Early Friday morning, CNN tried to claim that conservative outrage that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was allowed to fight in the women’s tournament at the Olympics despite previously failing a gender test was a bunch of fake news stirred up by Vladimir Putin hacks. Later that night, during Laura Coates Live, The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill added another charge: racism, especially racism against black women, despite the fact that Khelif is Arab, not black.
Coates agreed with her colleagues’ take that much of the controversy is built around misinformation, “And to be clear, this is not a transgender woman. This is a woman who is being used as a poster child to try to convey some other culture war. And the fact that she is being used in that way is something that is just so unbelievable to so many people.”
Yes, some people have wrongly labeled the boxer from Algeria, of all places, transgender, but so what? There is no right to be an Olympic boxer. If Khelif has an unfair advantage over the competition due to some rare condition, it is more than fair to ask if she should be allowed to compete.
[See NewsBusters for more]