Transvestigating (with Contrapoints)

Live in five, sorry.

Can you believe what they did to the green M ⁇ M?

I'm sure that'll come up.

Oh, I'm sure.

We're going to transinvestigate all the candies.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to The Big Fruity.

I'm Matt Bernstein, and I'm so happy that you're here.

Can you imagine a reality in which you constantly have to prove to everybody that you meet that you are the gender that you say you are?

Well, that's just a daily reality for trans people.

But I really did write this like I'm like a.

It's 60 minutes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, that's just a daily reality for trans people.

But this Olympic Games, it became the reality for one of the best cisgender athletes in the world.

That is so 60 minutes.

We're going to cut to someone, you know, on location.

What does it mean to get transvestigated?

Who gets gets transvestigated?

What gender are you, listener?

I don't care, but J.K.

Rowling would like to know right now.

I guess that's a little less 60 minutes.

What gender are you?

What gender is anyone?

I mean, you don't have to do that.

Today, we are going to use the latest global sports controversy, and I put that in air quotes, as an entry point for broader conversations about gender, race, surveillance, and some really weird Facebook groups.

To do that, we are once again joined by friend of the show, ex-philosopher, YouTuber, someone who I admire so much, someone whose work you're probably already familiar with, but if you're not, then I'm jealous of you because you get to experience it for the first time after you listen to this podcast.

Natalie Wynn, aka ContraPoints.

Welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

Thank you for having me back.

I am so happy to be here.

This is getting a little professional.

Okay, yeah, we should.

What should I say, fuck?

It's going to degrade really fast.

Like, we're gonna start, like,

we're gonna start talking about this, the dumbest tweets that have ever been made.

We're gonna be doing some light slander about mold.

Before we get into today's show, if you would like to support the show or you would like more of the show, you can get that over on Patreon.

The link to the Patreon will be in the description for this episode.

I do exclusive episodes over there every month.

This summer, I have been working on a multi-part series about the buy sister scandal.

So we're having having a lot of fun over there.

This is my job.

I didn't know you had done the bi sister episode.

I need to go listen to that because I also am like a bi sister scholar casually.

It was so fascinating.

I mean, I remember, I could not stop looking at my phone when that was happening.

I remember going to see a movie with my mom and my brother.

And the entire time on the way back from the movie, I was like staring at my phone.

I was trying to explain to them like why this controversy was earth-shattering.

They're just like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Tati, Westbrook is in her party.

I know.

I mean, because it's also like so comedic.

It was over vitamin supplements.

Well, it's like vitamin supplements.

And then she tried to like manufacture this, like, this

whole crusade, right?

Because otherwise, because otherwise, no one would give a shit.

Because, oh, she's mad that her vitamins aren't being endorsed by that.

Like, like, who cares?

Tati Westbrook became YouTube's Anita Bryant.

No, if she became Anita Bryant.

Like, it is over hair vitamin.

Sorry, I just derailed you again.

On July 30th, 2024, once beloved children's author, now user of X.com, J.K.

Rowling tweeted, What will it take to end this insanity?

A female boxer left with life-altering injuries?

A female boxer killed?

When I saw this tweet, I had no idea what was going on.

Yeah, she doesn't really explain it.

You're expected to be like up to date on all the lore of like

boxing gender investigations.

And I can tell, I mean, especially since J.K.

Rowling's followers, since she's always talking about women's boxing, you know, she's such an expert in that and something she obviously cares about so much until now.

Well, okay, no, this is a good place to start, though, because she attached this article.

The article from The Guardian that she attached to this tweet was titled, Boxers who failed gender tests at world championships cleared to compete at the Olympics.

Now, I read this with no understanding of what was going on.

This is the first time I heard of this story.

And looking back now, it seems incredibly irresponsible of a publication like The Guardian to publish a headline like this.

Yeah, The Guardian is not necessarily known for their most responsible covering of what they call gender issues or gender debate.

So I guess that didn't surprise me.

What did surprise me was that this was coming up considering that I knew that there was no transgender athletes competing in the Olympics.

So you would think that that would make you immune to having to sit through transgender discourse the entire time, but it turned out not to.

That's a good opening question.

How did having no trans athletes at the Olympics somehow make the Olympics entirely about trans athletes and what we think about them?

That is the question.

We are going to be unpacking a lot of discourse today as we do on this podcast.

But beforehand, I want everybody to be working with the same set of facts here.

And so I have made a little outline for myself with some background information that you need to know to understand what we are going to talk about for the rest of this episode.

So, for a couple minutes, I am going to be telling you the story of a boxer and two different boxing organizations and a little bit of Russian corruption, a little bit of Putin, and

we're going to work from there.

It sounds like a spy thriller.

It basically is.

It basically is, yeah.

Except everyone's getting investigated.

Iman Khalif.

Iman Khalif grew up in the rural village of Tiret, Algeria.

She grew up in relative poverty.

She played soccer growing up, football there, with boys, and boys were mean to her growing up because they were intimidated by her and she's tall.

And interestingly, the way that she got into boxing was from dodging punches that guys would throw at her.

Starting at 16, she would sell scrap metal to afford the bus fare to the training gym, which was in the town over.

And after a few years of training long hours every day, she began competing in international competitions for boxing.

In 2020, she competed in the Tokyo Olympics and lost in the quarterfinals, which is interestingly never mentioned in this conversation about the alleged man dominating boxing because like when she was losing, she was never accused of being a man.

Right, this is a woman who's competed in the Olympics before with no one saying anything about it.

No one.

Literally no one.

By 2023, Iman Khalif had competed in multiple IBA world championships.

She reached the finals in 2022 and it was never a problem.

The IBA is the international boxing association.

They host all of these world boxing competitions.

We'll get to that in a second.

She was going to compete in the finals in 2023 when she was disqualified for failing a quote-unquote gender test.

Initially, the IBA said that she failed the gender test for having high testosterone levels, and then the president of the IBA, Umar Kremlev, more on him in a second, said that she was disqualified because the tests showed she had XY chromosomes.

Iman and her representatives said that she had been the victim of a conspiracy.

Notably, neither the methodology for the test, nor Iman's results, nor just like anything about what this test actually was, has ever to this date been made public.

Notably, Iman's disqualification came three days after she defeated Azalea Amineva, a previously undefeated Russian boxer.

Iman's disqualification restored Azalea's undefeated status.

So what is the IBA?

The International Boxing Association.

It's an organization that governs amateur and professional boxing worldwide, and it has long been plagued by controversy and financial mismanagement.

It previously worked with the IOC, that's organization number two, the International Olympic Committee, IOC, to establish regulations around the Olympic boxing competition.

In 2019, though, the IOC suspended the IBA over concerns about their financial mismanagement.

And this is before all the Russian stuff, so bear with me.

In 2020, one year later, Umar Kremlev became president of the IBA.

This is when the IBA's relationship with the IOC, again, IBA, World Boxing, IOC, Olympic Committee, That's when it really falls apart.

Who is Umar Kremlev?

Umar has long been involved in the world of Russian boxing, and he's also a pal of Vladimir Putin.

Umar made Gazprom, which is a Russian state-owned gas company, the sole financial sponsor of the IBA.

So in 2023, the Olympics officially and permanently cut ties with the IBA over concerns that it was basically corrupt.

It was just acting as a vehicle to promote the interests of the Russian state and Russian athletes.

Now, fast forward to Paris 2024.

I promise I'm almost done with the background.

We're doing great, guys.

Because the IOC cut ties with the IBA, the gender test that they ran on Iman Khalif, whatever that was, it meant nothing to the IOC.

And so this year, Paris 2024, the Olympics said that Iman could compete.

And this is when she enters the public imagination.

In the second round of the women's welterweight competition, Iman fought Angela Carini, an Italian boxer.

Angela quit that match in pain after Iman hit her twice.

Afterwards, Angela Carini refused to shake Amon's hand and she would go on to say, it's not fair, which she would, interestingly, within days, express regret about.

But it didn't matter.

The media ran with that story that it wasn't fair, that Amman Khalif had failed a gender test administered by the IBA, an organization that nobody who goes on to talk about any of the things we're going to talk about in this episode had previously known anything about.

Nobody cared if the IBA was a disgraced, corrupt organization that has become a function of the Russian state.

Nobody, least of all J.K.

JK Rowling, fact-checked and the culture war ensued.

And that is what we are here to unpack today.

Congratulations.

You have made it through the context.

It's all downhill from here.

I'm sorry to say.

I mean, I think it's important for people to have the, like, before we understand what we're talking about here.

