-back from the opposite direction will be (y)our undoing. You're fighting the wrong people because you don't know how to fight (y)our oppressors. SMFH
Good on Erin to get another sub, who came in here to attack a good guy in the matter. I am not your problem. The establishment is.
But you can't deny that your "opinions" have been exclusionary, contradictory and confusing right?
"A cisgender man can kill a cisgender woman with one punch. That's why people encourage men not to hit women."
Because this is not about the difference in force, it's a form of patriarchy in which it was believed that it's simply indecent to hit a woman as a man.
Also, by continuing to use the suggestion of AMAB people having more force, you continue to basically reinstate the belief, the idea that Khelif is a transwoman, which she is not.
Another thing that it does is completely ignoring the fact that when it comes to hard evidence about the situation of Khelif, we know practically nothing.
Yet here you are using anecdotal evidence about AMAB people.
No one is denying that there is a difference. But here is the thing: Transwomen, before being eligible to compete in the women's category, tend to have to adhere to strict hormone guidelines.
The medications we need to take (typically also as part of HRT in general) are not exactly good for our athletic performance.
The problem by continuing to insinuate that Khelif is capable of punching harder than cis-women means you want to continue to insist that she is trans.
Khelif has participated in boxing earlier, and didn't exactly dominate there. Only 6 games she won ended with a knockout. Of about 50 games, that's not exactly the "domination" that people like to refer to when it comes to suggesting that transwomen are completely killing women everywhere.
There is no known, open transathlete competing in the Olympics, and there hasn't been for 20 years, ever since the IOC relaxed it's guidelines in 2004.
If transwomen were such a dominating factor, so much stronger even while on HRT guidelines (if not being barred from competing outright like an increasing amount of sports unions are now doing), we should've seen that.
We should've seen classification games being dominated. We should've seen people winning game after game in other championships.
Lia Thomas, often loudly called a cheater only won 2 races. She never broke a record.
The athlete that did, and won 6 races? Almost no one knows her name, merely because the transphobic people who love to shout how transwomen in sports are "erasing women" are ACTUALLY doing that.
Also: You might want to stop holding 1 anecdotal experience as evidence against the whole transcommunity.
Because here is the thing when that happens for any other reason, in, like, let's say, a criminal act of sexual misconduct: people LOVE to hold that against the whole trans community, but will never hold a cis-male (which they almost ALL ARE) against all cis-men when they commit such an act.
Thank you. As for the "it's important to keep in mind there is a difference," well most abilities between cis men and cis women are two different bell curves in distribution, with a different average, yes. But there is also significant overlap between the genders, and this includes athletic ability. Its not true that all cisgender men have athletic advantage over all cisgender women. And then trans people's abilities are even more likely to have gray area than that, for obvious reasons.
There are ways to protect athletes from differences in height, weight, muscle mass as needed for sports where it's that relevant, and boxing already has weight categories to address this too.
But part of the reason there are women's sports in the first place, isn't because women needed to be protected from these differences. It's because TV networks and sports companies didn't want to show the opposite, that sometimes women will beat men in sports. That's why baseball became mens only after a woman pitcher struck out Babe Ruth, that's why gun events became gendered after a woman won big in the early 90's, and there are examples in other sports I know less about too, I'm sure. Additionally, cis women actually have the advantage on record, when it comes to certain athletic things like long-distance running.
I will avoid further debate here, but you can guess what I think of KingRay and his rants. The best thing I have to say about that person, is it's nice that he gives money to Erin to fund her research.
Yes, I can deny what you're saying because I'm talking about the brute force of boxing. You're talking about something else. This particular comment wasn't talking about the transgender fight for equality with regards to sports. I tire of that particular subject. You took it out of context and anybody else reading what I said. If you read what I said with that filter, of course you and lots of people overstate what I said and change the context which I said it. I'm way outside that box. Try jumping in mine and you will see nothing confusing about it.
Now, going on and on and on will not change anything I said. You people just want to fight and if you want to do that, go get your oppressors. I'm not one of them. That is the problem with this fucking topic. People want to fight each other about it instead of going after the reason this has become a mess. I certainly didn't make it that way. Cisgender heterosexual Christian Nationalists have made it that way.
I stand by what I said 100%. If you don't like it, keep scrolling past it. I don't care when people do that bullshit. I'm not living or commenting from that echo chamber you're in.
Oh please. It's so easy to pick anecdotes like this as if it's universal fact. I have an ex (cis woman) who sparred all the time with men at all sorts of boxing gyms in NYC. Many of them serious fighters and would spar because there weren't enough women to spar with every time. They'd always be shocked boxing with her because not only could she take their hits, they would also tell her constantly that she hit like a truck.
Does that mean it's like this for every case? No! There's a reason it's a weight-classed sport and also a reason why the number of full-round fights are limited. It's brutal and is dangerous. Cis people have serious injury all the time. Trying to go fight the facts by cherry-picking your arguments is just projection onto trans people and ignores a lot of the variations in bodies of fighters, just like we see with this story and people assuming all sorts of things with no factual backing. All of the boxers in my life, including one who just spent a weekend with the US boxing team in Paris will say similar things.
