Episode 30: The Olympic Games (of Gender Panic)

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Weird Ottingen.

And whether we like it or not, we're in Big With the Right.

So Adrienne, before we get started today, I know you had something you wanted to tell our listeners about.

Yes, and this will come as a shocker to people who've been listening to previous episodes.

I have a book coming out, and I'd like you to pre-order it.

I'm told by the powers that be to repeat that as often as possible.

If you do still want to pre-order it, I had swag made.

The swag is allegedly in the mail.

It looks very pretty on pictures.

It hasn't arrived yet.

So if you pre-order and send me a proof of pre-order to cancel.research at gmail.com, I will send you said swag.

What's your book called, Adrian?

The book is called The Cancel Culture Panic, How an American Obsession Went Global.

And it's, yeah, it's about a lot of, actually, a lot of people we're going to be talking about today, the kind of international circuits of right-wing outrage machines and how these kinds of freakouts get internationalized, right?

Like to the point that someone can say something kind of ill-considered at Harvard and suddenly like, you know, Spanish newspapers or Chilean or Argentinian newspapers will devote lots of column inches to it.

And that's to some extent what we're talking about today as well, where, you know, people really got way into some stuff happening.

That wasn't happening.

Right.

They got too invested in things that weren't happening in the Ile de France.

So today we are talking about swirl of gender controversies surrounding the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Yeah.

And I should say that

this is partly based on a substack post I wrote.

Yes, I have a sub stack.

Like every white guy in his 40s have a sub stack.

So free to subscribe to that too.

Sorry, I feel like I'm just like plugging shit here.

I mean, you should also write and review us on iTunes while you're at it.

I will.

Okay, I'll come clean and say that I, as a fan of Adrian Daub, I subscribe to his sub stack and I read his newsletter stemming from this most recent gender controversy at the Olympics.

And I thought it was the smartest thing I had read, unsurprisingly, not just on

this particular, you know, faux cancel culture controversy.

but also on like the gender politics of the Olympic Games in particular, which are so fraught and so loaded and so weird

when you think about them.

It's one of the most like esoteric, creepy, heavy-handed examples of gender binarism and gender essentialism that we sort of all just accept as a wholesome treat.

And I say this with no disrespect to the people actually competing at the Olympics who have nothing to do with any of this.

Very impressive.

Very impressive.

You know, there's the incredibly fit young people performing feats of strength, and then there are the rest of us, like sweaty, pale dweebs on couches assessing them.

How do you miss that?

Says I, as I wipe, you know, chips crumbs off my

face is just covered in chocolate, and I'm like, you gotta run faster.

Yeah, what the hell, man?

So, do you want to talk about like our most recent moral panic du jour and then we can expand a little more out into like what the Olympics accomplish for uh the gender regime?

Yeah, so for those who have been spared all of this,

things did not start well in terms of gender.

I mean, they started well in an interesting way.

They like, Paris decided to do a kind of a different opening ceremony, which I have to say, given the frankly fascist aesthetic of recent Olympic Games, I was all for.

I was like, ooh, this is just going to be a little goofy.

And people did not take well to it.

It was a little goofy.

It was, I would say, a masterful performance, but not a masterpiece in editing.

Like, it was the ultimate yes and performance.

Like, it just felt like, like, and also Marie Antoinette will show up without her head.

And you're like, okay.

And then, like, the minions will be there because, like, apparently that's animated.

The minions are canonically French.

Oh, is that true?

Yeah, that, the, I don't know about their master, the evil guy, but the little yellow guys are all French.

Rue, I believe he's called.

Oh, that's a French name, too.

There you go.

Everybody's French in that movie.

Yeah, it was corny and over the top in a way that I have come to expect from the French.

I think Americans tend to think of the French as really classy and fancy.

And if you spend time there, you actually come to realize that they're a profoundly corny people.

Yeah,

it was a kind of corny maximalism.

Yes, yeah.

And yet

it was nothing if not charming, precisely because it was bullion and yeah, it felt like they had left nothing, had held nothing back.

But for all that, people got offended by it.

Based on, you know, shitty art history, one of the conceits was that the paintings of the Louvre were coming alive.

And they were sort of illusions in the background of a lot of the different stations that the opening ceremony sort of passed on its way down the Seine, where basically you would see famous paintings, sort of like motifs being picked up, right?

They were two portraits that were sort of half submerged in the water.

Some of it was computer animated.

It was neat.

And then there was one, I think think they set it up on one of the bridges, which was a bunch of drag queens performing a painting called the Feast of Bacchus.

You know, likely place for drag queens to be, I got to say, at the Feast of Bacchus.

That's where I expect to find them.

Yeah, we should do our Stéphane voice.

This place has everything.

Gods, monsters, scrapes,

and the human outrage machine.

Now, Stefan, what is a human outrage?

It's that thing where Elon Musk tweets about how disrespectful it is to Christians.

yeah and so like the dumbest people you know about the marie antoinette you know famous christian saint marie antoinette with her head off the weirdest part i think he did it on a bunch of things okay but it's true the one that i found was like he was like oh this is disrespectful to christians about marie antoinette about marie antoinette with her head cut off yeah i mean i don't really think that she's revered by the christians patron saint of cake yeah i don't think elon musk knows who she is yeah or he might have taken some pointers from her story um Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, maybe he's just like, oh, she's a rich lady, and obviously they're godly.

I will say, like, about this controversy, the Feast of Bacchus performance in which these drag queens sort of posed in this

arrangement that was supposed to evoke a painting about classical mythology, right?

