The Paris Olympics have been poisoned, but the toxin has been infused for a long time. There was nothing spontaneous about it. The controversy surrounding the fight between boxers Imane Khelif and Angela Carini, forced and inflamed, is yet another episode of how the international community of hate uses its entire arsenal to contaminate any debate. But this is no ordinary success: they have managed to poison a global event. The networks have been on fire for the last 24 hours and, as always when they are on fire, someone had planted matches in the forest.
When Carini received the punch from Khelif, the Italian right had been shouting for days that the Algerian is a trans man, that it was cheating, that her life was in danger, that They were going to massacre her. The Government of Giorgia Meloni had turned that fight in a political and media battle Khelif into a monster. Sports Minister Andrea Abodi spoke of “guaranteeing the safety” of female athletes, and Family Minister Eugenia Roccella regretted the participation of “men who identify as women.” Senate President Ignazio La Russa wrote on Facebook: “An Algerian transsexual against an Italian at the Olympic Games… Is it politically incorrect to say that I support women?” The most successful was Minister Matteo Salvini with a tweet with two million of viewings two days before the event in which he spoke of the harm that “the trans boxer” had caused to another rival and ended with a cry: “Enough of the madness of the ‘woke’ ideology!” The woke ideology, he says, as if he were talking about the Queer Republic of Algeria, a country in which LGBT activism is actually prohibited. As if he were dedicating himself to campaigning with a trans athlete at the Games.
Pugile trans dell’Algeria – bandito dai world di boxe – può participare alle Olimpiadi e affronterà la nostra Angela Carini.
A messicana athlete whose affronted life has said “I suoi colpi mi hanno fatto molto male, non credo di essermi mai sentita così nei miei 13 anni… pic.twitter.com/8A0StGK4YP— Matteo Salvini (@matteosalvinimi) July 30, 2024
With that toxic environment, it is likely that Carini went into that ring under duress and far from 100% concentration. Now the Italian has apologized to her opponent, because Khelif is not trans. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has flatly denied it. Doubts about her condition arose from a test leaked by the International Boxing Association (in conflict with the IOC) that indicated that she has XY chromosomes, the male ones. But how can she be trans if we know that since she was little she fought to box, because her father believed she was not? a sport for girlsEven UNICEF told her story as an inspiration for women.
Are there women with XY chromosomes? Just ask the Spanish sprinter María José Martínez Patiño, who suffered an ordeal when she had the same result at the World Championships in Kobe in 1985. She was humiliated (as the Algerian is now) and disqualified. Patiño has a syndrome that makes her insensitive to androgens: her body does not know how to manage testosterone and does not develop the external physiological features that we assume men have. “I could hardly pretend to be a man, I have breasts and a vagina. I never cheated,” said Patiño after winning her lawsuit, proving that she is a woman and not a cheater, and explaining her case—a paradigmatic one—in The Lanceta reference in medical science. Everything indicates that this type of intersexuality could be the case of Khelif, who this Saturday competes against a Hungarian boxer: Anna Luca Hamori. She says that she is not interested in controversy, although her federation (of the country governed by Viktor Orbán) agrees with Meloni’s speech.
But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if she’s trans, intersex or an engineer in agro-industrial fluid dynamics. The far right and its comrades had already located their prey and were not going to let her escape. Because the (supposed) danger of trans people is their latest crusade and they had been stirring up this fear for days, months and years: an athlete defeated by a trans man. The punch, and Carini’s bitter tears, provided all the necessary drama. As soon as the Italian threw in the towel, everyone came out in droves to run on the hamster wheel of indignation: Meloni, Trump and his vice, Ayuso, Milei and even Borja Sémper, who fortunately deleted his tweets.
This persecution of trans people has its explanation, and it has been honestly given by its own ideologues. After the social defeat against the rights of homosexuals, they needed another cultural workhorse to mobilize their bases. The ghost of trans athletes is very easy to sell, because it is visible. “Look what a guy he looks like,” is said of many athletes. Since the Games started, a real hunt for “trans” began.transvestigation” starring trolls obsessed with finding out that all celebrities are trans. And the Olympic village is full of women with shoulders broader than your brother-in-law who retweets Captain Bitcoin. Before Khelif, this pack accused rugby player Ilona Maher of being a man, that he told through tears the damage that was being done by this persecution of any athlete who was not “fragile, small and docile”. They even attacked the legendary swimmer Katie Ledecky.
So the weirdo MAGA freaks “transvestigated” American rugby star and Olympian Ilona Maher and God bless her for calling out these creeps.
Keep calling these conservative assholes “weird” because they are and they’re going to lose in November because of it. pic.twitter.com/AlkpRiy9dd
—Is Taylor okay? 💙 (@taylor_ashbrook) July 30, 2024
If you can see your triceps, you are deformed. This is the logic we follow. It is about identifying progressivism with what is woke (that grab bag of reactionary fears) and it woke with the monstrous, the unnatural, that which breaks the healthy order of our societies, that which endangers real women (the fragile and docile ones). That is why, half jokingly, half seriously, Begoña Gómez is called Begoño, Brigitte Macron was Jean-Michel, Michelle Obama was Michael, and now Kamala Harris, before transitioning, was called Kamal Aroush. The torrents of hate that run through networks and forums clearly show the function of these hoaxes when it comes to generating a detestable imaginary.
But these torrents do not emerge from the sewers of the Internet, but from offices decorated with the finest wood. Trump is the mayor of the city of hoaxes, but one of those who has been stirring up this first-rate moral panic for some time is, of course, Elon Musk. He has his reasons. He himself — who is now close to Meloni — admits that he bought Twitter to correct the drift of the network, which in his opinion caused his daughter to become trans. A few days ago he said something so savage that it places the character: “My son is dead.” In reality, it was she who removed him from her life for being, quite simply, a bad father. In the controversy over the female boxers, the X network stopped the visibility of all the tweets that called her cisgender (as opposed to trans), because Musk considers that word a degrading insult, while allowing all kinds of hate messages to spread unchecked.
Does not understanding what is happening with Khelif make you transphobic? Not at all. Human biology is complex and intersexuality (if confirmed) is even more so. But it is worth bearing in mind who is pushing these controversies, who is pointing out all women because of their appearance, who is dehumanising them. And, above all, why, at the most equal Games in history, a witch hunt has been unleashed which, for now, has already claimed two victims: Khelif and Carini. Two boxers, two women.
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