Sparring is not competition. That's a different ballgame altogether. They know who they're sparring with and won't knock them TF out. And, I tell you what. When a transman can hit the ball out of a semi-pro or pro ballpark, I'll believe what you're saying. There are always exception to the rules, which is what you're trying to say. Talk about anecdotal. How about a transman throwing a 100mph fastball? Thing is, they don't have the cismale hand, leg, or arm strength to do that. That's why you don't see any of us competing on that level. I was an athlete for a very long time, and lived inside of professional sports. SMFH
You might have been an athlete, but you are not trans, and continue to show that you do not understand the processes that transpeople go through, along with the harm the current discussion is actually causing.
That's the problem people are having with your insinuations about how AMAB people are always better at this or that.
As a transwoman I'm 170 cm's tall. For a Dutch person, that's the average height for women.
Most women at work are taller than me.
But yet, I get questions asked a lot about how I managed to stay so short.
This is the stereotypical idea of how men and women are "supposed" to look, that results in people not even realizing that they themselves are not part of that average, or stereotype.
It's usually even only after I explain to them that I actually was so short when I was younger there were concerns my body was having hormonal issues, and they looked into it, that they realize that they are actually taller than the average.
The main concern was my thyroid breaking down the puberty hormones before they could do anything to my body.
These women tend to only realize how this average, this stereotype of "all women are mostly this and this size" is problematic when they meet me, while previously having noticed they have trouble finding clothes.
Add to this questions about why I don't have an adamsapple, or why my shoulders are narrow, my feet and hands are small, and you can start to see why transphobia is so dangerous.
When you look at transphobic ideas of how a woman is supposed to look, you can already see how merely length can become a problem.
People who are part of the gender police think they know everything about biology, while they are actually incredibly problematic.
What you fail to see, because with Khelif, next to knowing practically nothing that can be fact-checked, we are now seeing transphobic people who looooove to claim they are about protecting women HARASSING a cis-woman! (And not caring they are doing so).
And when you see how this is targeted at someone from Algeria, you can clearly see the underlying, smoldering racism that it is based on.
Racism that these people to a degree realize they can't openly use anymore, so they do it like this. And you are partially falling for it.
Iris, now you're full of shit. I am an AFAB transman as witnessed in all my YouTube videos. Again, you just want to argue because you, me, and everybody else around the internet are tense/upset because of the onslaught of bullshit coming from the GOP. Go after them, not me. I could care less what you think. You are delusional. Your judgments are not accepted or respected by me. You want to be a little jerk? No, you can just fuck all the way off.
I had been out in the sun in stlouis and thought I was losing my mind. I'm so glad you have the determination, skill, and support to do all this. I have talked with individuals and a military unit about trans issues but that was with people that wanted to learn.
Well, she can't "recall" the notification emails that got sent out on initial publishing, so if you read it in its email form, the duplicate would still be present. Plus, "something something browser and server caching something" can be tricky.
Besides everything else already noted, another highly unfortunate consequence of the Khalif controversy is that it reinforces haters’ warped belief about what a trans woman should “look like” (even though, again, Khalif is NOT transgender!) The problem with this stereotype is that trans women can, on occasion, be just as attractive, graceful, and cis-passing as any from-birth female. When that occurs, such trans women initially have a much easier time in life and don’t get questioned readily, but if the trans history ever comes out, the reaction can be as savage and ruthless as anything.
They are self-destructing so rapidly. They are CREEPY WEIRDOS, utterly OBSESSED with what's in people's pants. NORMAL people leave all this stuff to the governing bodies, in this case the IOC.
If this woman is not on the phone with the best defamation lawyers in the US and the UK the minute after the Olympic flame goes out she’ll only have herself to blame for missing out on a big payday. The list of deep pocketed individuals and media outlets who got this completely wrong without the slightest bit of fact checking is almost unprecedented. And I would certainly start with Miss Hogwarts and Chaya Headcase.
The Boston Globe is evidently on its way to becoming an UNmajor American newspaper to join the list of other MSM purveyors of DISinformation garbage like the NYT. Guess I need to look up its owner’s name to watch out for that one.
I wish a journalist would investigate if Angela Carini deliberately provoked this fire storm. I find it hard to believe that it just happened without being planned ahead of time, especially given the theatrical nature of the failed bout; that Carini, when not competing is a member of the Italian state police, the child of a police officer, and according to Dave Zirin, has right wing politics herself; she was publicly consoled by the Italian fascist Prime Minister the evening after the fight; and the fact that all right wing parties worldwide are targeting, gender, non-conforming people. Not to mention, that Carini‘s opponent in this case is Muslim, a targeted population at this time in Europe and Italy. All these factors suggest to me that this was a contrived event designed to provoke outrage for political gain.
She might've found the article I just found that this athlete was disqualified last year because they discovered she had X/Y chromosomes. Now I'm thinking she's intersex if "F" was on her birth certificate, but she had that chromosome. What a mess, though.