It was mistaken by people who've seen maybe one painting for clearly the only other time there's ever been a feast of anything.

It was mistaken for

Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper.

Yeah.

Many world leaders are now denouncing this as a blatant insult to Christianity.

It was this moment from the ceremony that invoked the sacred Christian image of the Last Supper.

But it featured drag queens and dancers standing in the place of Jesus and his apostles.

And that was understood to be some sort of abomination.

Anecdotally, I can say that like the priest at the church that I went to the next Sunday, immediately started his homily.

It was like a beautiful, it was beautiful readings about, you know, unrelated unrelated things.

And then this priest gets up and he's like, you know what pissed me off?

It was the Olympics.

And I was just like, I'm out of here.

But like they're, they're very online.

The online right was very, very mad about this.

And it trickled down, at least to my Nigerian priest in San Francisco.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

I mean, it's really interesting, right?

Like, this is actually something where

I really benefited from your analysis of the trad wife because I was like, these people are trading exactly the way the trad wife is.

Like, they feel disrespected.

Really, they are uncomfortable with drag queens, if we're honest, right?

They feel that something's being disrespected, but they want to call that tradition, but they don't know jack shit about that tradition, right?

Yeah.

Now, I haven't done the art historical research yet, but like, my guess is that the Feast of Bacchus, of course, was supposed to evoke, like, the painting is supposed to evoke,

you know, Last Supper paintings, right?

So if there's sacrilege contained, it occurred in the 17th century.

It was a while ago.

Yeah.

Because it turns out we have a long tradition of playing with religious imagery in Western art, you know, and sometimes that can skirt the line to disrespectful, I would say.

And that those are some of the best paintings.

But it's like, for them, this was like the first time they had

zooks.

I mean, I'm sorry.

Like, the history of Christianity is all about appropriating other traditions and mimicking them or undoing them

in various guises, like from Judaism itself through the European paganism.

They do this everywhere.

Yeah, like give us, give us back Mithra's birthday, guys, if you're so into

it.

I want Saturnalia again, you know.

I know.

Again, Stefan voice.

This Saturnalia has everything.

I don't know.

Did you ever take art history in college?

Like, this is, that's my background for all this.

It's just that I thought I was going to be an art historian for like two years.

And so I would like get super stoned and watch slideshows, which we had at the time, and I would fall asleep.

But like there are like feast paintings are just

a genre.

And they often are biblical, right?

There's the Feast at Canaan, I think.

There's a couple of famous ones, especially sort of early High Renaissance, I would say.

And they always have like little visual gags.

There's one, I want to say Veronacy, but I don't think that's right, where like there's a little dog pissing against the table and whatever, right?

Like they're busy canvases.

They have a kind of a, they have a little bit of Bruegel energy, right?

Like there's like weird shit happening because like it's a big, busy canvas and you can have some fun with it, right?

So like, even if that had been Take on the Last Supper, it would have been very much in keeping with what they were trying to say about the Louvre.

And the people freaking out about it were just like guardians of a tradition that they seem to know jack shit about.

Yeah.

I mean, one thing that does recur to me a lot in the like new right or online rights treatment of this Western tradition that they claim to revere is that they never understand

that people in the past can be joking.

It's like how they don't think that women are ever joking.

They assume that women are always like dead serious and stupid.

And they also don't think that any dead white men can ever be joking.

Those dead white men are always dead serious and right, you know, which like leads them down some like very interesting pathways.

So the idea that sort of making fun or containing some irreverence or humor might in fact be a part of that tradition strikes me as something that just wouldn't be on their radar.

Yeah.

No, I think that's so right.

And it's also, I think, very central to their complaint that the classics are no longer being taught in American colleges, right?

Like, as someone who does this shit for a living, that's all we fucking do.

I mean, like, not all, but like, it's a lot of what we fucking do.

Like, of course, Hume, Locke, Kant are still taught at American colleges.

What we don't do is hero worship, right?

And that's kind of what they want.

And frankly, hero worship often is very incompatible with actually spending time with, you know, any, not just dead white male thinkers, but any old thinker, right?

I mean, like, we did an interview about a month ago with Alex Ross, right, who has devoted an immense amount of his life to Wagner.

And no one can make funnier jokes about Wagner than him.

Like, the more you immerse yourself in something, taking it seriously also means being able to be unserious about it.

And like, you're absolutely right that this kind of trad fixation betrays its insecurity about the object that it pretends to venerate.

It really is uncomfortable with it, right?

You know, like any fetishism, it isn't very good at looking at what it actually is venerating.

Right.

And I mean, that goes for the Olympics, too, right?

Like, they're like, oh, this is incompatible with the tradition of the Olympics.

Like, what, the one with the dongs, right?

Like, where everyone was like paying grain for 800 years?

Like, yeah, like, the Greeks would have been really, would have been really offended by that.

The Olympics itself is a pastiche of an imagined past.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Like, when did they start these?

Like the early 20th century, the modern

1890s.

This is something we should look up.

And I should have looked this up before.

1896 summer in Paris.

In Paris.

Wait, no, so they were organized in Paris, but the first one took place in Athens, makes sense, obviously.

But it was a French joint, the whole thing.

But yeah, so like, right, like put a pin in that date to our listeners.

Like, that's not accidental.

1896.

Yeah, it's like, you know, it's a moment of high nationalism, right?

We're less than 20 years away from everyone just going fucking ape at each other for like the dumbest chain of reasons in the history of the world.

