Brief: Born Female exposes how anti-trans activists weaponize fear by falsely claiming Imane Khalif, an Algerian boxer born female in a country where gender noncompliance is punishable by law, transitioned to compete against women. Khalif’s prior IBA medal disqualification fueled baseless speculation—like an XY chromosome anomaly—igniting outrage among women despite no evidence. This tactic exploits societal anxieties about male violence, prioritizing political manipulation over facts, and risks normalizing misinformation while undermining trust in gender-based narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
It's just a brief bit that won't fit into a regular episode, and that I don't want to have to wait to put out because it's timely.
This first section was written as parody.
If a person who is born as a man but prefers to be a woman can be allowed to exist in society, if society can accept them as a person who prefers to be female rather than male, then insulting a man for any feminine traits he has will have no teeth.
No longer will it be an insult to say that a man should put down his purse so he can perform some manly feat better.
No more will anyone be able to say that a man should feel bad about the throw he just made because it was done like a girl.
We will no longer be able to imply that a man will lose all of his strength and effectiveness as a man when he defers to his wife in any decision.
Wearing the pants in the family will no longer be a thing that has any meaning.
Whatever will we do as a society if this can be allowed to occur?
What kind of a culture will we have if we find it acceptable for people to want to have feminine properties and features?
If we allow this, then aren't we saying in some small way that women matter as much as men?
Unless we make it clear that this is a step down for the people that make this transition from man to woman, then we will lose any right to subtly imply in all other things that men are still better than women.
How are we supposed to decide how much salary to offer a person if they look like a woman but might have previously been a man?
How will loan officers at banking institutions calculate the average amount of disposable income a person has left over from their wages if the person was born as a man but now spends all that extra money on makeup and female attire?
How will we, as polite members of society, make realistic assumptions about a person's life goals and prospects for marriage and children if we allow them to change from a man into a woman?
And what about sports?
Isn't the reason why we separate men from women in sporting competitions because it would be unfair to have the women compete directly against the men?
How then could we ever allow a person to become a woman when they were once a man and compete in a sport against other women?
Aren't they cheating the system somehow?
And what do we do with team change rooms if we can't just have all the players undressing and showering in a big open space in front of each other?
That's not weird.
That's how it's always been done, and we're a society that never changes or allows any new ideas to ever change how we do things.
To change them is to admit that they weren't perfect to begin with.
And what about the people who were born as women but wish to be men?
Aren't they stepping out of order?
Aren't we then just completely throwing away the idea that we've, oh so subtly kept silent but ubiquitous for several generations now?
That, yeah, women get to vote and work and have their own bank accounts and marry people their fathers don't approve of, but they won't ever get to really be men.
Wouldn't that mean that being a man isn't really better after all?
Won't that rip the soul out of a society that has been structured around the ideal path for a man to succeed in life and that women just have to find a way to exist in if they want to have any real choices?
Women have a place in society and men have a different place.
So allowing women to become men means that we might have to pay them more for the same jobs now, right?
Think of the burden on businesses if all of those women getting paid less suddenly got paid as much as their male counterparts.
There's just no way to insult a man who was previously a woman by implying that they do something like a woman.
What would that insult even mean?
If we can't use gender swapping insults, then what kind of insults will we even have?
Why can't we just go back to hating and insulting each other for all the old familiar reasons?
Why does it always have to be so exhaustively new and difficult to understand?
That ends the parody portion.
On to the topical.
Imane Khalif is an Algerian woman who is competing in the Olympics as a boxer.
How extremely pernicious is this lie being told about her?
This is the culture war issue that the anti-trans crowd has been looking for.
They didn't know exactly what it would be, of course.
They simply beat on the anti-trans drum as often and as loudly as they could until they finally found the right spot where everyone in the world would hear it.
Think of the feelings this inspires.
The anger, the fear, all the strongest emotions.
How does this lie land with women who have been victims of violence at the hands of men?
This particular piece of propaganda really pours the poison into the cracks.
The pictures of the Italian boxer who lost the match that everyone's talking about, Angela Carina, show her wincing, cringing, and crying, and they're littering the internet.
Every woman who has ever been the victim of a man putting themselves into the proverbial shoes of this Italian boxer who, they are told, had to face off in a boxing match against a man.
But of course, it's not true.
Khalif is not a man.
She was born female in a country where attempting to express a gender other than the one assigned at birth is a serious crime.
If she was born a woman and is now a woman, then how could she possibly be transgender?
But what about her questionable eligibility, you ask?
She was declared ineligible to compete in a previous tournament.
Not an Olympic tournament, an International Boxing Association tournament.
Completely different organization of people organizing boxing matches.
The details about why that happened are not clear, as the IBA has been anything but clear about the nature of the test they used to justify the disqualification.
Also worth noting, Khalif wasn't disqualified until after she had already earned a medal at that tournament.
So, with no evidence of what the exact nature of the test was or why it would lead to disqualification, the internet has done what it's best at and has replaced evidence with speculation.
Perhaps the online inquisitors postulate she has a genetic anomaly that causes the existence of XY chromosomes in a person that otherwise looks as female as any other female that has ever existed.
For the purposes of this particular bit of internet outrage, Khalif is a woman whose circumstance is being used by a calculating group of disinformation merchants.
They know the political wedge they're using isn't true, and yet they hammer away at it nonetheless.
But the real question is, what do you do when you find out you've been lied to?
Do you cozy up with the ones who lied to you, like a victim accepting their abuser?
Because that's what you become when you believe these lies.
A victim of disinformation, giving an abuser power to further influence your decisions and continue the abuse.
And though very few people believe these sorts of lies deeply enough to get themselves into real trouble, there are some in the past who have.
And if we allow this disinformation to continue, then its influence will grow alongside it, and more will be lost to the unreality being woven in front of us.
Is that going to be you?
Are you going to be a new person that I have to worry about becoming lost to the machinations of people who would use your strongest emotional responses against you?