The paper has issued an apology and correction.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/08/03/sports/editors-note/
"A significant error was made in a headline on a story in Friday’s print sports section about Algerian boxer Imane Khelif incorrectly describing her as transgender. She is not. Additionally, our initial correction of this error neglected to note that she was born female. We recognize the magnitude of this mistake and have corrected it in the epaper, the electronic version of the printed Globe. This editing lapse is regretful and unacceptable and we apologize to Khelif, to Associated Press writer Greg Beacham, and to you, our readers."
So wait. They're saying she is a trans woman, or a trans man? Now I'm confused. Saw a man saying she was born female, but how could she have X/Y chromosome unless she's intersex at birth? This is getting crazy now. So much crap thrown in every direction.
Unlike what the religious zealots and/or trans-exclusionary bigots would prefer to believe, biology is extremely complex, incredibly intricate, and often gets a little messy. Whereas the willfully ignorant haters like to crow about the sex and gender "binary", pretty much everything complicated in biology is actually distributed on a curve or spectrum. That includes biological sex, gender, sexual orientation, et cetera.
Between genetics, epigenetics, random mutations, and various anomalous coding "misprints" and disorders, the most recent study I saw estimated that nearly 1 out of every ~5,500 or so human births can technically be classified as "intersex" (defined as "chromosomal sex [e.g., "XX" = typically female and "XY" = typically male] is inconsistent w/ phenotypic sex [observable sexual characteristics, e.g., female genitalia]") in one way or another.
Obviously, I don't know many details about this particular female athlete, but here's one simple example of why the hatemongers' attempts at "biological zealotry" are both a fool's errand and nothing short of sex and gender fascism:
"https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/androgen-insensitivity-syndrome/"
Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) is a disorder in which a patient whose chromosomes are "XY" (typically male) happens to have the inability to properly respond to androgens such as testosterone. Since (simplistically) all humans begin development as essentially female, someone with "Complete" Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome will be born with all the easily observable indications of being a healthy young female, including (often) completely normal female external genitalia. It would take an entire separate article to detail how and why this can happen, but suffice to say that unless the parents opt for genetic testing or advanced imaging, no one will have any idea that this hypothetical baby girl has CAIS until she hits puberty. So her birth certificate says "F", she's lived her whole life as a girl, and unless you look at her chromosomes or do an in-depth examination of her reproductive organs, you wouldn't even know that she is technically intersex. Nearly all CAIS patients live as women...just women that can't conceive.
See? Biology is complicated and messy. The whole intractable "binary" positions staked out by the haters makes any legitimate biologist roll their eyes and shake their head sadly at the ignorant hubris on display...
[Edited to remove the unnecessary HTML from the provided hyperlink]
I've grown tired of arguing with boomers on the blogs that insist that our understanding of biology has not changed since they took biology in highschool. These folks are desperate to keep their obsolete world view intact at any cost.
Honestly, I'm seeing people my age and younger repeating the same shit. Please don't put an age onto this, because there is a reason why the fascism that fuels this transphobia (in the form of extreme-right exclusionary politics) has managed to land so well in multiple European countries which are now backsliding democracies as a result.
The problematic thing for me is also that it does the thing that transphobes do to transpeople: label people.
Let's simply call out racism, discriminatory behavior, bigotry, sexism, gay- and transphobia without labelling the group of people that regurgitate it.
Because if anything: the people affected by their hateful views know who is being talked about.
Agreed. It is truly exhausting. That's yet another reason why incredible journalists / advocates like Erin are so incredibly important.
And on the plus side, the reason they are getting so obnoxiously vocal and unreasonable of late...is because WE'RE WINNING!
Oh now, why you dig at boomers when many generations are being shits about trans people? I had a young man in my house treating it for bugs. He said the dumbest things that all those people in the echo chamber are saying. He didn't know I'm trans. I set him straight. He couldn't have been more than 30 years old and I'm a boomer.
I see. Well, since I made that comment, I went and read up on it a little bit. I hate science, but it was interesting. Yes, she's intersex. So what. Thing is, she's Muslim and racism is crawling up in here about her beating that white woman. She's got more testosterone in her system than average women, which is why she's so muscular and has masculine features. Thing is, there are many Olympic female athletes with bodies like hers. That never stopped anything. I bet those women had more testosterone in their blood, too.
They just mad because she beat her opponent terribly. It happens. Especially with boxing or even kick-boxing.
She's not intersex. There is no factual accurate knowledge about this. All we know comes from a highly unreliable source, lead by a Russian guy that has close ties to the Kremlin. And we know how the Kremlin thinks about sexual diversity.
Why do you think World Aquatics has been promoting anti-trans viewpoints after being bribed with a new headquarters in Hungary? Also not a big proponent of gay- or transrights?
I agree with the racism part, but concerning the facts that we have, there's actually little to absolutely nothing that we know.
And that's the problem with the people going off on tangents now.