One difficulty I feel like I've had trying to talk to people about this case is

A lot of people are under the impression that this is a question of trans women competing in sports when it just isn't.

No one in the story is transgender.

Nobody in the story is transgender.

Nobody in the story is transgender.

And nobody in this story that we know of has XY chromosomes or high levels of testosterone.

Like, that was the other thing, is at the beginning, a lot of people were saying when the story broke, like, oh, well, you know, some women who are athletes, especially, naturally have high levels of testosterone.

And there are genetic variations where cisgender women can have XY chromosomes.

And that is all true.

But Iman Khalif just never had any of those things.

And so I don't even want to give credence in this particular story to the idea that, like, she did, because the IBA has never presented any evidence about this gender test or what it was.

Yes.

Anyone claiming that Iman Khalif is intersex or has high testosterone levels is basically engaging in pure conjecture.

There's there's no solid evidence of any of that.

Right, which J.K.

Rowling has done like upwards of 20 times.

Yes.

Should we talk about J.K.

Rowling's meltdown?

Yeah, let's just get into it.

There are a number of people who are responsible for making this story something that we're talking about today.

And those include J.K.

Rowling, Elon Musk, Logan Paul, Donald Trump, all of the people that you want to have lunch with.

I think that J.K.

Rowling is a good entry point because she's where I learned about all this for the first time.

Yeah, so what ignites this is this photo of Angela Karini and Iman Khalif after their match, where Karini is crying and Iman is comforting her.

And I think what really ignites this as a controversy is the visual spectacle of this feminine European woman weeping

as a taller, darker skinned woman has just won a boxing match against her.

Yes.

To me, Iman Khalif, what she looks like is a professional female boxer.

She's tall, she has long limbs, she is muscular, because that's what champion female boxers look like.

As we've seen from a lot of the other women who compete in these matches.

But in this picture, you get

the vibe is kind of of a damsel in distress, I think, and that becomes the sort of mythological framing of what happened.

So the first time I saw this picture was when J.K.

Rowling tweeted it.

Let's just read the tweet because I think this really establishes the tone of the discourse.

Could any picture sum up our new men's rights movement better?

The smirk of a male who knows he's protected by a misogynist sporting establishment, enjoying the distress of a woman he's just punched in the head and whose life's ambition he's just shattered.

Hashtag Paris2024.

I did text Natalie beforehand and I was like, Can you please use the voice when you read the tweet?

Yeah, I've been walking around the house like doing my Hermione impression all day.

Yeah, this tweet gets 449,000 likes and according to Twitter, which I believe kind of inflates these metrics, but 120 million views.

And one of the things that really interests me about this picture that you just described is that it gets circulated by all of these people, including J.K.

Rowling.

But and it's clearly, you know, Iman Khalif is patting Angela Karini on the back, but it's portrayed as because she's taller and necessarily she has to look down at Angela Karini, who's shorter than her.

It's it's framed as this like menacing, like, you know, like a predator preying on their prey.

Absolutely.

I mean, the first, I mean, the first obvious thing to say about this, right, is that like the discourse is already not even about fairness in sports.

Like, we're already like, we've instantly moved way beyond that.

It's not a question of, oh, is Iman intersex?

It's not a question of, are there heightened testosterone levels?

Is this fairness?

The critics are immediately saying, she's a man, or they're not even, they're not even using she at this point.

They're saying he's a man.

This is a smirking male enjoying the distress of a woman that he has punched.

Right.

That's the language that J.K.

Rowling uses.

So, in a way, even though Iman is not trans, she's getting the full trans woman treatment, which is to say that she's getting portrayed not only as a man, but like a diabolical man, a misogynistic man who enjoys violence against women.

And, you know, I just don't get that from this picture at all.

Even taking gender out of it, I look at Iman Khalif in this picture and I see someone offering condolences and support.

Like, you have to be engaged in huge levels of speculation and vilification to look at this and see, quote, the smirk of a male who's, quote, enjoying the distress of a woman he's just punched in the head.

Where do we even start with this, right?

Like,

it's the punching people in the head competition.

Like,

why is that being framed as this like shocking thing?

Well, that's what I was going to say.

I mean, there's everything about this tweet, which really does on August 1st, like kick off this conversation that would just become only more miserable over the following week.

And we're going to talk about all of it.

But like, a man who's just punched a woman in the head.

Like, first of all, we are talking about boxing.

That's like if two tennis players come off the court and you're like, and he was hitting the ball with the racket.

Like, yeah, that's what the sport is.

Yes.

It's like this weaponization.

And you see that over and over.

And like a lot of the images shared by people who are trying to make the case that Iman Khalif was like uniquely violent against other women or something, they use photos of them boxing, and it's like, yes, they are punching each other.

That's boxing.

Yeah, it's being framed not as unfairness in sports, but as an issue of violence against women.

Crazy.

Male violence against women.

Crazy.

And there's so much like subtext to this, like all the things that you have to kind of believe for this narrative to make sense.

I mean, mean, one, you have to believe that Iman Khalif is a man, which J.K.

Rowling seems to believe based on vibes.

We're talking about someone who was assigned female at birth, grew up as a girl, who is from a country where trans

where being transgender or gender transition is illegal.

Is illegal.

And these people think that they sent a trans woman to the Olympics.

So, one, all of that is just complete speculation based on more or less nothing except JK Rowling's gut feelings.

Two, you have to think that this boxing match, which everyone agreed to, which is regulated by an organization that has public rules saying what their

standards are and who meets them and who's allowed to compete.

And everyone who enters into a boxing match has consented to this situation, right?

And again,

this is not a complex consent kind of situation, right?

It's not like women are sort of socially coerced in a million ways to to become boxing champions, right?

In fact, usually quite the opposite.

You know, as a woman, you would have to go out of your way to go into boxing, as Khalif, in fact, did.

We know from her backstory that boxing was strongly discouraged because boxing in itself is seen as a masculine activity, right?

And that's kind of part of the background of this is that the fight for women's sports has often been a fight for women to do something that is seen as masculine.

Now we're portraying it as like like sort of almost equivalent.

The implication is that this is sort of equivalent to domestic violence, right?

Or that Iman Khalif is somehow like getting away with punching women because of like some little loophole in the rules.

Like life hack, want to hit a woman, simply become an Olympic athlete.

As if men don't get away with hitting women every day.

all over the world, right?

Yeah.

As if domestic violence was only made illegal within the last hundred years in many places.

Some places, it's still not illegal.

A sinister scheme is being invoked to explain what is a boxing match.

You don't necessarily have to think that anyone involved in this has bad intentions, but the worst possible intentions are being ascribed to Iman Khalif, again, on no evidence at all.

Yeah, Kat Tenbarge, who is a friend of mine who's a journalist who is someone who I've had on the show a number of times, she reports a lot for her work,

celebrity domestic violence cases.

And I just remember her writing online that she had never seen anyone care about an actual female victim of physical violence this way ever.

I've never seen it in my entire life.

You would think that everybody was like actually die-hard like into protecting women's rights or something the way that they approach this conversation.

They don't care about women.

They just hate trans people more or people who they think are trans people.

Trans, gender non-conforming, the list is expanding.

I mean, compare the way that the internet has received Iman Khalif to the way that the internet has received Johnny Depp.

Yes.

I think that says all that needs to be said.

Treasure troves of evidence to show that a woman had been abused in the entire world and the entire internet fought against it to protect the legacy and reputation of a movie star.

Johnny Depp, who J.K.

Rowling is friends with.

Johnny Depp and J.K.

Rowling is friends with.

We have people like Elon Musk, J.D.

Vance, Donald Trump, Piers Morgan, Ian Miles Chung weighing in to attack this woman.

Suddenly, these people who have, I mean, some of whom are domestic abusers themselves, and none of whom have ever really spoken out about domestic abuse as an issue before, are now suddenly really, really concerned that a woman was punched in an unboxing mesh.

One thing I do want to say is that Angela Carini, the Italian boxer who initially said it's not fair, she retracted everything within like two days and then released a public statement where she was like, I really wish I hadn't behaved that way, and I regret not shaking her hand.

And if I could see her again, I would embrace her.

And a lot of people make her like kind of the villain in this whole thing.

And I understand why.

And there was a lot of definitely like the weaponization of the image of like white woman tears and all of that stuff.

I just think that like at the end of the day in this media circus, I think that she is not the biggest issue here.

Yeah, I also want to reiterate that I do not think that Angela Karini is the villain in this situation.

I think that crying when you have lost your match in the Olympics is not unheard of.

And can sympathize, I mean, I think that she's being kind of a bad sport in the moment, but like most of the escalation of this into a global campaign of insane bullying, I don't think she could have foreseen that.