But also like, it's a time when, let's say, the fixation on certain kinds of bodies becomes really, really important.

This is sort of the high point in France of fears about degeneration.

So

basically like physical degeneration or decadence.

It's also the moment when we start, I think, getting more school sports where we get a lot of fixation on clean drinking water, et cetera, et cetera.

And that's great.

But it also is like a moment when everyone's like, the working class is diseased.

Right.

Right.

They're all drinking themselves to death and becoming prostitutes.

You know, this is sort of where eugenics really attains a broader currency is around that time.

Well, it is the post-industrial urbanization period, right?

In which now, instead of being what was imagined to be like sort of quaint, wholesome, morally innocent, agrarian peasants, now the mass of your populace are all crammed together in these cities and they are understood to be deprived physically, but also crucially morally of this essential character that was embodied by physical agrarian, like agricultural labor, right?

Yeah.

And I mean, a cynic might put it this way: and might just say, this was when the rich finally had to live kind of cheek by jaw with the poor.

Yeah.

Right.

They didn't just like ride past them, but they're like, whoa, these people are malnourished.

Or like, whoa, these people have to do very demeaning things to get by.

Right.

They were like, Well, obviously, we can't pay them more.

So, what if a

lecture?

What if no more pay, but a lecture?

Speaking of Marie Antoinette, like famously, this is a person who had a fantasy about what peasant agrarian life was like with the petite trianon and her like little like milkmaid bullshit, which is actually very overlapping with the trad wife fantasy as well, right?

Yeah, the OG Trad wife.

Um, this like

fantastical,

imagined,

like, really like collaged version of multiple different pasts all laid on top of each other to evoke an authenticity, a

moral uprightness, and by extension of physical health.

This is also where you get like the yoga to anti-vax pipeline also partakes of this fantasy of the natural or like the pre-industrial or the pre-medicalization,

pure body as being something that you can find in in a return to the past.

Whereas actual peasants of the pre-industrial era had a lot of diseases and not a lot of teeth and short lives.

Yeah.

And I mean, to be fair, it is also a moment when just like living in a city is fucking unhealthy.

You know, everyone's sort of squished together, you know, everyone's heating with cold by that point, right?

So like everyone's got some kind of lung disease.

And also, you know, there's not a small element of racial anxieties.

It's usually not yet kind of colonial subjects coming to europe but but it's often people who are sort of off white

you know so the the the white other right like kind of coming just say italians i'm sorry right like within no it's like within italy it's southern italians uh within france it's usually like people from the south in germany it can it's often catholics so the the makeup of the poor has to some extent transformed they they don't they look different often or they or people think they perceive differences from them uh whether when it comes to themselves.

And so, like, yeah, so there is this this they are registering some some changes, but they're not looking to analyze them in any way that like you know

They're looking to analyze them as you say in questions of moral failing and hygiene the calipers won't come out for another few years.

Oh, no, no, they're saying

okay, okay, okay.

Oh, yeah, no, they they I mean Physiotomy is one of my little side interests your side quests that was given to you by a wizard.

Yeah.

No,

when I was in graduate school, I translated a book on it.

And so after that, I've always been fascinated with it.

And I, I mean, I've written one non-academic piece about physiognomy, but otherwise I've just kind of done it in academic settings.

But like, it really kind of hits its stride, I would say, in the 1830s and 40s with people like Carl Gustav Carlos.

And the funny thing is that like any European with any brains was like, this is bullshit.

Please stop doing this, right?

Georg Winfried Hegel has an entire chapter in his 1806 book, The Phenomenology of Spirit, where he's like, Okay, here's why this is bullshit, right?

Which has the great line, the spirit is not a bone.

He's like, You can't get there from here, right?

Like, someone can have the brain pan of a murderer if they don't murder someone, guess what?

They're not a murderer, so that's not gonna work, you guys.

And yet, it sort of kept coming up.

And my theory has always been it's because

it was an easy way for the bourgeoisie to manage cognitive dissonance, right?

It was a way to say, like, the people who are abjectly poor while I'm doing pretty well

kind of did it to themselves, right?

There's something, or their ancestors did it, or nature did it, whatever it is.

I don't have to feel bad about it.

It's just like, it is what it is, right?

And I think that the Olympics are an expression of that spirit, right?

Like, when we get to the category of fairness in the Olympics, there is a distinction here about what are natural differences, quote unquote, what are differences that are good and important and worth celebrating, and what are differences that are bad and illegitimate, right?

And

cheating in a way, right?

Like, so this question of naturalness and we can sort of say what's natural and what's not is central both to these bourgeois, not even disciplines.

They're not disciplines of knowledge.

They're just kind of habits, right?

Like people would have these books at home of like famous faces where you could sort of like learn what a good face looks like, right?

Like absolute bunk, right?

And, you know, the Olympics, which are basically a celebration of well-built bodies.

So do you want to talk about women's boxing?

Yeah, which we all became experts in in the last,

were you into it before?

Because I absolutely was not.

No, I mean, boxing, if I'm going to be real with you, I think boxing should be banned for everyone.

It's violence is the kind that just like freaks me out.

For some reason, I really love rugby.

I love watching women's rugby, which is profoundly violent.

It is a really violent sport in which there are no helmets and no padding.

Yeah.

And like American football, it's like probably like just really horrifically terrible for the people who play it.

Yeah.

For reasons that don't make sense to me and which I probably could not defend.

I love watching women's rugby.

But women's boxing had not been on my radar.

And frankly, I don't think it had been on many people's radar.

Yeah.