Which is especially troublesome given how it's now showing that people like Rowling don't care: they just as well shame a cis-woman for being transgender, while claiming to be "about protecting women in sports" and "protecting women's rights".
It also shows the double standard of people like Rowling first saying men can't have uteruses, and now that's somehow possible...
If only people would wake up to the ease at which these people are able to change their narrative, and the way they hate...
Her DNA was tested. That's a fact. Did you read the other link I put around here somewhere? She was tested the previous year, disqualified from competing, then they decided to let her compete the following year because they're not supposed to discriminate based on chromosomes. I forget the name of their organizations out there in charge of the competitions, but I'm not pulling that out of my ass, Iris. How do you think they know she has XY chromosomes? Her training beat that woman, not her chromosomes. Well, most likely, because she has lost before. I think they didn't like that she looks so masculine and is a Muslim. She looks very tall, too. Towered over the woman she beat.
It doesn't seem quite that cut-and-dry, on a closer look...
The only source for the claims made about Imane Khelif's chromosomes and testosterone levels, even in the article you posted earlier, is Umar Kremlev, the president of the International Boxing Association. No supporting evidence seems to have been presented at all, and he wouldn't even offer specifics on exactly what tests were performed, or by which labs, or what their methodology was, so that any of it could be verified.
Kremlev is an associate of Vladimir Putin's; he was installed as IBA president after a highly suspect proceeding; since his takeover, the organization has had its headquarters relocated to Russia, and Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom has provided a majority of its funding (the IBA has also apparently changed its name, but that's not relevant to the discussion at hand). But wait, there's more! Imane Khelif's disqualification from the IBA's 2023 Women's World Boxing Championships occurred a few days after Khelif broke a previously-undefeated *Russian* boxer's winning streak. Heck of a coincidence, that...
The IOC- the International Olympic Committee, that is- had no involvement in the 2023 championship from which Imane Khelif was disqualified; the International Boxing Association (which did run said championship) was banned from the Olympics prior to the 2020 games (and well before Russia invaded Ukraine; it wasn't a retaliatory decision), so the two organizations' ties with each other had been effectively severed years prior to the events in question. No ruling was reversed to allow Khelif to qualify for the Olympics, and it doesn't have anything to do with the IOC's position on chromosome testing- it's simply that the IOC doesn't recognize the validity (or integrity) of the IBA's ruling on her, as per their own statement here: https://olympics.com/ioc/news/joint-paris-2024-boxing-unit-ioc-statement
I'm not usually one to wear tin foil hats, but... all of this strikes me as smelling somewhat like the downwind side of a tuna cannery during a power outage in July, and I don't think we can draw any conclusions about anyone's biology based on the IBA's claims- which, again, appear to be unsubstantiated by any verifiable evidence. Of course (standard disclaimer) everything I know about sports I learned at Google U, but... I'm far more inclined to trust the AP and the IOC on this, because everything I'm finding about the IBA while digging into this story is sending up all sorts of red flags.
Sources:
https://apnews.com/article/olympics-2024-khelif-russia-boxing-b53b1edda21139d14a572bd35ca440e6
https://apnews.com/article/2024-paris-olympics-women-boxing-1c6c10c60d792b282df3a42561055d14
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_IBA_Women%27s_World_Boxing_Championships#Medal_table
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Boxing_Association#2020%E2%80%932022
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif#2023:_IBA_Championships_disqualification
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/boxing/tokyo-2020-olympics-games-boxing-aiba-banned-latest-news-a8975326.html
Not enough news outlets are talking about the racism involved in the complaint against Khelif. White cis womanhood is socially constructed to make women of color "unfeminine" by comparison. From there it's a short step to accusing them of being men in disguise. A woman of color who defeated a white woman can't possibly have done it fairly, according to them.
Yeah, remember when they accused Michelle Obama of being a transgender woman? That was disgusting. They went after their children, too ... claiming they were adopted or something. They also went after our beloved Serena Williams, claiming she was a transgender woman as well.
I meant to say they do these things to them because they can't practice racism OUT LOUD anymore. Not without getting a bunch of flack. So, they start attacking them in other ways. This is one of those ways. SMFH
Honestly, looking at a former lawyer in The Netherlands who went hardcore anti-trans and racist, transphobia tends to go hand in hand with rabid racism.
This woman I am now talking about started out being transphobic, and in April or May this year called all muslims antisemites....
She even said it like this: "You see that it is baked into their culture, into the religion of islam."
Oh, and to make things worse, she tried to do the "Look, I have research that says I'm not racist!" thing by linking to 2 pieces of research.
To bad for her was that both pieces, one written by a problematic pro-Israel professor of some university, and another that was actually much better and factually much more accurate than the first, nowhere included the word "religion of islam" or "muslims".
No, both pieces talked about feelings (or lack thereof) in Arabic countries following the attacks of October the 7th.
The media however, was dead silent on her lies, one newspaper (which has a problematic amount of employees working there who also live in the the village this former lawyer, who is now a minister is from) even went so far as to humanize her in one of the most cringeworthy ways.