No, in which she has denounced.

Wait, right.

She has condemned it, to be clear.

Yeah, she has.

And I think a lot of the things that people like J.K.

Rowling and Elon Musk have said about this have been ascribed to her, but they're really just being said on her behalf without her permission.

And that's the other thing that really distinguishes this from a case where a woman has been abused is that usually in cases of abuse, there's a victim, right?

There's there's there's someone who is claiming is claiming to have been abused.

In this case, there isn't.

It's a bunch of people who have decided that Angela Carini is a victim of male violence, quote unquote, despite the fact that this is a boxing match that she agreed to.

And when she realized that she was facing an opponent that she could not beat, she tapped out.

You could argue that boxing is inherently inviolent and that we should abolish full-contact sports.

I mean,

there are like semi-credible arguments that like abolish the NFL, like, right, it's causing brain damage in all these men, right?

Okay, but that's not a mainstream position, and no one here is saying that, right?

No one is, it doesn't seem that anyone is advocating that boxing be abolished.

All the attention is specifically on the fact that a woman who people are perceiving as a man based on vibes has hit a woman who kind of seems feminine and damsel-ish in the way that this has been framed online.

I would like to take a quick break from today's show to thank the sponsor of today's episode, Nord VPN.

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That'll also be in the episode description.

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Now, back to the show.

Would you like to read the next JK Rowling tweet?

To provide a little context here, so we're moving into August 2nd, day two of the discourse, if you will.

And between August 1st and August 2nd, a lot of people started to make light of the fact that, like,

IBA is kind of a shady organization.

We don't really know anything about Iman Khalif's biology.

And looking into this to the extent that people are begging to is kind of dehumanizing.

And also, like, this is a cis woman.

J.K.

Rowling, probably, you should pump pump the brakes a little bit.

And so J.K.

Rowling, famously very bad at accepting that she has ever wrong about anything, digs her heels in.

I don't think I've ever seen, by the way, J.K.

Rowling admit that she has been ever wrong about anything.

Not once.

No, when she did her Holocaust denial, which was the impetus for the last episode we did together, she never walked that back.

And it's

a habit that J.K.

Rowling has that I think actually might kind of be a key to understanding her madness, right?

I mean, I'm sure we'll discuss later, like, how did she get this bad?

Some people have proposed black mold.

I mean, my personal theory is that this is someone who's self-radicalized, essentially, through an accelerating feedback loop of doubling down on bad takes, of responding vindictively to any criticism, of being love-bombed by an already rabid hate movement.

I think that's how we've gone from, you know, some of my best friends are trans, and I have a hard time thinking of them as anything but women.

And, you know, saying, I'll march with you if you're persecuted, if you're ever oppressed, just to, like, the insane

tirade that we are now in the middle of.

And that we go on like once a week with her.

Once a week at least.

J.K.

Rowling's transphobia did not fall out of a coconut tree, but here we are nonetheless.

August 2nd, day 2.

The idea that those objecting to a male punching a female in the name of sport are objecting because they believe that Khalif to be trans is is a joke.

We object because we saw a male punching a female.

So, because people are like, at this point, have pushed back on the idea that Iman Khalif is a trans woman.

Here, she's just saying, no, Iman Khalif is a man.

And I know that because I can see it.

Yeah, she's saying that, okay,

she's not a trans woman, but she's just a man.

Okay, what does that mean, Joanne?

I mean, you're saying that a person who was assigned female at birth, who has lived their entire life as a woman, is a man based on

what?

Speculation.

I think one of the reasons that I found this entire saga around hating Iman Khalif to be like fascinating is that to me, it represents like a significant escalation in gender-critical rhetoric, right?

Where as I think that most of their most vicious hate in the past was kind of directed at trans, I mean, initially, right, J.K.

Rilling denied even that.

She was trying to maintain a front of compassion for trans people, but saying, oh, but I just have like a few concerns about the safety of women's spaces and so on.

Years ago, she moved from that to just being openly vicious to trans people online, misgendering,

just attacking random trans civilians' appearance for no other reason than essentially to be a bully.

But now we've escalated even further to using the same playbook against people who are not even trans.

Yeah.

It kind of is a departure from what has previously been their theory of gender, right?

Because you used to see gender-critical people argue that, oh, the reason that trans women are not women is that they don't have like female socialization, right?

You have to have been socialized as a woman to have the distinctive sort of traumas that are constitutive of womanhood because they have this, sometimes they have like a very like victim victim-centered idea of what it is to be a woman, right?

To be a woman is to suffer in these particular ways.

But here's someone who was assigned female birth, someone who has been socialized as a woman.

And yeah, they're saying, oh, no,

that's a man and it's a misogynistic man.

And we're going to misgender you and we're going to vilify you.

And there was a time when all of these people would agree, oh, a person born with a vagina could never be a man.

And now here we, that has also been abandoned.

So what is it exactly that makes someone their gender at this point?

It's not genitals at birth.

It's not socialization.

It's not hormone levels, presumably.

It's basically nothing to do with phenotype at all, because otherwise they would have to say that trans men are men in a lot of cases, right?

I think because of secondary sex characteristics.

It seems basically to be a kind of like royal proclamation theory of gender identity, where it's like, whatever Her Majesty J.K.

Rowling decides based upon vibes, that's your gender.

Gender assigned by J.K.

Rowling.

That's literally what it is.

It's gender assigned by J.K.

Rowling.

It's based on what she perceives.

Assigned male at J.K.

Rowling.

Assigned male at Hogwarts.

Assigned male by J.K.

Rowling, and we're supposed to just accept that.

Fucking crazy.

Well, so that was the thing that I noted with this tweet.

She said, we object because we saw a male punching a female.

We saw.

And it's like, okay, I thought the whole thing was being a woman is about what's in between your legs.

But now you're telling me that it's not necessarily what's in between your legs.

It's about what I see.

Who's we?

Who's we object?

Who gets to decide?

Who sees?

Right.

It's now a question of subjective perception and whose subjective perception matters because there's not agreement on this point.

I do not look at Iman Khalif and see a man, quote unquote, right?

So who's like, who saw, who saw what?

Whose perception is the privileged one?

I mean, presumably, it's J.K.

Rowling.

It's also, I just want to be like really frank here.

Like, what did you see?

You saw a woman, Iman Khalif, who was insufficiently performing femininity, right?

And you said that is a man.

And you said that maybe because she was too tall or maybe because she was too brown or she was too strong or she punched too hard at like in the boxing match or, you know, she didn't have on makeup or her, she had a wide jaw or like whatever it is that you think you saw and like you saw a man.

I don't even like want to give any credence to this.

She's just saying, I saw someone who I thought looked like a man because they didn't look feminine enough.

And that's the joke about this kind of like feminism, right?

Because J.K.

Rowling, of course, she would first and foremost identify as a feminist.

And this is the thing, is that her version of feminism, trans-exclusionary radical feminism, this is what it comes down to.

And it kind of originates in this gender critical dogma that, quote, we can always tell.

So the idea is that they have decided to confidently maintain that they can always tell the biological sex and therefore gender of a person, true gender, right?

Because they believe in that, of a person based on their own perception, right?

They think that they always get it right.

And I mean, obviously, that's demonstrably wrong because there's, we could point to a million examples of gender-critical people getting it wrong.

Including this one.

Including this one, including like, you know, just silly things where someone online will like post a picture of J.K.

Rowling to some transphobic person and being like, so are you saying that this is a man?

And they'll be like, yes, that's a man.

Because they've been primed by the situation to think that the picture is going to be of a trans woman.

So it causes them to perceive the woman in it as, quote, a man, right?

And any woman could be, anyone could be transvestigated in this way.

And what they're doing is they're exploiting a kind of feminist idea that, like, women need to trust intuitions.

And we all need to trust our gut because, you know, there's people who will try to gaslight women and who will try to put, to put it, use, use the norms of femininity and agreeableness to put us, to put women in uncomfortable situations.

Okay, I understand that that's where this idea comes from.

But the problem with always trust your gut is like, what if your gut is racist?

And it probably is, right?

Yeah.

And I feel like this is a situation where your gut is always right is not only incorrect, it's actually making you the dangerous aggressor.

I mean, you could point to other situations like, I don't know,

white women calling the police on black and brown men because, you know, they had a bad feeling about it.

I mean, it's very like Emmett Till.

It's very Emmett Till, yeah, exactly.

And the concept of white woman tears is a a concept that originates in non-white women pointing out this problem with the feminism of a lot of white women, where it sort of doesn't occur to white feminists sometimes that white women may not be the most victimized class on earth in some situations, right?