The same way that the feast-related holdings of the Louvre were not on anyone's Bailey Wick or very few people's Bailey Wick before people decided to make a huge fucking issue out of it.

I think the same.

Like everyone became a fucking sports punch expert overnight on August 1st, I believe it was, when Iman Khalif, a boxer from Algeria, fought Angela Karini, I believe, of Italy,

and basically won the fight in 40 seconds.

Karini withdrew.

She forfeited the match very quickly and afterwards appeared at a press conference in tears and seemed, you know, she says something to the effect of like, I've never been hit that hard in my life before.

It's not fair.

She like later tried to walk that back, but her

post forfeit comments were seized upon

by the online right, by like J.K.

Rowling, by a series of people who want to make a fuss about

their own transphobia and use any excuse to have their transphobia influence policy to suggest that Iman Khalif was transgender, which she's not.

They want to have men playing in women's sports.

You saw the boxer today, the Italian female boxer, just saying, I can't be

two shots.

Two shots.

She pulled away.

She said, I can't fight this.

40 seconds in.

There will be no men playing in women's sports when we're elected.

I said in my piece, there were three different versions of this, and no one ever had to sort of explain what they meant, right?

There were those who thought, who clearly sort of proposed that, that Khalifa's trans, which she's not.

There were those who claimed that, I forget what that's called, but like it's something that like Quillette loves, like differential sexual development or whatever, right?

Like, so basically, yeah, this is someone who develops sort of male characteristic, quote-unquote, whatever the fuck that means, like later in life, even though she was born and raised a girl.

Is it technically a kind of intersex?

Is it under the intersex umbrella?

Well, that was the other thing.

People suggest that she might be intersex.

I think that I'm not sure, but like basically those were the three things that I sort of saw implied.

Okay, so either this was a person, assigned male at birth, who transitioned to living and competing as a woman.

Or this person was born with an ambiguously sexed body and is living and competing as a woman.

Or this person is some sort of like, it seems like differential sex development almost like splits the difference.

It's like in-betweener.

Iman Khalif is, you know, a signed female living as a woman, but her body is somehow not womanly enough.

Enough, exactly.

She shades into the wrong territory.

And so two things to say about that, right?

One is Iman Khalif herself pointed out, I believe, in an interview that like a lot of the media sort of picks up on this like only after the fight.

But the people that she fought against, of course, like boxing is not apparently not that big a world.

Like they knew her.

Like she had trained in Italy, apparently.

So like these people know that that is not the case.

The people competing with her know that that's not the case.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And frankly, like she's, she's having a very good Olympics.

She hasn't always had very good, like she, she's been beaten by some of these people before, right?

So like it's.

Very strange.

Like, you know, it gets very much picked out exactly like the Last Supper thing.

But the second thing I want to point out is that like this entire torrent of like just asking asking questions coverage that you then get, right?

You get the outright transphob, you get your J.K.

Rowlings, you get your, you know, oh, this is a man who gets off on punching women.

You're like, oh my God, like just shut up.

But then you get these like just asking questions like, well, there are serious issues here about, you know, women's sports and how to protect them, blah, blah, blah.

And we should say all of this is based.

This is both about her and about Lin Yu Ting, who is another boxer who this was.

From Taiwan, I believe.

Taiwan, that's right.

This is all hung on allegedly allegedly like tests that were conducted on these two women's boxers by an unrelated sports accrediting agency that determined they were male somehow.

Tell me, like, because this is what these transphobes who are smearing Iman Khalif are really hanging their whole argument on these old test results.

And I don't actually know quite what they're talking about because you walk us through that.

So that's really interesting.

So I looked into this.

Like, so people are always saying, like, oh, the Olympics have to have rules.

Like, that's bullshit.

The Olympics apparently have rules.

The rules are the individual competitions are organized by bodies for that particular sport.

And they decide, apparently, what the rules are, right?

They basically administer this because the IOC, I think, is both too corrupt and not interested in this, right?

The IOC is like a glorified real estate development

bribery racket.

It's a bunch of Swiss people trying to get rich.

Yeah, exactly.

But so like they leave it to, right?

Like if you're an an equestrian, it'll be like, I don't know, the Equestrian Association or whatever, right?

The problem with boxing is that it doesn't have one right now.

There is an international boxing association, the IBA, but it is shady as fuck.

And most specifically, it's shady as fuck and like basically an extension of the Putin regime.

And so, basically, the IOC was like, you can't run this.

We're going to run it ourselves.

So, even the IOC, these are people who are too corrupt for the IOC.

Yeah, they're like, cool.

This is not just a real estate thing.

Yeah.

But the test in 2023 that Lin Yu Ting and Iman Khalif allegedly failed.

It's some sort of like biological sex test.

Yeah.

But they never say what it is.

So we don't know what they were actually tested for.

Yeah, they don't know what the test is.

On the 23rd of March, the results came through and

it demonstrated the chromosomes that

we refer to within the technical and competition rules that make both boxes ineligible.

And

that was then further ratified by the BOD, our board of directors.

It was taken there to remove both boxers from the championships.

We're not able to disclose

the results of any tests.

Now, I haven't looked into this.

I don't know whether or not

that kind of testing is standard.

Meaning, what's supposed to have happened?

Like, Iman Khalif hit her head real hard and acquired some Y chromosomes that way.

Like, what, like, surely this would have come up before right like um but no so we have this like alleged test and presumably iman khalif and lin yuteng presumably they have also been tested for other competitions by other bodies right that's what i would imagine i don't know um but so the thing is the iba For us normies, the story, and really also for the people freaking out, the story starts on August 1st, but it turns out that's not the case.

