The Media Research Center’s Alex Christy weirdly had transgender people on the brain during the Olympics. In a July 26 post, he groused that a PBS Olympics preview showed that other people don’t hate LGBT athletes as much as he does:
With the Paris Olympics set to begin on Friday, PBS’s Amanpour and Company devoted their entire show to the games on Thursday, including a wild history lesson on the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness and the Making of Modern Sports author Michael Waters tried to tie Nazism with opposition to transgender ideology.
As part of his history lesson, Waters touched on the Czech runner, Zdenek Koubek. Koubek was a champion female runner who would later identify as a man. It should be noted that Koubek was intersex, not transgender.
Christy doesn’t understand that being transgender is not an “ideology” — he’s just parroting anti-transgender ideology from his fellow right-wingers. Later, Christy got quite offended that a CNN panelist pointed out that one of the biggest critics of Koubek at the time was an “ardent” Nazi who wanted to eliminate Jews like Koubek from sports, sexuality aside:
The controversy around transgenderism and sports today relates to men competing in women’s sports, not the other way around. Women have been football kickers, competed in male golf tournaments, and played on male baseball teams, so that’s not the sports problem.
However, Waters still tried to tie opposition to the “possibility of transition” to Nazism, and that is simply ridiculous. Men are men and women are women, the existence of intersex individuals do not change that.
Unfortunately for Christy’s argument, his MRC colleague Clay Waters spent a lot of effort last year insisting that an intersex soccer player was actually transgender. Still, Christy doubled down on his gender obsession about athletes in another Olympics controversy in an Aug. 2 post:
A day after conservatives voiced outrage that an Algerian boxer, who previously failed a gender test, was allowed to fight in the women’s tournament at the Olympics, CNN Newsroom guest host Paula Reid and sports analyst Christine Brennan rushed to defend the boxer against “an avalanche of misinformation.” However, all the duo could do on Friday was point out some irrelevant facts, like that Imane Khelif is not transgender and the International Boxing Association being run by a Vladimir Putin stooge.
As part of a tease of the segment, Reid hyped, “the IOC, coming to the defense of a boxer at the center of an avalanche of misinformation.”
Half an hour later, she reported, “An Italian boxer quit just 46 seconds into a match against her Algerian opponent after taking an especially hard punch to the head. Now, some critics say the Algerian boxer should not have been allowed to compete after she was disqualified from last year’s world championships.”
Christy hyped that “It’s not just American social media, it’s the Italian prime minister as well” raising questions about the fight. He then tried to defend the honor of the Russian-led IBA that conducted the “gender test” that Khelif allegedly failed:
Putin belongs at The Hague, but just because his hacks say the world is round does not mean that CNN should be arguing the world is flat. It is unfortunate for Khelif, but there is no right to be an Olympic boxer. Chromosomes and testosterone matter more than passport identification.
Christy harped again about Khelif and dthat alleged “gender test” in a post the next day:
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.
Christy tried to play whataboutism by discussing an athlete who had been convicted of child molestation:
Hill then tried to change the topic by declaring that Khelif’s critics are hypocrites because they haven’t spent as much time condemning the Netherlands for having a convicted child rapist on their beach volleyball team, but, to be fair, CNN hadn’t exactly covered that either.
[…]What if one believes that child rapists and people who fail gender tests should not be allowed to compete?
Christy was still clinging to that “gender test” argument in an Aug. 6 post:
Comedy Central’s weekly temp host of The Daily Show, Michael Kosta, reacted to the outrage that Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is allowed to compete in the women’s Olympic boxing tournament on Monday by spreading fake news about pro-life laws in America in an attempt to argue conservatives are being hypocritical. He also conveniently never said the words “failed gender test.”
For the International Olympic Committee, Khelif is a woman because her passport identifies her as such, and that is good enough for Kosta, “Because, again, this female boxer is female. Can we stop this before America turns it into a presidential campaign issue?”
