Transphobia Hurts Everybody

It's a weapon used to build the fascist movement

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The punch heard round the world in record time was dealt by Algeria’s Imane Khelif, and it landed right on the nose of Italian boxer Angela Carini. The Olympic fight ended after just 46 seconds with Carini breaking down in tears and opting out. Almost instantaneously the right-wing echo chamber labeled Khelif a man, called her trans, and ran with the lie. Conservative publications from the Daily Mail to Fox didn’t bother with the truth, and neither did J.K. Rowling or Elon Musk or countless other anti-trans “crusaders.” The reality is that no one is sure about whether or not she has XY chromosomes and is intersex, whether she has higher than average testosterone levels, or none of the above. But she was certainly assigned female at birth, has always indtified as and been considered a woman, and has lived her entire life as a woman. Yet that truth was left to catch up to the rampant falsehoods, as is the new routine in a world filled with dishonest conservative provocateurs who are rewarded for their lies.

We should be clear that, as the Washington Post reports, “There never has been evidence that either Khelif or Lin [another boxer] had XY chromosomes or elevated levels of testosterone. They have competed for years, including at the Tokyo Olympics and several world championships.” And in those past competitions Khelif was beaten by other women, because, despite the flurry of unverified and unverifiable rumors, she’s not some super-strength having man who wants to fight women, but instead another woman boxer in a pool of immensely skilled and strong women who compete at the highest level. Amy Broadhurst, a British boxer who beat her in 2022, spoke the simple truth in the midst of this frenzy: “I think it’s the way she was born and that’s out of her control. The fact that she’s been beaten by 9 females before says it all.”

Now there are a lot of elements to this. For one, there’s the fact that every star athlete has genetic advantages. Shaq is over 7 feet and built like a tank. Michael Phelps has oddly long arms and even has a different lactic acid process than the rest of us. Simone Biles is unusually small and flexible and strong. Usain Bolt is insanely fast. Lance Armstrong, Katie Ledecky, the list goes on. High testosterone levels are normal when they help male athletes, and probably fly under the radar 99% of the time when they help female athletes as well. But this case blew up, and not because of anything the athlete herself did or didn’t do.

What I want to focus on in the rest of this piece is that last part. Imane Khelif didn’t do anything unusual this Olympics. She competed as she’s done for years and landed one really good punch. Everything else, and I mean everything, was created, manufactured by an increasingly powerful conservative media and social media network that spans influencers, platforms, and semi-reputable news organizations. This fact, and the motives behind this network, should lead people who might be on the fence, who might see themselves as politically somewhere in the middle, to thoroughly question why the lie that “a man beat up a woman in the Olympics” was just pushed on them from multiple angles.

This anti-trans surge isn’t new, and in its development we’re able to learn more about who benefits from it, and why the right keeps beating this drum even when a good chunk of the population sees it as weird that they keep “transvestigating” everybody and their mother. Primarily we’re able to see that what motivates the leaders of this anti-trans movement are the maintenance of the gender binary and traditional conceptions of gender, a related desire to control women, and the desire to have scapegoats for the fascist movement. Let’s take these in reverse.

The scapegoat issue is readily apparent; for an anti-democratic, far-right movement to succeed, we need to turn on one another. Fascism mobilizes people not primarily for a positive, forward-looking vision, but instead in opposition to subsets of the population who are scapegoated, often in the name of reclaiming some past glory. And trans people provide an unfortunate target in this fascist narrative. We have seen the right repeatedly lie and claim that mass shooters are trans, even that the Trump shooter was trans, rushing this narrative out ahead of the truth, much like they did with Imane Khelif.

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Imane’s story, and the evolution of transphobia in women’s sports and beyond, shows us how quickly and easily this scapegoating narrative is morphing into a larger force of social control. The real problem with Imane, and women like her, is that they’re “too masculine” or too strong or too far outside the lines of conventional femininity. And so the right leaps to police them, using the cudgel of trans-ness as a weapon to be wielded against women who fall outside narrower and narrower lines — all while claiming to care about and want to protect women, of course.

It’s important to note that certain women are bearing the initial brunt of this cudgel. Imane is from Algeria, and we’ve seen the exact playbook used before with African women specifically. In the Tokyo Olympics, Namibian 18-year-old sprinters Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi were not allowed to compete in the women's 400 meters because of their naturally high testosterone levels. Much like Imane, this natural advantage is not fundamentally different than male athletes or other female athletes born with genetic, physical gifts that help them excel at their sport. But the right is looking for ways to police and control women, and Black women were always going to be the first to be punished by this right-wing movement.