Time magazine has a very nice rundown of that, that basically the IBA, even though it wasn't allowed to be part of the Paris Olympics, has been kind of pushing the story out via Twitter during and even before the games, right?

So

they told Russian news agencies that Ting and Khalif had XY chromosomes and were excluded from the event, therefore, blah, blah, blah.

But they also very clearly were interested in juking up a little bit of controversy about the Paris Olympics, which they weren't allowed to be part of.

And, you know, Russian athletes were not allowed to be part of.

So, for instance,

the head of the IBA, his name is Kremlev, wrote on July 26th of 2024 that the 2024 Olympic Games are outright sodomy and the destruction of traditional values throughout the world.

And Thomas Bach, who's the IOC chairman, is responsible for this, right?

So, like, I don't know, that sounds kind of like a good time.

I know.

I mean, I would have gone if I'd known that.

Now you're telling me, Kremlev.

But the point is, like, they were pushing this story out ahead of time.

Okay, so this was engineered.

Hard to, I mean, I can't swear to it.

There's also a suggestion.

I didn't quite understand this.

Like, it's possible that the test in New Delhi happened after a fight that one of the two had won, meaning it was used to disqualify someone.

Like, who knows?

It might have just been that someone bet a bunch of money and was like trying to get their bet back.

But, like, whatever it is, like, it's clearly an interested party.

They're clearly pushing, they're trying to get a culture war started.

And they, for some reason, refuse to just answer the very simple question for out of privacy concerns, right?

They like got these women tons of death threats, but they have allegedly privacy concerns and therefore won't tell us what fucking tests they ran.

Yeah, like this person's genitals and DNA is not supposed to be private, but your testing regime is very private.

Unbelievable, right?

But all I want to say is that like

all this fucking discourse based on just the flimsiest, the flimsiest of nudges that maybe maybe there's something there, right?

Let's also be clear that, like, this is all about upholding a division of bodies into two binary categories.

Exactly.

It's not wholly arbitrary, but its relevance to each one of these specific sports might be, you know, questionable or contingent or imaginary.

And like.

the division of upholding the sex division of these sports, that that commitment is not really being questioned throughout this.

Yeah, including by the IOC.

That's right.

Yeah, by nobody.

Like, even the defenses of Khalif are she's not trans,

which raises the question to me, at least, is like, well, would it really be a problem if she was, you know?

But I'm also interested in how Khalif and the Algerians have responded to this because what's really fascinating to me is that Algeria, which is not exactly a like queer and trans-friendly country, it is illegal to change your sex on any kind of documentation there.

I believe homosexuality is illegal in Algeria.

I think that's right.

Yeah, that's the other thing.

People are accusing this woman of a crime that would, I think, come with serious jail time.

I mean, it's so incredibly gross if you think about it.

But Algeria is, in fact, taking this on as kind of a nationalist cause.

Yeah.

They're saying, you know, they are trying to deny or undermine the excellence of Algeria.

I think it does not hurt that these Olympics are in Paris and a a lot of the authority figures are like, you know, speaking in French to rile up Algerian nationalist spirit.

But like this person who.

They're watching Battle of Algiers, like

who jazz themselves up for their press conferences.

Yeah, you know, but like Iman Khalif, who, you know, I don't actually know a lot about this woman's life or identity, but she looks to me like a pretty standard, like millennial Gen Z butch lesbian, right?

Yeah.

Who is not who I think of as an icon of national pride for Algeria.

And yet she has become so

because of the way that her talent and hard work have been undermined and insulted by these Western officials, right?

So you see this like upsurge of like a post-colonialist nationalist pride around a figure that like in some of these post-colonial like activist circles would be understood as like a decadent Western import, right?

It's a very interesting clash or like maybe non-intuitive unification of like sex and racial politics.

So there's a precedent for this when Castro Semenya was challenged on her sex.

Where's Castro Semenya from?

South Africa.

South Africa.

South Africa, which has really horrendous anti-lesbian homophobia.

Yes, but also, but good laws, oddly enough, right?

Good constitution on that stuff.

But still, people really came out to support and defend her.

And there's a great article by Zine Magubane, I hope I'm saying that right, about this case, pointing out that like part of it is that like the very category of intersex has sort of a colonial legacy.

It was often used to kind of to class bodies that sort of didn't fit in with white European femininity.

And so the argument of that piece is that that just had to raise heckles because people sort of understand what the disciplining function of these categories.

And of this way of reading bodies at all is, right?

And I think there's definitely something to that, especially at the Olympics, right?

Part of what happened here clearly is that, you know, the Olympics are a massive image factory.

There's so many images produced by this.

And one thing that happened with the Khalif fight is that these transphobes would just share stills from the fight.

right in which let's say caliph did indeed look not stereotypically feminine right like oh you're telling me this is a woman, right?

Like, I can take a snapshot of you with like

your mouth in any shape, right?

Like, with a fast enough shutter speed, you can do that.

But, like, we're used to these athletes' bodies being sort of scrutinized in this way and slow motion, in stills, right?

The photo finish, et cetera, et cetera.

And so, like, people didn't notice that they were being fed extremely selective visual evidence and they were being asked to kind of become armchair diagnosticians.

But of course, we're always asked to be armchair diagnosticians at the Olympics.

One example I give in my in my Substack post is the way a lot of sports commentators still kind of joke about like Chinese athletes' age, right?

Like, oh, this, this gym, this is like probably 12 or whatever.

