Straight into an impasse

Alona Ferber at Prospect bashes women who know that men are not women.

She starts with Imane Khelif’s punch to the head of Angela Carini and Carini’s forfeit of the match because she didn’t want to be killed.

The Russian-run International Boxing Association, stripped last year of its recognition by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), claimed that the 25-year-old, who had competed in women’s boxing for years, had been disqualified from the 2023 boxing world championships over a failed gender eligibility test. The IOC rejected this, saying of the bout with Carini, “Scientifically, this is not a man fighting a woman.”

On X, users speculated whether Khelif—who was born female and has never identified as either trans or intersex—was male or a man or something or other that made her inclusion in the competition unfair, even dangerous.

Khelif was not born female. Ferber simply made that up. What he “identifies as” is irrelevant when it comes to male v female bodies in a boxing ring.

That day, the Algerian boxer found herself hurled straight into an impasse in the discourse over biological sex, the notion of gender and the idea that trans rights compete with those of cisgendered women, a term that refers to someone whose gender identity is the same as their sex at birth. 

It’s not a “notion” you condescending sellout creep. When “trans rights” means the right for men to invade women’s spaces and sports and refuges, it’s about a bunch of hard painful facts.

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