And that there actually is a kind of power that comes with being particularly a feminine white woman.

You know, the patriarchy makes a confined space, granted, but also a nonetheless almost sacred space for the feminine white woman and you know you see it in films like birth of a nation where the idea of the white woman under assault from this like dangerous dark other is invoked or in situations like the emmett till trial trial right

where basically right a white woman adopting a posture of victimhood is weaponized against non a non-white man or a non-white woman it's hard not to see this as falling into that exact pattern.

Yeah, yeah.

So for the rest of that week, J.K.

Rowling, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, continues to tweet and retweet and tweet some more about how Iman Khalif is a man.

And on August 7th, she tweets this.

So I'm going to send this one to you.

So the gender critical account Fair Play for Women tweets, quote, be kind, they said.

And there's a picture of a women's boxing match.

And then J.K.

Rowling quote tweets that saying, quote, but not to women, they meant.

Hashtag Paris2024.

This really isn't funny, but like the putting hashtag Paris2024 with the little Eiffel Tower emoji next to all of her like disgustingly racist and just like ridiculous and factually untrue tweets is so funny to me.

She's like, that can't be a woman.

She's not white.

Hashtag Paris2024.

I know it's there's something like twee about using this hashtag after like the movie.

It reminds me of that tweet where she tweeted about her children's book, The Ichabog, and then like accidentally control-pasted the text of some insane screed about trans people and TERFs that she had been writing elsewhere.

It's kind of the fascinating paradox of J.K.

Rowling in general, is that there's this kind of Jekyll Hyde thing where it's like, oh, children's author who writes whimsical stories about wizard school on one hand.

And on the other hand, it's like these like insane, venomous diatribes about the transsexuals.

I think it's one reason why we're all sort of so fascinated by this is that there's just something kind of fundamentally absurd.

Be kind, they said, but not to women, they meant.

And it attached to the photo of Iman Khalif punching one of her opponents in the middle of a boxing match.

And again, it's this weaponization of like a narrative about violent men.

And it's literally just two women having a boxing match.

Boxing is hitting.

Not to sound like a broken record, but that's what boxing is.

Right, boxing is being unkind, I guess.

Yeah.

And this, like, like, I don't know.

You could take any picture of two boxers in the middle of a punch and like frame this as, like, wow, that's not very nice, is it?

Like,

well, don't watch boxing then.

I feel like there's something else subtextual going on where it's unclear.

I mean, if she thinks that what she is claiming is a man in a consensual boxing match with a woman, this is fundamentally violence and it's male violence against women, which the subtext is sort of that this resembles, you know, intimate partner violence.

And I kind of wonder, like, I mean, I guess the subtext, right, is that she doesn't think that it's unkind for women to punch each other in the context of a boxing match, right?

Because she's not saying that.

She's not saying abolish women's boxing.

So,

I mean, does she think that like women cannot commit intimate partner violence against each other?

She seems to have, I mean, she seems to have this idea of womanhood where it's like to be a woman is to be a victim and to be like a kind of delicate flower or something, right?

And that's not a new idea.

There's an interesting book called In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado about her experience being in a abusive lesbian relationship and like one of the and like the difficulties of like how do you talk about that when it's something that one it's like you know could contribute to the stigmatization of gay people there's an anxiety about that but there's also a lot of people who sort of don't understand that women could be capable of committing domestic partner violence in a way that kind of echoes the way that like British courts a hundred years ago they struck down a law that was going to make female homosexuality illegal because the British parliament I think decided that it simply is not possible for there to be a sex act between women because you know it's missing it's missing the masculine element i think that there's a there's a quote from some you know member of parliament who said something like without the penetration like how could orgasm be possible um so you know it's also like you know the english parliament collectively admitting that they don't know what the clitoris is, which is funny.

This book that I'm talking about, it echoes it with cases.

Sorry, I have it right here because I wanted to mention it.

Like there was a case in 1892 where there was

an incident of lesbian domestic violence, Alice Mitchell slit the throat of her girlfriend, Frida Ward.

And the court kind of couldn't make sense of this as killing between lovers, right?

Because they just could not grasp that these women were lovers.

In the last century, in 1989, there was the first case ever of battered woman syndrome being invoked as a defense in a case where a woman killed her female partner who was abusive.

And the judge actually would only allow the defense if they changed the phrase to battered person syndrome because they just didn't get how a woman in a lesbian relationship could be a battered woman.

But what battered woman means is to be the victim of a man.

So there's, I don't know, there's this long history of sort of not understanding that like women are capable of doing active, masculine, aggressive things.

And I feel like, I certainly think it's subtext for how women, for how J.K.

Rowling views lesbians in general as this kind of sexless separatist movement or something.

But I also think it's how she views boxing,

where she thinks that, you know, female athletes must be sort of fundamentally dainty victims.

And she like sort of can't wrap her head around the concept of a powerful, aggressive woman in sport.

Sorry, that was a long ramble, but.

No, it was good.

We have one more J.K.

Rowling tweet and then I'm going to put us out of our J.K.

Rowling.

Our misery.

Only to be graced by Logan Paul coming up.

It really does only get worse.

It's just

sinking to the bottom.

You know, I want to just say, like, amidst all of this, like, JK Rowling is sending millions and millions and millions and millions of people to eviscerate Iman Khalif online.

And one thing I want to say about people who are new to celebrity as Iman Khalif is.

Like, when this was all kicking up at the beginning, like, I don't know, I went to Iman Khalif's Instagram this morning and she has almost 2 million Instagram followers now.

And that's amazing.

And I hope not only does she sue all of these people and become rich, but I hope she gets all the endorsements.

However, when this was starting, you know, just a few weeks ago, I went to her Instagram and she had like 20,000 followers.

And I'm sure I was even a little late.

Like, I'm sure it was way less than that when the Olympics started.

And again, outside of the boxing world, nobody knew who she was.

And the thing is, we think about Iman Khalif right now as a celebrity because she has become one over the last couple weeks.

But when you're very new to being a celebrity, you don't yet have the money, the resources, the people to stand in between you and the online vitriol.

Like, you don't have any of that.

Even if you're at the Olympics, a lot of people don't have money when they get to the Olympics.

A lot of people do sex work to make it to the Olympics.

And like, I say that all of this because J.K.

Rowling was essentially sending a very, very angry mob, which she has a lot of power over, to harass ultimately an unknown woman with very little resources to do anything to combat it.

Absolutely.

I would actually argue it's a global digital bullying campaign that actually may be unprecedented in its scope.

You know, people, people talk about like cancel culture and pretend that they care about that.

There's been a lot of hand-wringing over the last few years, and some of it justified hand-wringing about cyberbullying.

And you know, the celebrity case of this that's often brought up is from 10 years ago.

It's Justine Sacco, who is this woman who made a racist joke, then got on a plane.

All of Twitter basically decides to get this woman fired by the time she lands.

Twitter is a lot bigger than it was 10 years ago.

And also, a lot of the people who are participating in the dogpile against Iman Khalif, which is also completely unwarranted and completely based on lies, many of the most powerful and famous people in the world are joining in the dogpile.

I don't know that I've ever seen someone get bullied by this many people in power,

someone who three weeks ago, basically none of us had heard of, and who could not possibly be prepared for like the psychological stress that's, I mean, it's hard to even imagine like what it must be like to be the target of this.

Logan Paul,

I have to skip ahead to Logan Paul, but Logan Paul, God, I hope I never say that again.

I do have to skip ahead to Logan Paul.

Logan Paul tweets, this is the purest form of evil unfolding right before your eyes in relation to the Iman Khalif Angela Karini match, where he uses the same photo of Iman comforting Angela Karini.

And it's just like, this is the purest form of evil?

Like, let me go back on your Twitter and see if you've said,

it's like anything about anything ever.

Yeah, have you ever commented on any kind of women's issue at all?

Have you ever said a word about domestic violence?

Have you ever said a word about any man who's been outed as an abuser?

I don't think I can recall a case of Logan Paul ever being a spokesperson for that.

Okay, so we're going to transition from J.K.

Rowling to Logan Paul.

I love my job.

I mean, and I think that the transition from J.K.

Rowling to Logan Paul is kind of an illustrative example of the type of talking points don't just remain contained in your little field where you developed them.

So gender critical feminists, I mean, I've always been amazed by how not bothered they seem, by how many like right-wing male misogynists seem really enthusiastic about taking up all of their talking points.

Yes.

I feel like if I

had...

found that all of the talking points I'd used for the last five years were suddenly enthusiastically being embraced by the U.S.