And I was like, yeah, or she's short.

Like, I mean, I don't know, man.

Like, maybe, maybe let's not contemplate this person's body beyond like what it's currently doing, right?

Like,

I don't think we need to like comment on her boobs.

Like, that's just like, that feels weird.

It compounds with various gendered racisms, right so like imani khalif and castra semenya they are arab and black respectively right and those are populations that are subjected to a masculinizing racism yeah they are understood to be more manly and women from those populations are understood to be like less real as women whereas what's interesting to me also is that a Taiwanese boxer is implicated and that is a feminizing racism again that typically gets deployed against East Asians, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that is also an unusual confluence of racism and misogyny and transphobia all wrapped up in the controversy over this boxer.

Can you tell me a little bit about her?

I don't know that much about her.

I mean, I think she was lucky in that I think her fights were not as widely, like there wasn't a spectacular incident like with Angela Karini,

though she also, like Khalif, I think, gave a very good press conference where she,

you know, called all this out and solicited, like, what the hell are you doing with my life?

But yeah, it's interesting, right?

Like it's, it's very noticeable that we are, like, I'm not an Olympics historian, but, but it does feel like the big cases tend to involve non-white people, right?

Or non-Europeans.

And candidly, it's only ever women's sports.

Nobody is ever going to, you know, an Olympic gymnast or even like even in sports where, you know, women are not necessarily perceived to be incapable of competing at an elite level, like say gymnastics.

Yeah.

Nobody's looking at a gymnast and saying he's too impossibly tiny.

He cannot really be a man.

He must be secretly a woman like trying to cheat.

Like that's not happening.

It's womanhood that's being policed and disciplined.

Yes, except that, of course, that the whole, you know, oh, this person got doped, right?

Like it's also like a way that that can work for both genders.

I feel like it's, you know, I mean, it's really all about gender construction, right?

It's like, which ones are the salient biological features that make up someone's quote-unquote sex?

And what are things that are just the way he is right like Michael Phelps is a sorry but a freak of nature absolute freak of nature he all but has gills it's nuts he's got what has he got like webbed feet and the really long wingspan and the like double double jointed which you know some some people are some people aren't um there's some kind of acid that doesn't build up as quickly meaning his his muscles don't tire like didn't you have an example in your newsletter of one athlete who just like literally didn't feel pain was that it oh no no it was someone else but they saw that.

Yeah, yeah.

They're like, it's exactly right.

I mean, like, that's close to a fucking X-Men at that point, right?

Like, you know, you should start for Dr.

Xavier's school for the forgift of youngsters.

But, like, that's somehow okay.

You know, the power that is imputed to Iman Khalif's non-existent Y chromosome is like really kind of amazing, right?

Like, when we countenance all these other things, I mean, I'm going to say something controversial here, but like, there was a picture going around of Simone Biles standing next to Shaq, and like, she also is impossibly tiny.

Like, that is like, I didn't know people came that small.

I'm sorry.

Um, I mean, next to Shaq, we all look quite tiny, all right?

Like, that's a woman of 5'2 experience.

But she might be like 4'8 or something like that, right?

She's like very short.

She's quite small, yeah.

Yeah.

And I'm sure that helps, right?

But like, that's not salient, and we don't talk about that.

Like, I didn't realize how small she was, I just thought she was a powerful athlete.

And of course, no one would break down crying and refuse to shake Simone Biles' hand or Michael Phelps' hand and say, that that was not fair, right?

That's the thing.

It's not just about what's scientific.

People can couch it in all the craniometry and all the weird like face measuring they want, but is that what a man's face looks like?

Right?

Like, no, is that what a woman's face looks like?

They can do that all they want.

This is ultimately about the moralization of nature, right?

Like, it's never a question about like, what is the effect?

It's the question of, is it fair?

Right.

And my point is that, like, in the Olympics, we accept unfairness sort of at the word go.

Well, this is just the nature of athletic competition, right?

It is a mix of

the things that we kind of talk about in, you know, misty-eyed sentimental terms, like dedication,

passion,

perseverance, like legitimately moralizable qualities.

Like a lot of these athletes.

are people who, I mean, Simone Biles is a great example, legitimately had to overcome tremendous hardship.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like legitimately had to spend tons and tons and tons of time when she probably would have rather been doing other things yeah practicing over and over and over again right like there's part of the simone biles story that is

profoundly moralizable yeah right and i think i think quite legitimately so and then there's the part of the simone biles story and every athlete's story that is completely unmoralizable yeah right that is completely devoid of input by human agency uh that is devoid of like moral cause you know she's short she didn't do anything to make herself short right That was a genetic roll of the dice that happened to be in her favor.

And it's nobody's, it's to nobody's credit and it is nobody's fault, right?

Like she just is.

Michael Phelps has all of his weird things completely a moral roll of the dice.

It's something he just seems to have.

And there's, and that's sort of similar on what get classified as these like male and female traits, right?

But suddenly a moralization of those qualities clicks into place when they become gendered.

And that is very interesting to me.

Yeah, right.

It's unfair that there's even a trace of masculinity in this.

I'm sorry, it's also boxing.

It's like,

find me the dainty feminine trad wife who wants to beat up other women for exercise.

Like, I just don't, I don't think she's out there.

I think these are good.

It's going to selectively draw.

Like a lot of women's sports selectively draw from women who have more masculine interests and will develop as a result of those interests, more masculine physiques.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, two points about that.

One is,

I mean, there was an attempt, right, to cast Angela Karini as this damsel in distress.

