“I might be guilty of spreading misinformation.”
Jerk Olympics
YouTuber-turned-boxer Logan Paul has made the surprise move of apologizing — sort of — for being an asshole after he, Elon Musk, JK Rowling, and other notorious transphobes accused Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, a cisgender woman, of secretly being a man.
The root of the debacle goes back to 2023, when Khelif was disqualified from an international women’s boxing championship over a doctor’s claim that she had too much testosterone in her system to compete. While it remains unclear what standards the Algerian Olympian failed to meet, she faced no such hurdles when qualifying for this year’s summer Olympics — and went on to win a gold medal after her opponent, Italian boxer Angela Carini, forfeited their match seconds in after getting a bloody nose.
Because of that former disqualification, however, Paul and his fellow bigots raised a huge stink, suggesting that Khelif is a “biological male” — as per the common line of reasoning used against transgender women, particularly those who compete in women’s sports — who, by bloodying Carini’s nose and winning gold, had perpetrated misogynist violence.
“This is the purest form of evil,” Paul said in his initial, since-deleted tweet.
The entire situation is a travesty and an embarrassing vestige of Cold War-era “gender testing” in global sports competition enacted out of fear that Eastern European countries were sending men to compete in women’s sports — and reveals, accidentally, just how myopic the transphobic worldview really is.
Oxymorons
“OOPSIES,” Paul declared in his half-hearted apology tweet, posted on Musk’s X-formerly-Twitter social network. “I might be guilty of spreading misinformation along with the entirety of this app.”
“Although she’s been previously disqualified for failing a ‘gender test’ and has XY chromosomes,” he continued, “some sources say Imane Khelif was born a biological woman.”
“I stand by my sentiment that biological men should not compete against biological women in any sport,” Paul wrote, “and if you disagree you’re a sick fuck.”
While it’s rare that someone as prominent as Paul will so readily admit to “spreading misinformation,” the rest of his backhanded apology serves as a reminder of the root cause of this entire manufactured controversy: that beyond just wanting to demean and punish trans women for having the audacity to exist, they also are so deeply invested in rigid gender roles that they end up applying the same perverted standards to cis women as well.
From the absolute freaks who follow butch cis women into bathrooms to confront them over their gender identity to the armed protesters who threaten drag queen story time, it’s clear that misinformation like that which Paul admitted to has whipped transphobes into such a frenzy that they’ve entirely lost the plot — which is, at the end of the day, indicative of just how unhinged their beliefs really are.
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