Republican Party, by Logan Paul, by Elon Musk.

I would feel that I must have done something very seriously wrong.

I say this on my podcast a lot, but it's like, if Ben Shapiro is retweeting me, like if I'm having friendly engagement with Matt Walsh on Twitter, as J.K.

Rowling has done.

It's time to go to the mountains and like meditate for three months.

She will never do it.

No.

But so Logan Paul tweets at the beginning of this.

I can read the Logan Paul tweets.

I'll do my Logan Paul voice.

This is the purest form of evil unfolding right before before your eyes.

Stop.

I think it's pretty good.

No, I love it.

It's so good.

It's so good.

Thank you.

A man was allowed to beat up a woman on a global stage, crushing her life's dream while fighting for her deceased father.

This delusion must end.

Okay.

First of all, a lot of people have their dreams crushed at the Olympics.

Like, I think, first of all, like, we have to start there.

Most, most people.

Most people lose.

Like, what do you think the Olympics is?

It's, again, it's like weaponizing all of this stuff that has nothing to do with like gender or biology or protecting women or or whatever they're claiming to care about, but it's like...

Does he want participation trophies?

But yeah, also like the language, the purest form of evil.

The purest form of evil is about as black and white as it gets in terms of your moral nuance, right?

I mean, look, if I was, if I were a TERF, I feel like what I would be trying to like, okay, so what if I were a TERF?

Exactly.

If I were a TERF,

and I believed that Iman Khalif was, you know, whatever TERFs think the criteria for a man is, X, Y, chromosomes, or whatever.

Okay, suppose I thought that.

I feel like what I would be arguing, and like the only sensible thing to argue from that position, would be that I understand the complexity of the gender identity of this person,

but, and I think this is unfair in, you know, I think this is unfair and should be excluded from women's sports.

I don't think I would then escalate into saying that Iman Khalif is a man, nor would I suggest that she was motivated not by, you know, wanting to win an athletic competition in a sport that she's been practicing for years, but rather, you know, a sinister, diabolical desire to get away with punching women.

And then escalating from even that to simply saying it's the purest form of evil.

We're ascribing like satanic motivations almost.

Well, something about a lot of like the language and imagery we're going to get into that was used amidst this reminds me, not to take like a really dark term, but it reminds me a lot of the way that like Nazis would talk about undesirables.

It's dehumanizing.

It's like fascist dehumanization, the purest form of evil.

There was an image that went viral after

Iman's match with Angela Karini that someone had illustrated, which basically portrayed them in the boxing ring.

And Angela Karini was drawn as this kind of like wafy-looking, very feminine, thin white woman.

And Iman Khalif was depicted as a literal beast.

Like a minotaur, goat horned, like

male bodybuilding physique, boxing gloves five times the size of her opponent.

And the opponent is like a, you know, a 5'2

Caucasian biological like Barbie.

It's just this like imagery of like King Kong and beauty, right?

The first thing that I thought when I saw that, which went viral in part because her opponent after Angela Carini, like her, her upcoming opponent, which she would go on to be, would share it on her Instagram page along with a bunch of other memes calling Iman a man.

Ironically, those two women, Iman Khalifa and this opponent who shared all these things about her being a man, they were physically very similar in stature.

Yes.

I mean, you have, I really think people should look at this picture because I think

the distance between what we're looking at here, which is two women who have more or less the same physique, although the opponent in blue actually, to me, looks taller and, if anything, more muscular than Iman, but is lighter skinned, right?

But is white, yeah.

This is where, like, it's hard, there just is no non-racist explanation for this, right?

Because what we're seeing is Iman now not just being portrayed as a man, but being portrayed as like a subhuman monster.

Well, right.

And the first thing that I saw when that image circulated was that, like, oh, this reminds me a lot of Nazi propaganda about Jews and other, like, quote-unquote undesirables in the 30s and 40s.

Like, there's this one image in particular that I'll I'll put on the screen, but it was from 1942.

And it's Nazis would do this like in their propaganda where they would like portray Jews sometimes as like ants,

but also as just like, you know, like monsters and satanic looking ghouls and beasts.

And like seeing trans women or just like people who people think are trans women portrayed that way, it's like very haunting to me because dehumanization is, you know, one of the steps of fascism.

Absolutely.

And I have to say, as a white trans woman, I have seen white trans women portrayed as monstrous or as like hulking muscular men who are dangerous to women or as kind of like hideous abominations.

But I don't think I've ever seen this level of like animalization with like literal horns.

There's just, like I said, I think it's only racism explains why this imagery would be invoked.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Logan Paul, amidst people pointing out that he has done a spreading of misinformation, tweets,

he's such a fucking idiot.

Tweets,

oopsies.

He literally starts the tweet with oopsies.

I'm not missing.

Oopsies.

Are you like oopsies?

Are you fucking kidding me?

Oopsies.

I might be guilty of spreading misinformation along with the entirety of this app.

So it's like, not only did I do it, but everyone did it.

We were all doing it.

Like, haha, we all, we all did a little oopsies.

We all did a little.

Like, no, Logan Paul.

We did not all do a little.

Okay, Matt, get through the tweet.

Although she's been previously disqualified for failing a quote-unquote gender test and has X, Y chromosomes, false, that's false.

Some sources say Iman Khalif was born a biological woman.

I stand by my sentiment.

And the sentiment in question was that Iman Khalif is the purest form of evil.

Exactly.

And then, so he basically is like, oopsies, I made a mistake.

And then in following right up, because the common theme with all of these people is that none of them can ever be wrong, even in the face of literally just being wrong, he tweets again, is my opinion that men shouldn't be allowed to compete in women's sports transphobic?

With a poll where people can answer yes or no.

Because it's like, okay, well, maybe I was wrong about Iman, maybe Iman's not trans, but hey, it's still wrong for trans people to be included.

It's just like, yeah, it's like, I may have been factually wrong, but in a different, more spiritual sense, I was correct.

And then he maybe immediately pivots to like whipping up a transphobic mob despite the fact that there's not even any fucking trans people involved in this, in this situation.

I got like really, really fucking frustrated when all of this was like swirling around.

And I made this Instagram post where I attempted to dispel all of like basically the mainstream narrative that people like Logan Paul and J.K.

Rowling had propagated at this point.

And it got so much traction on Instagram, which of course I was grateful for, but like it made me simultaneously so upset that it is like people like me, people like you, it sometimes feels like all we can do is push back.

That like the people like who who create the center of these conversations are like these just like fucking idiots.

Yeah, the worst people and the least intelligent and the least scrupulous and the least moral people have the hugest microphone in the world.

And they're all so

rich and so well cushioned in every aspect of life that they are answerable to no one, that they're accountable to no one.

All of these people spread misinformation to enormous audiences.

The other tweet that I had here was Elon Musk retweeted Riley Gaines, who posted a picture of Angela Carini writing, I stand with Angela Carini, men don't belong in women's sports.

And Elon Musk, to the tune of 1.8 million likes, wrote, absolutely.

There was never a retraction from Elon Musk.

There was never a retraction from Riley Gaines, bless her heart.

There was never

a retraction from J.K.

Rowling or Logan Paul or any of these people.

They can say whatever they want and they are accountable to no one and they are so, and I cannot stress this enough, so stupid.

And this is really, I think, exacerbated by Elon's ownership of Twitter where or X or whatever we're calling it.

Yeah, fuck X.

Yeah, fuck X.

I know.

You can't, like, no one knows what you mean if you say X.

Great branding, by the way.

There's no accountability in part because Elon wants this website to be his propaganda tool.

He's basically outright encouraging it.

Not only is there no accountability, but there's sort of rewards for engaging in these hate campaigns.

There's something like spiritually good about talking about this.

I feel like I'm like expunging it from my body.

Well, because

you feel insane when you're just looking at it on Twitter all day.

And it's like, literally, how can literally everyone be this wrong and this cruel all at once?

And like just reason and facts and sense and compassion,

it just feels like, I don't know, like like throwing gravel at a skyscraper in terms of how effective it is.

I'd like to take a quick break from the show to thank the sponsor of today's episode, Blue Land, who, along with my supporters over on Patreon, make it possible for me to spend 12 hours a day going down right-wing online rabbit holes, which, you know what?

When I put it that way, maybe we should all stop enabling this behavior.

Maybe we need to stop.

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And now let's get back to it.

There were a number of mainstream publications also who published entirely false narratives about Amon Khalif.

The Boston Globe published an article titled

You Want to Read It?