In fact, the next fighter, I forget her name now, Hungarian fighter that Khalif beat,

put on her Instagram a meme of herself and Khalif as beauty and the beast, right?

So like there is this like...

Khalif was like this giant Minotaur-like figure.

It was basically from the movie.

It was basically

a tiny little white woman with blonde hair, very skinny, in a boxing ring facing down this gigantic, like literal monster.

Right.

And then actually, I saw the picture after Khalees won that fight, and the Hungarian boxer who posted that meme was actually substantially physically larger than her.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, right?

Like, there's that.

And then the other thing, of course, is that they attach it to these weird sort of physiognomic categories, like her facial structure.

But then they even attach it to, like, would a woman dress this way?

Right.

There's a video that went around where like she's sort of scratching under her shorts.

It's like, a woman would never do this.

Like, first of all meet one.

Just try and meet one.

Second of, like, she looks good in a suit.

Again, like, I don't want to,

if she's straight, I'd be a little surprised.

I've like my dar is definitely going off.

I was looking at these pictures that the transphobes were posting of Imin Khalif trying to prove that this person was secretly a man or like secretly assigned male at birth or whatever they're alleging.

And I was like, in Algiers, there are like four women who are waiting for my text back from this

person, you know, like I know so many women with exactly this gender presentation.

And it's, it's, frankly, it's not that far outside the norm.

I just don't think I've tweeted, these people are acting like they've never seen a butch before.

Yeah, that was a great tweet.

Yeah.

And frankly, like, butches are not that uncommon.

Yeah.

Thank God.

But like, this is from the same group of people, this transphobic online movement, who have this weird theme that Bush lesbians are going extinct because they are, you know, being seduced into transgenderism.

And then when they're actually encountering one in the real world, they are insisting that she's not a man.

And in fact, the person looking at a masculine woman and saying that's in fact a man, that's the transphobes.

That's the transphobes who are trying to enforce that boundary and narrow the category of womanhood so that it can only accommodate a very small number of people.

And the rest of us get pushed out.

You know, and I mean, like, I think you pointed this out on Twitter as well, but like these people who've been going on and on about women's spaces are using.

People tell me what that means, by the way.

Yeah.

Like shitters.

So bathroom at a TGI Fridays.

Like, what are you talking about?

Would you want to stick shit at a TGI Fridays

next to a man, Maura?

There's no place that I ever

safe space that we have in the world.

It's a safe.

Yeah, it's a bathroom at a Chili's.

Yeah.

where someone where someone just like evacuates their bowels after a margarita you're like oh this is this is my temple this is what i get the the 10 minutes of peace of just of shitting my guts out at the teacher fridays um yeah but like they they talk really breathless terms about these spaces as if we do not live in a gender integrated world yeah you know but then even that like i'm sorry it's separate spheres that's all it is if they're going yeah but if they're then going around being like, oh, this is not a woman, she doesn't belong here.

It's like, yeah, so you're just kicking lesbians or women who present too masculine out of like women's spaces.

Like, who now is destroying those spaces, right?

Like, this is who I am.

Who now is hostile to lesbians, the people you kick right?

Who never asked?

for this, you know, it's these like weird British boomer straight women

who are obsessed nominally about me and my welfare and then also give me shit when they see me in the bathroom.

You know, it's like, please please leave me alone like i don't want to be living in your head rent free like this again i just i just had a margarita and i need to it needs help

we can we can talk about how to define women in a second but right now i'm i'm having i'm having a case of ass spraying mayhem um

in in this in this our sanctum it's it's nuts right i mean like that's that's in some way i mean like i i feel horrible for the athletes at uh in all this but it it was almost darkly funny to observe these people's categories come completely unglued in the space of like 24 hours, right?

Like, as you say, like the ones you're like, we must protect lesbians or when they see one and they're like, everybody needs to be protected from this evil lesbian, you know?

Like the category of woman just gets smaller and smaller and smaller in their imagination in order to exclude anything that makes them uncomfortable.

And I'm sorry, it's just too many people.

Like, it's just too many people for all of them to be somebody that you like.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, and and I mean, like, this is not a new point, but like people have pointed out that like there's, that's probably the reason why turfism is so dominant in the UK.

It is ultimately an imperial feminism, right?

It's a feminism that wants to teach other women how to be women.

And

a lot of the categories that they're applying to Iman Khalif

seem to me to come out of that project, out of the project of imperialism, right?

Where it's like, oh, no, you guys are doing gender wrong, and so therefore we must teach you.

in my life, I get assigned to be like a turf whisperer.

Somebody will be like, look, can you talk to my mom and get her off of that?

Like this happens to me every now and then.

Yeah.

And it's something that like I have enough privilege and frankly enough patience that I can do.

Like I can go and sit down with somebody and I can convince them to take my own commitment to like, you know, alleviating cis women's oppression seriously enough that they can trust me and I can try and reason with them out of this.

And I will say it's actually not as hard as I used to fear it would be.

Like people are reasonable with if they trust your commitment to feminism.

But this specific kind of spectacle or imagined spectacle of a very violent sport with a large audience

in which a cis woman winds up crying.

That is exactly the kind of thing that would undo all of those conversations.

That's a good point.

Because it is a punch.

And these are people who are alert, I think not unfairly to the widespread nature and, you know, pretty much universal acceptance of men's violence against women.

Right.

And part of it is this like weird insult of the media substitution in which this instance which is not men's violence against women, right?

It is two women competing in a sport gets assigned all of the moral outrage that isn't being applied to actual male violence against women, right?

