Transphobes Have Got Their Money Shot: A Woman Punching Another Woman in the Face

This just in from Paris: a man has punched a woman on live television and stands to be garlanded with medals for it. At least that’s what a certain children’s author would have you believe.

What actually happened is that Italian boxer Angela Carini (a woman) quit her match against Algeria’s Imane Khelif (also a woman) on Thursday after just 46 seconds in the ring, telling her coach: “Non è giusto! Fa malissimo” (It’s not fair! It hurts so much). Holding up a grainy photo of her late father, Carini later told the press that her heart – and possibly her nose – were broken.

And just like that, trans panic engulfed the Olympics.

The controversy – which has now sucked in Donald Trump, Georgia Meloni and the UN special rapporteur on violence against women – centres on the fact that last year, Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting were excluded from the boxing world championships after failing a gender eligibility test. The exact nature of the test remains unclear. The International Boxing Association (IBA), the Russian-led authority that conducted the test and was itself excluded from administering the Olympic boxing citing concerns over its management and integrity, claims the test “proved [Khelif and Yu-Ting] had XY chromosomes”. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) said the test showed they had high testosterone levels, though the claim has since disappeared from its website.

In the absence of any actual medical diagnoses – can you imagine how shameful and traumatic it must be to have something so private discussed so publicly? – many (including respectable media outlets) have pop-diagnosed Khelif and Yu-Ting as having DSD or disorders of sexual development, an umbrella term used to refer to several variations from binary sexual standards and which 2% of people – the same proportion as have red hair – are estimated to exhibit.

The ICO cleared both Khelif and Yu-Ting to compete in Paris just as they had done, to zero fanfare, in Tokyo (despite her supposedly phenomenal genetic advantage, Khelif bombed out of the quarterfinals, losing 5-0 to Ireland’s Kellie Harrington). What’s different this year? Transphobes on the hunt for someone to enact their grisly fantasies of trans violence have found their perfect candidate: a cis woman boxer. Close enough.

A central tenet of the transphobic movement is that trans women endanger cis women. This claim is impossible to evidence on any statistically significant scale since police forces don’t consistently collect data on perpetrators’ gender identity (they do, however, record victims’ gender, incidentally showing that transphobic hate crime has tripled in the past 12 years – but never mind). This forces transphobes to zero in on the vanishingly few cases of trans women harming cis women – usually prisoners who are in prison because they are violent – to demonstrate the vice inherent to all trans people. This is exactly the line they ran on the gays in the 80s and 90s, by the way (see “Gay Slayer” Colin Ireland and Kenneth “The Stockwell Strangler” Erskine).

In Khelif, transphobes have found someone who appears to substantiate their wild claims. The sight of Carini crumpled in the ring, her heaving shoulders obscuring her own massive muscularity, as Khelif pats her sportingly on the back could not have been a more perfect tableau if JK Rowling had staged it. Here is the money shot transphobes wanted, served on a silver platter.

What’s telling is that the anti-trans movement talks about Khelif as if she, rather than the sporting bodies with their inconsistent and opaque gender eligibility criteria, were responsible for this mess. Writing in the Telegraph, Suzanne Moore – who quit the Guardian following an internal revolt over her alleged transphobia – argued that “someone with a DSD cannot help the way they were born but they can choose not to cheat; they can choose not to take medals from women; they can choose not to cause injury.” Moore imputes violence to Khelif as if it’s a moral failing rather than her professional responsibility. Weeping at a press conference after the abortive match, Carini complained that her opponent had hit her harder than anyone had before. My girl, you are an Olympic boxer – what do you expect?

The thing is, people like Moore aren’t interested in resolving the conflict between the IOC or IBA’s gender eligibility rules – not least because doing so would deprive them of opportunities to manufacture moral panics. What they want is to extrapolate from an individual case a general point about trans people: that they are a danger, and that their medical treatment should therefore be a public prerogative (recall how Caster Semenya was forced to take the contraceptive pill to lower her testosterone, giving her panic attacks and severe nausea). And that point has been made loud and clear.

On Monday, the High Court upheld health secretary Wes Streeting’s emergency ban on puberty blockers for trans kids. It’s 11-year-olds with suicidal ideation, not 25-year-old boxers with bloody noses, we should be worried about – because it’s they who will be burned by the fire that Khelif, simply by existing, has ignited.