Just like CNN, The Daily Show wants to claim conservatives are overreacting and trying to make a controversy where none exists by projecting domestic arguments over transgenderism onto Khelif. However, none of the criticism directed towards conservatives addresses the possibility that Khelif has Differences of Sexual Development which can lead a woman to have male levels of testosterone and would explain the failed gender test.
Christy’s link on “failed gender test” went to a Reuters article that also noted that the International Boxing Association would not release the results of a 2023 test of Khelif that were used to disqualify her from a tournament at that time and that “the IOC says the IBA is a discredited organization, mired in financial opaqueness and compromised by ties to the Russian leadership.” So there very much are legitimate reasons to raise questions about the IBA’s judgment. Christy also failed to mention the mess of a press conference the IBA held the previous day that raised even further questions. As one observer wrote:
First of all, this rogue press event—held during the heat of competition, overshadowing exploits on the field of play—started about an hour late, with no official explanation granted. There was chirping that Umar Kremlev, the president of the IBA, was going to make a surprise appearance remotely, and technicians were working on the Russian translation capabilities. The three principals who were slated to speak – IBA Secretary General and CEO Chris Roberts; Dr. Ioannis Filippatos, president of the European Union Boxing Committee and former chair of the IBA’s medical committee; and IBA coaches-committee chairman Gabriele Martelli – were all seated and looked ready to get going. “Guys, you are wasting our time, my god!” a German reporter shouted.
No one disagreed with that assessment.
Kremlev finally appeared on an electronic screen behind the live speakers. But no one could hear him as he spoke, a 2020-era Zoom issue (maybe he was muted). Twice during the approximately 90-minute session of filibustering, chaotic press questioning, and overall unpleasantness, the microphone feedback sent shudders through the hearts of the some 100 reporters packed into a sweaty room. AV errors aside, the more serious problem was the messaging.
Roberts, for example, started out claiming that the IBA didn’t want to overshadow the Olympics and was only touching down in Paris because of Khelif’s victory last week over Angela Carini of Italy: Carini withdrew after 46 seconds; the controversy exploded from there.
[…]Kremlev seemed hung up on the prize money he said he would be offering the women defeated by Khelif and Yu-Ting at the Olympics, and accused the IOC of hoarding revenues and failing to distribute them to athletes. He returned to knocking the opening ceremonies and Bach and continued to brandish his role as equality and fairness advocate.
“It was a chaotic farce,” IOC spokesperson Mark Adams wrote to TIME in an email, in response to questions about the organization’s response to Kremlev and the IBA. “The organization and the content of this press conference tells you everything you need to know about their governance and credibility.”
[…]There’s a very fair discussion to be had about gender participation in sports. It’s a nuanced, difficult subject. This was not the way to do it. By coming to Paris and adding to an already combustible situation, the IBA failed Khelif and Yu-Ting. It failed all athletes, really. It certainly failed itself.
But rather than tell readers the truth, Christy and the MRC censored how the IBA and its judgment is utterly discredited. Indeed, Elise Ehrhard served up an Aug. 12 post purporting to detail “the Worst Woke Moments at the Paris Olympics” by falsely claiming that Khelif and another boxer are “allegedly biological men”:
The world saw the heartbroken face of Italy’s Angela Carini after she forfeited her match against Khelif to “save her life.” Khelif then inappropriately patted Carini’s breasts in the ring after he was announced the winner.
Some of the female boxers registered their dissent against the IOC’s despicable decision to allow the alleged men to compete against women. Hungarian boxer Anna Luca Hamori shared a picture of a horned beast in the ring on her Instagram before fighting Khelif. Turkey’s Esra Yildiz Kahraman and Bulgaria’s Svetlana Kamenova Staneva made the XX symbol after their matches with Yu-Ting to signify the importance of female chromosomes.
In the end — surprise — the two allegedly biological men defeated their female opponents and won gold medals in their divisions. Khelif’s coach carried him over his shoulders for the camera.
The only proof Ehrhard offered that Khelif is a “biological man” was a post at sister website MRCTV by Craig Bannister in which he baselessly asserted that the two boxers are “two biological males.”