Pointing out how good she was at making her own clothes, how she was together with the love of her life since the age of 15.
It was absolutely disgusting, but the remark showed very well how transphobia typically is not where it stops: when people are bigots, it tends to transfer over to other areas of discrimination.
She, by the way, personally let me know that "she can't be transphobic, I know several transpeople".
Which to me was a massive red flag.
SMFH ... ridiculous. No, her racism bled over onto her transphobia. Racism is the most hideous of them all and starts when they're very young. At young ages, they don't know about trans people.
Here's the thing. If she's running out trying to prove she's not racist, then she's racist. Same with being transphobic. Either way, those people are proving to be dangerous to our culture. A study can't prove or disprove how you're being in life. That's a matter of awareness, not denial.
Sadly, newspaper journalists are never, ever in charge of their headlines. That’s always the editors job to write and if I was that journalist. I’d be furious to have my name tied to a headline like that.
The controversy surrounding Khalif is awful and deplorable. It is more proof (as if we needed any) that gender policing and transvestigations based on physical appearances, stereotypes and misinformation hurts cis women too, and by extension ALL women. It is disgusting. Journalists should be ashamed. Transphobia by the press is just out of control at this point. How did we get here? This mess would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.
Agreed except the final sentence: the misogyny of athletic gender policing that mixed often with transphobia has been around since the 1930s at least. It is a long and sordid history, with many women falling victim. But now the people who benefit from it have a new twist to keep it going, just as the IOC was beginning to show some sense.
Personally, the IOC still shows sense. They have been defending her and backing her.
And they explicitly called out the problematic behavior of the IBA.
I will agree on the situation of transphobic people milking the absolute last cent out of controversy, clearly showing they do not care about women's rights, but the IOC has taken a clear position here.
I did not mean to imply that the IOC was at fault here. I agree with what you've said. I've been studying the entire history of "gender policing" in the Olympics (as part of a forthcoming book on trans women in athletics), and the "show some sense" has been a gradual evolution. Let's hope it continues.
Just like the New York Times, this is another example of base pandering for dollars. The writer of the headline (and managing editor who had to approve it) know quite well what they're doing, and are unlikely to be Matt-Walsch-type transphobes. But they know what can get them a few more clicks. They have no concern about the amount of pain they cause others. And there is no consequence for it.
I'm fairly cynical myself, but even *I* hadn't considered this monstrous possibility.
Sadly, though...you're probably right. =(
Clearly I don't know what goes on in the minds of large news company executives, but that's my guess based on years of experience with other such executives. It is sad indeed, but I think people who get into such positions are selected by the system to have very short-range vision (just like those in Exxon-Mobil, etc.). One might have hoped that the news business would have a better moral compass, but I think it's gotten lost.
The thing I find most frustrating about this whole hullaballoo is that boxing already has the most sensible method of categorizing competitors: weight classes. Khelif is a welterweight and she is competing against other welterweights, that's how the sport is organized.
Along with the fact that the Italian boxer apparently has quickly given up fights a couple of times before, and this isn't exactly new.
And that's next to the boxer now accused of all kinds of things having fought 2 years a go, lost a couple of fights but didn't have any controversy surrounding her participation.
Just like the opening ceremony's depiction of a Greek mythology scene, it merely made conservatives do the "OMG We can be angry about this as long as we create a narrative!"
To quote a columnist in my country (The Netherlands): "They are hiding behind the Bible as a shield for everything they don't like. And they hope the shield is big enough so people fail to see what really is going on behind it."
This is no surprise. Mis-/dis-information is a staple of those who have an anti-trans agenda and so these people show little to no understanding of science and little remorse when they are shown to be entirely wrong. The problem is these lies spread like wildfire on social media inflaming those who are already filled with hate and those who are just ignorant. There is never a retraction, an apology or a change in how things are vetted. The bulk of the "news" media whose responsibility is supposedly in conveying the truth is more interested in being first regardless of the truth and even if falsely salacious, don't care because "if it bleeds it leads", as the Boston Globe headline shows. Perhaps she has a legal option to sue for defamation. This could have been an opportunity for media to condemn how controlling of women's lives is as well as condemning Algeria for its anti-transgender laws. Sad and frightening at the same time.
It's looks like they issued a retraction with a well-written apology. Still awful that they did it in the first place though
I don't consider that a well written apology and how small do you think and what page did they bury the retraction on. The damage is done. Bottom line, was anyone fired or demoted as a result, I doubt it.
I think you misunderstood me, in no way do I find the apology makes it ok, I agree that the damage was done, horrid and abysmal. I only commenting to clarify where you said there is never a retraction or apology, I agree with pretty much everything else you said
So much of this discourse is like, “no she’s not trans, she’s a REAL woman!”
I’m glad that this is shining a light on the transphobia hate-machine, but the narrative seems to be that it only matters when they start hurting cis people
Yeah, that "real" woman thing is nuanced. Same with "real" man, which can mean multiple things. Even with their correction, they still said something stupid. SMFH
She is our clocky champion and on behalf of all things dollcoded, she will win the gold!
𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘧𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘢𝘺- an athlete got hurt competing in a sport that centers around two people punching each other until one of them is too badly injured to keep fighting?! That headline should be run on the same page of the newspaper as late-breaking news about the Sun rising in the east!
Come the hell on. It's not as if first-round knockouts, or boxers conceding matches because they're just not up to facing a particular opponent, are things which are unheard of. Because... y'know. The sport is about two people punching each other in the fucking face repeatedly. Boxers have for many, many years routinely walked away from fights bloody and concussed, with detached retinas, missing teeth, fractured jaws... by all rights, the matches should take place adjacent to the nearest Emergency Room, or else the sport should just be banned outright because... honestly, what the fuck, people? Why in the twenty-first century do we still have a sport whose only meaningful distinction from a back-alley brawl is the substitution of little foam pads for brass knuckles?
But no, we must have our gladiatorial games. And if brown lady is better at punching than white lady, that must mean brown lady is actually a man.
What a crock of shit this all is.
*edit- And another thing. None of this would even be happening if this happened in a match between two men. There would be no vilification of the victor going on. None. The very same assgoblins who are demonizing Imane Khelif would be celebrating instead. The conquering hero would be lionized as a paragon of masculinity for punching his opponent into submission in under a minute. The media would probably give him a cool nickname for it that he'd wear with pride for the rest of his career, his home country would put him on a stamp, and he'd go down in history beside Muhammad Ali as one of the greats of the sport. The sexist hypocrisy going on here is... well, no, it isn't unbelievable. Not even a little bit. It is, however, infuriating.
I think what's lost in the misogyny of it all is the will to take care of one's self. The Italian boxer realized that she had a brain injury and she forfeited; this is the correct move if you value the existence of your brain
That too! It is not an act of weakness to listen to your survival instincts when they tell you it's time to tap out.
It is a truly brutal sport but listen. I knew a transman who competed in semi-pro boxing. He's now in a wheelchair from getting head/neck injured in a match. He was in the best of shape, because he had been boxing for quite a while. He said he had no idea how much harder cisgender men hit than cisgender women. Said he saw stars and almost passed out the first time he got hit in the head. The higher they get in that kind of sport, the harder they GET hit. Ask a man going from college football to the NFL. They'll tell you the same.
A cisgender man can kill a cisgender woman with one punch. That's why people encourage men not to hit women. They could seriously harm them. Their muscle-mass is just that different. The hand strength of an AMAB is 10 times that of an AFAB, with variations, of course. That means most other parts of a cisgender male's body are more powerful than cisgender females or transgender males. It's a safety issue when it comes to boxing.
I became a paid subscriber just so I could reply to this nonsense. Look up Hergie Bacyadan, a WORLD CHAMPION trans man boxer. Look up Patricio Manuel, a five-time NATIONAL CHAMPION trans guy boxing in the USA.
Stop spouting cissexist, misogynistic supremacy narratives like this. Of course some guys will get injured in boxing, that doesn't mean trans guys can't compete or do well.
Yeah, okay. Both you and Cara are in that echo chamber where they call people stupid names when their opinion differs from the chamber. You didn't know those people personally, did you? Anyway, they do have to be careful that biological males aren't competing in sports with biological females post-puberty #1. That's all this is about. It's unfortunate that this boxer got caught up in the middle of the hysteria around us, but attacking me won't change me or the issue at hand.
You're full of crap that there's 0 issues with any of this and to call me cissexist, misogynistic, supremacy whatever is stupid. I'm a pro-Black transman. If anybody sounds like a white supremacist, that would be you. I can't stand them. You sound more like a woman than any kind of man, dude. I've also fought a few times with cisgender males, and I agree with the man I knew & my own experiences; not any of you. My father was a professional athlete as well. So, step the hell off Alex. My opinion is valid. Your judgments are not valid to me.
You people who say the same dumb things when someone is outside the box than you is extremely problematic. I feel sorry for your partners who have to deal with this level of toxicity. What you said only put the spotlight on you, and I don't care what you're saying to argue. Go learn how to debate instead of attack. Keep pushing with hostility and the push-back from the opposite direction will be (y)our undoing. You're fighting the wrong people because you don't know how to fight (y)our oppressors. SMFH
Good on Erin to get another sub, who came in here to attack a good guy in the matter. I am not your problem. The establishment is.
But you can't deny that your "opinions" have been exclusionary, contradictory and confusing right?
"A cisgender man can kill a cisgender woman with one punch. That's why people encourage men not to hit women."
Because this is not about the difference in force, it's a form of patriarchy in which it was believed that it's simply indecent to hit a woman as a man.
Also, by continuing to use the suggestion of AMAB people having more force, you continue to basically reinstate the belief, the idea that Khelif is a transwoman, which she is not.
Another thing that it does is completely ignoring the fact that when it comes to hard evidence about the situation of Khelif, we know practically nothing.