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We know and can easily see that these fascists don’t actually care about women or women’s sports, at all. They never watch or mention women’s sports unless they see an opportunity to attack trans people (while often really attacking a cis athlete). They don’t care when Brittney Griner gets locked in a Russian prison, or when women’s Olympic teams are under-funded, or when women’s leagues are struggling in the U.S. More importantly, they don’t care when women or genderqueer people suffer horribly under the law, in fact many of them are the exact people leading the charge to build a society where women would suffer much, much more.

That brings us back to fascists’ motives for constantly fomenting a trans panic: reinforcing traditional gender roles and the accompanying control over women and everyone who isn’t a straight, cis man. We see quite clearly in how anti-trans sentiment is increasingly being used to police female athletes and women who deviate from traditional standards of beauty and dress and femininity that transphobia is a tool used to reinforce the boundaries around what conservatives deem to be permissible behavior for women. Butch lesbians, non-binary folks, and others who don’t look traditionally feminine have reported more harassment in bathrooms since laws that are theoretically meant to only address trans people’s bathroom usage have gone into effect. This is how it works. More and more cis women, queer folks, and others are now feeling the effects of the dangerous anti-trans sentiment and movement that’s gained a foothold around the globe.

And a lot of people who might think of themselves as not too political are susceptible to the trans panic being generated, which is part of why the right keeps hammering at it. Anyone who hasn’t inoculated themselves against this fascist movement could read “male boxer beats woman up in the ring in Paris” and be pissed off. It’s reasonable to see that lie and immediately be angry that this is what the Olympics have come to. But, once you see how the conservative media machine fed you this lie, it’s time to pause and recalculate. The people generating this dishonest story, working hard to pretend a female boxer is trans, and trying to get you to be mad at something that isn’t true do not have your best interest at heart. Billionaires and the fascists they collaborate with want you mad at a group that is vulnerable in large part so you won’t be mad at them. They’ve crafted a media ecosystem and a set of lies that have very real consequences, these lies are getting trans people and queer people hurt and killed, and they want this to be just the beginning of rolling back right for anyone who isn’t just like them. They want trans folks, gay people, women and more to be treated like it’s the 19th century rather than the 21st.

But their whole campaign is built on a series of lies. Men aren’t transitioning, aren’t risking social ostracism and legal repercussions and physical danger just to beat up or rape or hurt women. They do that and get away with it far too often as men already. If the people who are making a name for themselves and drumming up support for the far-right by pretending to care about women’s boxing, or basketball, or water polo actually cared about women, they would demonstrate that. It’s such a simple test that it seems to escape right from under the noses of a whole lot of people. But the J.K. Rowlings and Elon Musks of the world could focus on guaranteeing access to abortion, or ensuring that women and all parents have ample leave when they have kids, or promoting real public safety through education and resources and healthcare if this all was really about protecting women. And they choose not to.

Instead the right has turned the very existence of a small fraction of the population into their battleground. They've twisted the topic of people’s right to exist as their truest selves into dishonestly pretending that they’re fighting for women — the women they ultimately seek to disempower. So what I’m asking here is that you try to see through their bullshit, to see through the attempt to attack and scapegoat people who are already marginalized and face threats of violence as is, without their existence being repeatedly condemned in newspapers and by some of the most influential people on Earth.

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A good rule of thumb for all of us is that when anyone wants to scapegoat people we should never follow along. People who deviate from the norm are good targets for the far-right because fascists can, at times, divide the 99%, the working class, along a fault line of support for or opposition to this minority group, when in truth we all have far more in common with one another under this system than we do with billionaires and the ruling class.

So when fascists point, we should pause. We should pause and remember that solidarity with one another is far more valuable and powerful than leaping at vulnerable people who aren't the cause of any of our problems. Solidarity will get us free, scapegoating will see us in chains. Don’t run with stories that seem to be targeting the vulnerable, targeting groups that are oppressed and trying to stir you to anger towards them. Our anger should be reserved for the people and even more so the systems that run this world, not our neighbors. As Tamara Nopper often says, “Knowing who to be mad at is part of the work.” And we have a lot of work to do.