The title of the article is transgender boxer advances that's the title bold the headline jesus

christ and then they released an apology in the form of an editor's note oopsies they didn't say oopsies but

can you imagine they start their editor's note with oopsies They wrote, a significant error was made in a headline on a story in Friday's print sports section about Algerian boxer Iman Khalif incorrectly describing her as transgender.

She is not.

Additionally, our initial correction of this error neglected to note that she was born female.

We recognize the magnitude of this mistake and have corrected it in the e-paper, the electronic version of the printed globe.

This editing lapse is regretful and unacceptable, and we apologize to Khalif, to Associated Press writer Greg Beacon, and to you, our readers.

And I just want to say that, like, any of the retractions that were made from anyone about publishing false information about Iman Khalif, like, they usually correctly apologize about being wrong about Iman Khalif.

But I do want to clarify that like being transgender is not a bad thing.

Like

yeah, I mean that sounds pretty controversial.

Could you elaborate on that?

But it's just like, you know, yes, it is wrong to call someone trans who is not trans.

because that's just factually incorrect.

But I guess what I'm trying to say is we shouldn't treat it as as belittling to call someone trans.

What we should be apologizing for in addition to, you know, the Boston Globe doing bad journalism here is that in spreading this misinformation, it's just ultimately aiding in this anti-trans hysteria.

Yeah.

Right.

It's about who picks it up and where it goes.

And it's also kind of an Overton window shift where you have like even people who are trying to be allies saying stuff like, no, no, no, she's not trans.

She's a biological woman.

Like she's like, they may as well be saying like, no, she's not trans, she's a real woman.

This has been one of the kind of revealing things about this whole episode for me is that I feel like even if transphobia escalated to the point that they literally like rounded up and shot every trans person, I feel like that still wouldn't be the end of transphobia.

If trans people didn't exist, they would have to invent them, and that and they're doing it, they're inventing trans people to get mad at.

I mean, and I think some of the motivation when it's like a newspaper doing it is that it's just like man is dominating women's sports, is like a great Fox news chiron you know what i mean it's just like for low information people who aren't gonna follow up and who just trust whatever outrage stimulating ideas put in front of their eyes i mean it's the reason why like donald trump for example will use his talking point whereas trump doesn't he doesn't talk about trans people a whole lot i think it's i think transphobia is something that he doesn't really emotionally connect with that much like in the way that i do think he is like very passionate himself about hating on you know, migrants.

Like he's very racist.

I don't, I don't think transphobia comes like transphobia came naturally to Ron DeSantis.

Yes.

In his shows, right?

Because like DeSantis almost couldn't help himself from bringing it up, right?

And that's kind of the distinctive thing.

Whereas with Trump, it always feels a little forced.

He seems to like he often can't even really get the transphobic talking points straight.

Like I recently thought, like, like he recently did this press conference where he was talking about Tim Waltz.

And he was like, yeah, Tim Waltz, he supports things you've never heard of.

He's big into the transgender world,

big into the transgender world.

What does that mean?

But the one thing that he does seem to be able to get right in terms of he uses the right transphobic rhetoric is he says, I will put an end to men in women's sports.

Yeah, I think he posted that, right?

Yeah, he posted, and he did post that specifically about the Iman Khalif situation.

Oh, yeah, he attached a picture of Iman Khalif.

So, I think there's a kind of sledgehammer simplicity to this talking point where it's kind of tempting for media and for right-wing politicians to use it because the people in the audience don't need to have any idea what they're talking about.

Just that slogan, it gets people angry.

And when people are angry, they click on things and they go to rallies and they vote.

Yeah, I'm looking now.

He said at one of his rallies, this young girl from Italy, she did not know what hit her.

It's a person who transitioned.

He was a good male boxer.

Like, he doesn't even know how to be transphobic.

He's just saying.

Yeah, he doesn't even know how to be transphobic.

He doesn't even know.

Baby's first transphobia.

Also, like, again, like, listen to the vocabulary choice.

Like, this girl.

Okay, a girl, not a woman, a girl from Italy was beaten up by, like, a male boxer, a great male boxer.

Well, what's interesting, though, is that she for she, oh my god, misgendering Donald Trump.

Oopsie.

Well, he said he hasn't, he said he uses any pronouns.

Right, right.

Oh, he's fluid.

Yes.

In the latest with Laura Ingram.

He's fluent.

Laura Ingram, yeah.

Kamala Harris in her Twitter bio, which I never noticed until this morning,

states her pronouns as she/slash her.

What are your pronouns?

I have no, I don't want pronouns.

I don't want pronouns.

I saw.

So you're fluid?

What is that?

But what's interesting is he first describes Iman Khalif as a person who transitioned.

Like gender-neutral pronouns and gender-neutral language, I think, comes more naturally to Donald Trump than transphobia does.

Yeah, completely.

Completely.

Good for her.

Good for her.

I want to talk a little bit about the trans

sports debate and what I think it really is about.

The trans sports debate in preparing for this episode, I learned, is about 100 years old.

There's a century-old history of sex testing, specifically in sports, and particularly administered to female athletes who are accused of not actually being women because they are too good at their sport.

Interestingly, where do all signs lead when they don't lead to Reagan?

Nazi Germany.

It dates back to the 1936 Summer Olympics, which was held in Berlin in Nazi Germany, which that Olympic cycle was also used by Hitler as a way to promote his regime.

The idea to introduce gender testing in the Olympics was introduced by a bunch of Nazi party members who basically lobbied members of the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, we're learning so much on this episode, as part of their ongoing panic to weed out undesirables, right?

And these Nazis were basically able to start a panic big enough for the IOC to introduce a rule that would allow athletes to challenge the gender of their competitor via physical examination.

And this humiliating ritual was only banned in 1996.

Michael Waters wrote a book about all of this called The Other Olympians, which is really interesting.

And if you want to learn more about the history of sex testing in sports, you should go read it.

I don't really want to talk a lot about this episode.

Actually, I don't want to talk at all in this episode about trans fairness in sports.

And I want to explain why.

You know, not only do I not want to talk about trans fairness in sports, because Iman isn't trans, no one in the story is trans.

This was never actually like should have been about trans people in sports.

But also, that's not the real reason.

The real reason I don't want to talk about it is because I don't think that the trans fairness in sports debate is a legitimate debate, or at least it's not the one that we've turned it into.

And I don't want to give credence to what I think is a stupid conversation.

And the reason that I say that is because I don't think the people who start these conversations, these debates about trans inclusion in sports, actually care about fairness in sports or trans people who participate in them.

Trans people are such a small minority of the population.

Trans athletes are even proportionally a statistically smaller group than cis athletes.

This is such a non-issue on so many levels.

Like when we are having the argument about trans sports and should they or shouldn't they, it's like, it is almost always a hypothetical.

What I think these debates really are are people whose ultimate goal is for trans people to not exist in public life, people whose goal is to strip trans people of fundamental rights, not just to play in sports, but healthcare.

being legally recognized as people they say they are, that kind of thing.

I think the trans sports debate is their way to get you to like dance with them.

Right.

I think if we turn this into a metaphor of like dance, I think they are trying to drag you out on the dance floor of like entertaining their desire for trans people to not have human rights.

And I think if they come out and tell you that they don't want trans people to have human rights, you're going to be like, well, no, that's ridiculous.

I'm not a terrible person.

I think it's an easier entry point for them to get you at.

But it wouldn't be fair, right?

If trans women were to compete with cis women.

And that's like, they're appealing to logic a little bit because like you have this primal way to be like, oh, well, no, but if you were born as a man, and they're dragging you on the dance floor a little bit.

And I think that's where they get you to think, well, no, but then trans women aren't really women.

And then you're also thinking about, well, do trans women pose a physical danger to cis women?

And they're like getting these gears turning into your head.

And, you know, are trans women stealing cis women's valor and achievements or jobs?

And then all of a sudden, you're like doing the tango with a transphobe

who has fully roped you into this conversation that I just don't want to have.

And so I don't give this an inch because I don't think that anyone who starts these conversations about trans fairness in sports actually cares.

I don't think that's what it's about.

And you know that that's the case because most of the people who at a high level are making or bringing this rhetoric up are people who never talk about women's sports in any other context.

They don't watch women's sports.

They don't know anything about women's sports.

They're not interested in it.

But it's like you say, it's a wedge issue.

It's to mix the metaphor, it's a foot in the door.

You know, and another reason you know is like, I, as a trans person, am very often approached online or even offline by people who demand to have an explanation from me as to like, okay, but why are trans women trying to like dominate all the women's sports?

And it's like, well, one, like, why am I being asked about this?

Because I'm trans.