Yet here you are using anecdotal evidence about AMAB people.
No one is denying that there is a difference. But here is the thing: Transwomen, before being eligible to compete in the women's category, tend to have to adhere to strict hormone guidelines.
The medications we need to take (typically also as part of HRT in general) are not exactly good for our athletic performance.
The problem by continuing to insinuate that Khelif is capable of punching harder than cis-women means you want to continue to insist that she is trans.
Khelif has participated in boxing earlier, and didn't exactly dominate there. Only 6 games she won ended with a knockout. Of about 50 games, that's not exactly the "domination" that people like to refer to when it comes to suggesting that transwomen are completely killing women everywhere.
There is no known, open transathlete competing in the Olympics, and there hasn't been for 20 years, ever since the IOC relaxed it's guidelines in 2004.
If transwomen were such a dominating factor, so much stronger even while on HRT guidelines (if not being barred from competing outright like an increasing amount of sports unions are now doing), we should've seen that.
We should've seen classification games being dominated. We should've seen people winning game after game in other championships.
Lia Thomas, often loudly called a cheater only won 2 races. She never broke a record.
The athlete that did, and won 6 races? Almost no one knows her name, merely because the transphobic people who love to shout how transwomen in sports are "erasing women" are ACTUALLY doing that.
Also: You might want to stop holding 1 anecdotal experience as evidence against the whole transcommunity.
Because here is the thing when that happens for any other reason, in, like, let's say, a criminal act of sexual misconduct: people LOVE to hold that against the whole trans community, but will never hold a cis-male (which they almost ALL ARE) against all cis-men when they commit such an act.
Thank you. As for the "it's important to keep in mind there is a difference," well most abilities between cis men and cis women are two different bell curves in distribution, with a different average, yes. But there is also significant overlap between the genders, and this includes athletic ability. Its not true that all cisgender men have athletic advantage over all cisgender women. And then trans people's abilities are even more likely to have gray area than that, for obvious reasons.
There are ways to protect athletes from differences in height, weight, muscle mass as needed for sports where it's that relevant, and boxing already has weight categories to address this too.
But part of the reason there are women's sports in the first place, isn't because women needed to be protected from these differences. It's because TV networks and sports companies didn't want to show the opposite, that sometimes women will beat men in sports. That's why baseball became mens only after a woman pitcher struck out Babe Ruth, that's why gun events became gendered after a woman won big in the early 90's, and there are examples in other sports I know less about too, I'm sure. Additionally, cis women actually have the advantage on record, when it comes to certain athletic things like long-distance running.
I will avoid further debate here, but you can guess what I think of KingRay and his rants. The best thing I have to say about that person, is it's nice that he gives money to Erin to fund her research.
Yes, I can deny what you're saying because I'm talking about the brute force of boxing. You're talking about something else. This particular comment wasn't talking about the transgender fight for equality with regards to sports. I tire of that particular subject. You took it out of context and anybody else reading what I said. If you read what I said with that filter, of course you and lots of people overstate what I said and change the context which I said it. I'm way outside that box. Try jumping in mine and you will see nothing confusing about it.
Now, going on and on and on will not change anything I said. You people just want to fight and if you want to do that, go get your oppressors. I'm not one of them. That is the problem with this fucking topic. People want to fight each other about it instead of going after the reason this has become a mess. I certainly didn't make it that way. Cisgender heterosexual Christian Nationalists have made it that way.
I stand by what I said 100%. If you don't like it, keep scrolling past it. I don't care when people do that bullshit. I'm not living or commenting from that echo chamber you're in.
Oh please. It's so easy to pick anecdotes like this as if it's universal fact. I have an ex (cis woman) who sparred all the time with men at all sorts of boxing gyms in NYC. Many of them serious fighters and would spar because there weren't enough women to spar with every time. They'd always be shocked boxing with her because not only could she take their hits, they would also tell her constantly that she hit like a truck.
Does that mean it's like this for every case? No! There's a reason it's a weight-classed sport and also a reason why the number of full-round fights are limited. It's brutal and is dangerous. Cis people have serious injury all the time. Trying to go fight the facts by cherry-picking your arguments is just projection onto trans people and ignores a lot of the variations in bodies of fighters, just like we see with this story and people assuming all sorts of things with no factual backing. All of the boxers in my life, including one who just spent a weekend with the US boxing team in Paris will say similar things.
Sparring is not competition. That's a different ballgame altogether. They know who they're sparring with and won't knock them TF out. And, I tell you what. When a transman can hit the ball out of a semi-pro or pro ballpark, I'll believe what you're saying. There are always exception to the rules, which is what you're trying to say. Talk about anecdotal. How about a transman throwing a 100mph fastball? Thing is, they don't have the cismale hand, leg, or arm strength to do that. That's why you don't see any of us competing on that level. I was an athlete for a very long time, and lived inside of professional sports. SMFH
You might have been an athlete, but you are not trans, and continue to show that you do not understand the processes that transpeople go through, along with the harm the current discussion is actually causing.
