Bigots Need Their Useful Idiots

On Thursday, ESPN host Pat McAfee decided that he needed to say some things about an Olympic boxing match that had occurred earlier that day between Angela Carini and Imane Khelif. Carini quit the fight after 46 seconds, claiming that Khelif's punches hurt too much for her to continue. A non-medal Olympic boxing match between two relatively anonymous fighters is not something that would normally earn mention on McAfee's show, but in this case he prepared a whole monologue, almost certainly motivated by the fact that the world's most vile bigots had spent much of the day calling Khelif, a cis woman, a man and claiming that her victory was some sort of scandal.

McAfee's segment was a disaster. It begins with him saying, "I haven't done enough research," and then quickly transitions into him saying things about "the transgender situation," despite the fact that no transgender person was a participant in this fight. It ends with him talking about the crisis of seeing "a potential male physical body" punching an opponent during a boxing match.

Khelif was banned from fighting in competitions run by the International Boxing Association (IBA) in 2023 for reasons that have still not been made entirely clear. At the time the decision was made, IBA president Umar Kremlev, who has recently been busy recording videos about how the Olympics are promoting "outright sodomy and the destruction of traditional values," told a Russian news agency that Khelif was banned because she had XY chromosomes, which can be found in cis women with certain genetic conditions. The IBA released a statement yesterday saying only that the test and result that led to Khelif's ban was confidential. The IOC, which no longer recognizes the IBA as a governing body due to its mismanagement and allegations of corruption that have been made during Kremlev's tenure, released its own statement on Thursday, reiterating Khelif's right to compete at the Olympics and her adherence to the rules. None of this made it into McAfee's monologue.

While McAfee and his producers demonstrated one particularly brain-dead way to cover this story, the New York Times found another angle. The paper published a story about Khelif and Carini under the headline "Italian Boxer Quits Bout, Sparking Furor Over Gender at Olympics." Reading the story, it's hard to detect what is supposed to be understood as the "furor." The result of the fight is not in dispute. Carini has said she holds no ill will towards her opponent. The IOC has made it clear that Khelif is eligible to fight. Where is the furor, then?

It is coming from everywhere outside of the Olympics, from freaks like J.K. Rowling, J.D. Vance, and Lauren Boebert, all of whom have decided that, in the absence of trans athletes competing at the Olympics, they can just invent one in order to whip up a trans panic. None of this is mentioned in the Times story, which gives it an uncanny, paradoxical quality. The story would not exist without that bigoted disinformation, of course, but the paper's institutional cowardice prevents it from accurately identifying the forces at work.

The Times' coverage and McAfee's monologue represent the two ideal outcomes for members of the misogynist and transphobic swamp whenever they decide to target someone like Khelif. In McAfee, they find a dolt who can be sent out to regurgitate their bigotry for a wider audience by nothing more complex than flooding his Twitter feed with the term "biological male" for an afternoon. In the Times, they have a paper that is reliably eager to hear both sides, allows itself to be guided by the bleating of various frauds, bigots, and charlatans, and contorts itself in order to transmute that sludge into something with the sheen of sober, informed coverage. McAfee is meant to get his audience of college students and underemployed bros hooting about "men beating up women"; the Times insists to its chin-stroking liberal readers that the simplest story in sports—a boxer used her talent to win a boxing match—is actually something complicated and potentially sinister: a furor where none exists.