I never talk about sports outside of when people approach me about this.

I don't play sports.

I don't like I have no expertise on this question at all.

But they're approaching it to me because, again, it's like an issue where it would be a mistake, right, for me to respond being like, well, the question of fairness of trans women competing in women's sports is actually really complicated.

And it's going to depend on the sport.

And it depends on, you know, who are we talking about here?

Like, at what age did a person transition?

Like, are we talking about someone who's on hormones?

Like, right, there's all these factors that go into it.

But the minute you start doing that, you're kind of losing.

Because, like, you say, the point of this talking point is that it introduces a conversation about trans women taking away things from cis women and trans women being a danger to cis women.

And so

I think it's effective for them as a wedge issue for that reason because you can spring this like question on normal people and not necessarily immediately come across like you're a raving bigot, which is, you know, probably is the case if you lead with what we get, one of the more insane talking points.

You're never gonna, you're never gonna have success as a anti-trans fanatic talking to the man on the street about autogynophilia or one of their more like abstract, like abstract, almost occult kind of talking points where it's like, you can't lead with that or you sound like a crazy person.

But I think you can lead with, well, I'm concerned about fairness in sports without sounding like you have an almost perverse obsession with trans people.

I mean, I think often the best thing to deflect is to simply point out, look, there's no trans women in the Olympics.

Why are you talking about this?

Every time a trans woman wins any kind of sports competition at any level, it becomes national news, basically.

And so people have a few cases on hand to point to, but like there's not a single sport at any level that is being dominated by trans women.

None.

Yeah, literally.

It's like, yes, we have the whole country talking about like a high school field hockey game.

Fabulous.

It's a completely hypothetical problem.

Who gives a fuck?

And it's like, I know you don't care about it.

And neither do I.

We don't care.

We don't care.

We're talking about the humanity of trans people.

Like that's what this is.

And that is why I'm not talking today about transfairness in sports.

I don't care.

I will say, if you genuinely care and want to engage with this on like a substantive level, a friend of mine, Skylar Baylor, who is a trans man who swam on the men's swimming team at Harvard, who has dedicated a big portion of his career to like dispelling myths and explaining, you know, all these things about like variations in hormones and depending on when you started transitioning and what you've gone through and what you haven't gone through and where that puts you in the sports conversation.

Like he explains it in, you know, really interesting and nuanced ways.

But I think the majority of people don't actually care.

The majority of people certainly participating in the conversation about Iman Khalif don't care.

And we're not going to talk about it.

Okay, Natalie and I just took a short break from recording and I checked my phone and the first thing I saw was Trump in a new video from a rally he did yesterday, which I guess he did last night after, because, okay, to contextualize this for anyone listening, we were recording this the day after Iman won the gold medal.

And Trump said in a, in a rally last night, I'd like to congratulate the young woman who transitioned from a man into a boxer.

You saw he won.

You saw he won.

She won the gold medal.

He doesn't know how to be transphobic.

He doesn't, like the concept of transphobia, he's actually kind of trying, he's trying to learn, right?

He's doing his best.

He's putting in the work.

Like he's he's educating himself he's listening and he's learning he's listening he's learning he's he's he's taking his seat he's trying to learn how to be a transvo but he's he's still having a little bit of a hard time with it

you know sometimes he's sometimes he struggles with the language and the pronouns he's trying he's trying to get better at all at all at always calling the people they're mad at a man but he'll he he'll get there he'll get there it can be tough i i guess at first you know but but i think we should we should give him some time so i said it was all downhill from the top but the truth is we are going to have a little bit of fun.

Can I say that or does that make it seem too lighthearted?

Maybe I should just not say that.

No, you can absolutely say that.

Transvestigators are fun.

It's like, I mean, they're fun in the way that, like, I don't know, watching like documentaries about David Koresh is fun, but

what?

Is that your reference point for fun?

It is for me, but I'm like a sick of it.

Learning about the Waco siege.

That is kind of what I do for fun.

Like, I watch occults.

Yeah.

I mean, this is kind of a cult.

It is kind of a cult, and it's kind of a conspiracy theory.

It's not kind of a conspiracy theory.

It's a conspiracy theory.

So what is it?

So we're going to be talking about transvestigation, which is a word that we've dropped a number of times already in this episode.

But I think we should visit it in its most extreme form in a way that demonstrates.

how the people who are kind of the biggest people like in our media culture like Elon Musk, like J.K.

Rowling, are actually inching their way.

And actually not even inching their way.

They're kind of running towards the place where they are the people in these Facebook groups of transvestigating Hollywood.

So, what is transvestigating?

Actually, Natalie, I'm going to have you take the wheel on this one.

So, transvestigating is basically armchair social media behavior where you sort of, in the way that conspiracy theorists do their own research, quote unquote, quote unquote, you investigate the gender of various celebrities or even

sometimes non-celebrities on the basis of things like the width of their shoulders, the like tilt of their eyes, the width of their brow bone.

I mean, there's hundreds of, we could go on for hours about what the they're the kind of people who post a lot of photographs of people with like circles and arrows and diagrams drawn all over it to decide like, oh, Hollywood has been telling us that Henry Cavill is a man, but if you look at the hip bone to waist ratio, you can actually tell that he is a she and a biological woman, right?

So it's this, this is like the basic concept of transvestigating.

You are investigating whether someone is transgender on the basis of whatever you've decided are the objective markers of biological sex.

I've seen some things about the transvestigation of Henry Cavill, and personally, I'd be thrilled if it comes out that he's a woman, because that means I get to finally be a heterosexual.

Congratulations.

Which will thrill the family back home, I'm sure.

Transvestigating, it's basically what we've done as a culture for the last two weeks around Amont Khalif.

Like, this was one big transvestigation.

Yeah.

Right.

And it, frankly, was just as nonsensical, albeit less entertaining, because there was someone, again, a previously random unknown person to the world suffering the abuse through all of it.

Right.

And it had the pretense of being about fairness in women's sports, which trans investigation usually isn't.

It's just like, I don't know, I guess a recreational activity to these people or like a conspiratorial rabbit hole.

I have joined a lot of trans investigation, as you can imagine, takes place on Facebook in Facebook groups devoted to this where it's just thousands of people posting pictures of celebrities zoomed in to where you can see each pixel and they're just like, did you guys see this?

Like, do you think Scarlett Johansson's a woman?

Like, I have joined a few of these Facebook groups for research purposes.

And entertainment, I assume.

I mean, it is entertaining.

It's just like these people think that everyone is trans.

And in fact, I remember seeing one about Caitlin Jenner and then more recently Dylan Mulvaney, where because these people are out as trans, they actually reverse transvestigate them.

Like, hold on, I'm going to pull this one up about Dylan Mulvaney.

Transvestigators have reverse transvestigated, reverse transvestigated Dylan Mulvaney to conclude she must have been born a woman, forcibly transitioned to male as a kid, and then transitioned into female in adulthood.

Yeah, so they posted a picture of Dylan Mulvaney in one of these Facebook groups, and someone named Krista wrote, Possibly female to male to female.

There are other body markers to look at as well.

Shoulder to hip ratio, leg to arm length, the way their stride and strut presents itself.

Sometimes it is very hard because some children are being transitioned before they hit puberty.

So this person is basically arguing that Dylan Mulvaney was born female,

forcibly transitioned to male in her like infancy, and then later came out as a female, which she was actually born as.

There's another comment on this post that refers to Dylan as a quote possible double flipper, which

is a new piece of jargon to me.

I have never heard the term double flipper, but these people are so deep in it, they have a term for this.

When someone like secretly transitions twice and then presents to the media as a trans woman, even though they're a cis woman, who transitions to male first before tricking everyone by transitioning

again

and is that is most insane what these people are claiming is essentially it's a it's a conspiracy theory right where they're saying that basically all celebrity all hollywood actors literally all of them are trans right so scarlet johansen is a man Henry Cavillo is a woman.

Like

any celebrity you can think of basically has been transvestigated at this point.

It could happen to you, Andrew Tate, and it has.

Can we look at the trans investigation?

Yeah, see, let's do it.

Let's do it.

Andrew Tate was transvestigated this week.

Here, I'm going to send this one to you.

All right, so we have,

I mean, I guess I should describe for the people not watching the visuals what I'm looking at here.

It's a Facebook post about Andrew Tate captioned: I guess she forgot to wear her fake eggplant emoji, laughing, crying emoji.