That's the problem people are having with your insinuations about how AMAB people are always better at this or that.
As a transwoman I'm 170 cm's tall. For a Dutch person, that's the average height for women.
Most women at work are taller than me.
But yet, I get questions asked a lot about how I managed to stay so short.
This is the stereotypical idea of how men and women are "supposed" to look, that results in people not even realizing that they themselves are not part of that average, or stereotype.
It's usually even only after I explain to them that I actually was so short when I was younger there were concerns my body was having hormonal issues, and they looked into it, that they realize that they are actually taller than the average.
The main concern was my thyroid breaking down the puberty hormones before they could do anything to my body.
These women tend to only realize how this average, this stereotype of "all women are mostly this and this size" is problematic when they meet me, while previously having noticed they have trouble finding clothes.
Add to this questions about why I don't have an adamsapple, or why my shoulders are narrow, my feet and hands are small, and you can start to see why transphobia is so dangerous.
When you look at transphobic ideas of how a woman is supposed to look, you can already see how merely length can become a problem.
People who are part of the gender police think they know everything about biology, while they are actually incredibly problematic.
What you fail to see, because with Khelif, next to knowing practically nothing that can be fact-checked, we are now seeing transphobic people who looooove to claim they are about protecting women HARASSING a cis-woman! (And not caring they are doing so).
And when you see how this is targeted at someone from Algeria, you can clearly see the underlying, smoldering racism that it is based on.
Racism that these people to a degree realize they can't openly use anymore, so they do it like this. And you are partially falling for it.
Iris, now you're full of shit. I am an AFAB transman as witnessed in all my YouTube videos. Again, you just want to argue because you, me, and everybody else around the internet are tense/upset because of the onslaught of bullshit coming from the GOP. Go after them, not me. I could care less what you think. You are delusional. Your judgments are not accepted or respected by me. You want to be a little jerk? No, you can just fuck all the way off.
Thank you for writing about this, it's been infuriating and would be funny if not for the violence Republicans bring women.
Also your 6th and 7th paragraphs are duplicates.
Thanks, fixed! :)
I had been out in the sun in stlouis and thought I was losing my mind. I'm so glad you have the determination, skill, and support to do all this. I have talked with individuals and a military unit about trans issues but that was with people that wanted to learn.
It wasn’t fixed when I read it
Well, she can't "recall" the notification emails that got sent out on initial publishing, so if you read it in its email form, the duplicate would still be present. Plus, "something something browser and server caching something" can be tricky.
But rest assured, it's corrected now. =)
I apologize for my comment
Wait...a prompt and sincere apology for an innocent mistake? ON THE INTERWEBS?!?
Dude...I think you just won the Internet Comments Section equivalent of Olympic Gold! =)
Hahahahaha. Dang, Chris.
Besides everything else already noted, another highly unfortunate consequence of the Khalif controversy is that it reinforces haters’ warped belief about what a trans woman should “look like” (even though, again, Khalif is NOT transgender!) The problem with this stereotype is that trans women can, on occasion, be just as attractive, graceful, and cis-passing as any from-birth female. When that occurs, such trans women initially have a much easier time in life and don’t get questioned readily, but if the trans history ever comes out, the reaction can be as savage and ruthless as anything.
They are self-destructing so rapidly. They are CREEPY WEIRDOS, utterly OBSESSED with what's in people's pants. NORMAL people leave all this stuff to the governing bodies, in this case the IOC.
If this woman is not on the phone with the best defamation lawyers in the US and the UK the minute after the Olympic flame goes out she’ll only have herself to blame for missing out on a big payday. The list of deep pocketed individuals and media outlets who got this completely wrong without the slightest bit of fact checking is almost unprecedented. And I would certainly start with Miss Hogwarts and Chaya Headcase.
The Boston Globe is evidently on its way to becoming an UNmajor American newspaper to join the list of other MSM purveyors of DISinformation garbage like the NYT. Guess I need to look up its owner’s name to watch out for that one.
I wish a journalist would investigate if Angela Carini deliberately provoked this fire storm. I find it hard to believe that it just happened without being planned ahead of time, especially given the theatrical nature of the failed bout; that Carini, when not competing is a member of the Italian state police, the child of a police officer, and according to Dave Zirin, has right wing politics herself; she was publicly consoled by the Italian fascist Prime Minister the evening after the fight; and the fact that all right wing parties worldwide are targeting, gender, non-conforming people. Not to mention, that Carini‘s opponent in this case is Muslim, a targeted population at this time in Europe and Italy. All these factors suggest to me that this was a contrived event designed to provoke outrage for political gain.
She might've found the article I just found that this athlete was disqualified last year because they discovered she had X/Y chromosomes. Now I'm thinking she's intersex if "F" was on her birth certificate, but she had that chromosome. What a mess, though.
That statement is not capable of being verified as factually accurate...
I don't care what you think or say. Leave me alone, dude. You're full of piss and need to take a leak for 2 days. SMFH
I think you have entered Chapel Perilous with this; tread carefully my friend.