Actual life beaters, yeah.

Yeah.

And like actual domestic abuse, which is a fucking epidemic

and kills a tremendous amount of women, right?

It's almost like this photo negative, right?

Because all of the attention that is not being paid to violence by actual men that enforces this gender hierarchy, All of that moral attention

that is absent becomes present in policing the same gender hierarchy in the name of protecting women.

That is very interesting to me, right?

It's almost like how like people who don't give a shit about rape get very, very up in arms about the prospect of false rape allegations, which like aren't really happening, right?

It's like, okay, this is how you are dealing with the shame of accepting and functionally tolerating domestic violence in your actual life and communities is that you're sort of inverting that shame and externalizing it onto random people

who you can make, you know, projection screens for the things you don't like about yourself.

Yeah.

I sound a little bit like, you know, a crank here, but I think there's something up with like the absence of actual concern about violence against women.

Well, no, it's true.

And I mean, the other thing, of course, that's very noticeable is that like for this brigade, femininity only ever exists as a category under attack, right?

And the idea of like, oh, there's two women punching each other, That's that's interesting, right?

Like, it's not something I like to watch, but like, it's something that someone might like to watch.

You know, it's all about women equals objects of violence, right?

Like, that's the only thing they could see.

There's a woman being beaten, right?

And it's like, well, what there's a woman doing, it's, I'm not sure this is whatever the gender politics are, they're at a higher level, right?

Like the people who organize these things, the people who train these women, like, yeah, I wonder about that.

But at the same time, they're just trying to make it into something that kind of evacuates womanhood of anything that isn't always about defense limiting and kind of delimitation, right?

Like they're basically like, woman is a safe space, right?

Like, and anything that happens to it is a violation of a safe space, it seems to me.

Well, I mean, this is the fantasy of like women's spaces as these sanctuaries from a violent world.

Right.

It takes very seriously, I think, appropriately the prospect of violence against women by men, but it then ignores the prospect of violence against women by women, right?

It imagines all women as allies, which is again, just something that the category is too big to allow for.

That is, it is frankly too many people for all of them to like each other.

Yeah.

Some of them, you got to land a punch.

You know, I'm not going to do it, but some women, some women will fight you.

Yeah.

Oh, and we should mention that the IBA, meanwhile, has flown to Paris to put on a bunch of doctors

and do a big press conference about these two athletes.

None of the doctors, I read a recount of it, and it seems that none of the doctors actually did the test, nor could they say what the test was.

They're all like podiatrists, once a vet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then this guy, Kremlev, apparently was like there on Zoom, and he's like, well, you know, they had very high testosterone.

And they were like, well, did you test their testosterone?

I was like, no, we didn't.

Right.

So like

the whole thing feels very, very fishy.

But like, in some way, it's very funny to watch these people who are like, there are two genders, and it's all biology, et cetera, et cetera, be like, well, but maybe there's really like a spectrum and like, right, like you can determine sex in different ways.

And sometimes these things don't align.

Like, I know, we know, you've been saying this.

And you've been telling it, calling us postmodern homos or whatever it is you've been calling us, right?

Like, isn't this supposed to be the queer theory or gender theory you're all so afraid of?

Like now, suddenly you're like, oh, what if she's a woman with high testosterone?

Like, yeah, welcome to gender trouble.

Like, that's the point.

Like, you're trying to make a distinction that nature doesn't make that clearly, right?

Because like, we're stapling together a whole bunch of stuff and calling it sex.

And then we stake an entire sporting event on that distinction.

And like, yeah, it's weird how that house of cards you build and then you put it on top of another house of cards is now at risk of full-on collapse.

Like, that's really sad and unpredictable.

Whoever could have seen this coming.

I will say Iman Khalif has dealt with this with like tremendous amount of grace.

Yes.

I saw one interview with her where she was just like, I'm not on social media.

And I was like, good for you.

Yeah, that is very smart.

She's like, I'm just on bumble

with like 400 unread messages.

And she's going to the final.

By the time this comes out, she may have

already competed.

As is Ting, Lin Yu Ting.

Are they going to fight each other?

No, they're different weight classes.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah.

I guess.

Yeah, we wish them both well.

Wish them both well.

I think they deserve a lot of uh relaxation and like French bread and cheese and uh enjoying Paris and not logging onto social media.

Yeah,

I will say that it would be now even funnier if they lost both their bouts and watched transphobes lose their minds.

I mean, I'm rooting for them to win.

I'm rooting for them to win.

They went through so much bullshit.

I'm sure their opponents are also lovely people and like that would be fine too.

And I think it would be the funnier outcome in the sense that then they'd have to explain how these inherent like didn't that happen to Leah Thomas, a swimmer in the NCAA, like she won some like qualifying race and all the transphobes got up in arms and then she lost the actual final and it wasn't that close.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now Leah Thomas is trans and so has to take estrogen supplements.

I'm guessing that this is what some people want to have happened here would be my guess.

That was the deal that Castor Samaya was offered.

Like you can artificially lower your testosterone.

These people who actually have these like physical conditions that are identifiable, that which is not true of our boxers yeah well we don't know because the russians won't say what the fuck they even measured

and it's exhausting and it's uh not in the spirit of sport no which we can applaud for from our couches while we eat chocolate chip cookies which is what i'm gonna do yeah for the rest of the olympics that's my gender my gender my gender is chocolate chip cookie

thank you for listening to in bed with a right we'll see you next time see you next time time.

In Bed with a Right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.