And it's a picture of Andrew Tate in a speedo and then perversely like zoomed into the like extreme, like pixelated degree on the crotch of the speedo

where i mean it is like admittedly like a slightly bewildering picture to me like what like

if it's a tuck it's a good tuck it's like i will say it's a really good tuck like because i cannot tell that he has a penis are we trans investigating andrew tate i mean well that's the thing right is like you start engaging with these people and now you're doing it right and now you're one you're walking down the street wondering: is everyone trans?

Like, I don't know, is is my mom trans?

Is my, like, is like, I don't know.

Am I, was I, am I actually a, am I a double flipper?

Like, was I born female?

And then, like, like, I don't know.

I'm starting to question, I'm questioning everything.

You know, you, you listening at home could be trans.

Like, I don't know.

Did your parents trans you when you were a kid?

Are you on the precipice of becoming a double flipper?

I couldn't prove that they didn't.

And isn't that the same as evidence?

Maybe Maybe we are all trans.

Well, I mean, maybe that's, I don't know, maybe that's what we should be striving for.

If everyone's trans, then no one will be.

Trans normativity.

Yeah, exactly.

Victoria comments, he slash she blocked me for calling him slash her a trans.

Transformer.

They do have so many amazing words for trans people that I don't even they're using them as pejoratives, but like transformer.

That's kind of cunt.

It's hard to get mad about being called transformer.

It's like when they call gay people members of the alphabet mafia.

Like, it just makes us seem, I think it makes us seem a little bit too cool.

Yeah, it does.

Why are you making it sound so cool?

But, you know, I tack this on to my outline for today's show because even though these people, it's like laughably insane what these people are doing.

J.K.

Rowling is barreling towards this.

It's kind of the ultimate conclusion of their rhetoric, right?

Which is that...

Basically, you know, whatever I perceive is what the gender of a person is.

So J.K.

Rowling thinks that she can intuit like, oh, I just saw with my eyes a man punching a woman, meaning like she can just, she thinks that she can always tell.

Well, of course, these people inevitably run into the fact that most people cannot, in fact, always tell.

And, you know, I mean, this is something that we have just attempted to discuss for a long time in trans discourse, you know, the fact that like masculine women are often casualties of transphobic witch hunts too, because bathroom panics often target masculine women.

I mean, I think that probably a feminine trans woman woman is in a lot of ways less likely to get confronted in a women's bathroom than a masculine cis woman, because a lot of people cannot, in fact, always tell.

And trans women are accused of like reducing womanhood to feminhood stereotypes, to like long hair and makeup and dresses or whatever.

But a lot of these people, that does in fact seem to be how they perceive gender, right?

There's been multiple other cis women in this Olympics who have been accused of being men on the basis that, you know, they're muscular and not wearing makeup because they're in the Olympics, an athletic competition.

There's a video on Twitter, I should find it, of this female athlete like in tears, and she's wearing like now a full face of makeup and like feminine clothes and jewelry and everything to try to, I guess, re-establish herself as a woman in the eyes of the public.

Because people see a lot of female athletes, they have muscle because they're athletes, right?

And a lot of people see that and they don't see any like overt feminine signifiers.

And so they see them as men.

All of this kind of, this line of thinking that a person does not get to tell you what gender they are.

You get to tell everyone else what gender they are.

It does lead to transvestigation.

And in some ways, that to me is the significance of this entire story about Iman Khalif is that this represents a kind of global mainstreaming of a transvestigation witch hunt.

Right.

I mean, there were...

Katie Ladecki is another one who there were multiple like viral posts about Katie Ladecki not being a woman.

And I'm looking at this one right now in front of me.

It's from Ian Miles Chong, who's another genius.

He wrote, Is this a man or a woman?

How you respond will determine the strength of your character.

And it's like, okay, yeah, whatever, Ian Miles Chong.

But what's interesting is that all of these tweets with Katie Ledecky or with Amon Khalif, like with Katie, they use pictures of her where she's just gotten out of the pool.

Obviously, she doesn't have makeup on because she was fucking swimming.

Her hair is slicked back.

And it's, they choose photos.

And J.K.

Rowling did this too with Amon Khalif, where they, it's just women who don't look feminine in that moment.

And like, that's what this is.

They choose an unflattering photo of a woman, and then that's the proof that she's a man, right?

Again, like,

as far as I'm aware, this is the first time that anyone has called Katie Ledecki's gender into question,

but it's being questioned, right?

Because it's a photo of her after getting out of the water where your hair is slicked back, which doesn't, which causes you to have the appearance of a larger forehead, and she's not wearing makeup.

Because

i don't you already said it and it's like

i don't need to explain why an olympic swimmer might not be wearing makeup during competition do i okay but to ian miles chong you do to ian miles chong you do and that is where this is all kind of headed right the ultimate social pressure that's going to be applied is for women in all circumstances to never be seen without a full face of makeup nails, hair, you know, that's what a woman is going to have to do to not be transvestigated.

And even then, it won't be enough because as we can see from these transvestigation groups, you know, they're transvesting Scarlett Johansson.

I mean, I think it's worth talking about how like this disproportionately affects women of color.

It disproportionately affects butchers and masculine women.

But ultimately, like there's nothing that will save you from being transvestigated by certain people.

It's not that men don't get transvestigated too, but I think it's most,

I think it ultimately will lead to increased gender policing of women in general at all times.

So to conclude, Iman Khalif, as you know, ended up winning gold.

Congrats to her.

I hope she has a lifetime of peace and happiness.

I also hope she sues the fuck out of all these people who lied.

And considering J.K.

Rowling's in the UK, where libel laws are flimsier and easier to leverage.

Yeah, Iman, on the off-chance you're watching this, England has very libel laws that really kind of favor the plaintiff, so that might be a good place to start.

And we know that she's got money, so just a thought.

Iman beat out her competitors, including Anna Hamori, the Hungarian fighter who shared memes of her the previous day about Iman being a man.

Last Monday, the IBA International Boxing Association held a press conference led by none other than Umar Kremlev.

A room full of journalists convened in person and Umar joined over Zoom and according to the Washington Post, Umar talked in circles for 90 minutes about testosterone and the need to protect women's sports and also admonished the Olympics opening ceremony for hosting drag queens because, you know, why not?

And when journalists asked repeatedly for evidence of Iman's gender tests, because that's the only reason any of them wanted to speak to him, he said that he couldn't provide any and wouldn't provide any.

And eventually, many of those journalists just left the press conference while Umar was still talking.

So, Natalie, in this world of increasing transvestigation, the gender surveillance panopticon, as I call it, where do we go from here?

Like, how do we not barrel towards a world where this becomes the norm and where, like, one of the most popular self-identified feminists of our time is championing the cause of making women act more feminine, lest they be described as men?

Well, I think it starts by not allowing this whole incident to be memory-hold, right?

A lot of times bigoted movements rely on denial of their own horrible behavior, or they just rely on people forgetting and moving on to get away with continuing to do it again, right?

So, I think maybe keep this whole situation in mind and all of its ugly consequences the next time someone is being globally transvestigated and you know, push back against the people doing it.

Remember that these people were all wrong last time.

And I think that being aware of the way a certain type of moral panic functions can help you to kind of not get swept up into like really ugly witch hunt type behavior.

Also, you know, I think sometimes the comedy of transvestigation can be helpful because transvestigators are ridiculous.

And I think just laughing at this as like abnormal behavior in some ways is more effective than arguing against it because some people in this conversation, JK Rowling among them, are not available for a rational conversation to be had.

So what can you do but laugh at them and move on?

Ooh, you know what?

This is where we'll end the episode.

I just opened Twitter.

Iman Khalif Khalif has filed a legal complaint for online harassment.

Oh my God.

We're on the up and up, kids.

We're ending on a high note.

We're winning.

I hope she gets a lot of money.

She deserves it.

Hashtag Paris2024.

Hashtag Paris2024.

Natalie, where?

Everybody knows where to find you, but I have a ritual of doing this.

So I must ask, where can people find you?

And you should, if you haven't, go watch her videos.

Thank you so much.

I am ContraPoints.

That's the name of the YouTube channel.

And it's also my handle on Twitter, on Instagram.

I guess add me on threads too in case we decide that, you know, we don't enjoy using a website owned by the kind of person who does what we've been talking about this entire episode.

And yeah, thanks so much for having me on again.

Oh my god, thank you for being here.

If you have made it this far, you're welcome or I'm sorry.

I hope that you had a little bit of fun today.

No, that's not what I want to say.

If you learned something from this, if you found this meaningful, feel free to share it with your family member on Facebook who shared some really disgusting shit over the last two weeks.

And I love you.

I appreciate you.

We are all in this together.

I love you so much.

And until next time, stay fruity.

Cut.

That's good.