Por 
This August 1st, the social network X was filled with transphobic messages against Imane Khelif (a cisgender woman) who defeated Italian boxer and former police officer Angela Carini in a fight that lasted 46 seconds as the Italian retired in tears, insinuating that it was not a fair fight by saying “never in my life had I been hit so hard. It is up to the International Olympic Committee to judge”. From that moment on, a chain of misinformation and transphobia was unleashed in social networks that was ignited by the gasoline of J. K. Rowling, Agustín Laje, Javier Milei and Elon Musk himself, owner of the social network X.
What appeared to be an organic reaction of indignation was not. It was a coordinated attack on X that had been brewing since at least July 27 and continues to this day. Volcanic, with the help of DFRLab, tracked the start of the transphobic hoax and found more than 10 thousand tweets on the social network “X” that replicated the same hateful message, reproduced on millions of accounts globally. Imane’s name alone has generated more than 2.3 million mentions on X as of Friday morning. Thus began to take hold the false idea that Imane, a cisgender woman, was a trans woman and could have killed Carini in the ring:
July 27
The Reduxx account, a “pro-women” portal that disseminates transphobic ideas, shares a message on X with a link to an article on its website stating that 2 athletes competing as “female boxers” (“female boxers” in quotes) in Paris 2024 had previously been disqualified from the Women’s World Championships for having “XY chromosomes”, referring to Imane and Taiwanese Lin Yu-Ting. This is where the speculation begins, as no document supports such a claim.
July 28
While openly transgender accounts such as ContraBorrado were spreading Redux’s misinformation, four days before the fight, the hashtag #IStandWithAngelaCarini was already being used on X in support of the Italian boxer, warning that she would be facing Imane Khelif, who had “failed gender tests” and had previously called for a protest against an “unfair” fight:
“She is @Angelacarini98. This Thursday, August 1, she will face Imane Khelif in the boxing ring, Khelif previously suspended from women’s boxing for failing a gender test.” #IStandWithAngelaCarini
July 30
The right wing and the Italian government had also been stirring up transodiant messages in advance, calling for Khelif’s disqualification and suggesting that the Algerian would kill Carini if she entered the ring. Two days before the fight, Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister and minister of infrastructure and transport, began to spread the idea that Khelif was a trans person who would kill Carini in the ring. “The trans boxer from Algeria, excluded from the World Boxing Championships, can participate in the Olympic Games and will face our Angela Carini. A Mexican athlete who fought against her said: “Her punches hurt me a lot, I think I have never felt like that in my 13 years as a boxer, not even against male sparring partners”. A slap in the face for the ethics of sport and the credibility of the Olympic Games. Enough of this crazy “woke” ideology!
July 31
The President of the International Boxing Federation, Russian Umar Kremlev, known for his hate speech against the LGBT+ community and who introduced the unsubstantiated idea that Imane Khelif has XY chromosomes, says on his X account, referring to the opening of the Games, “it is pure sodomy and the destruction of traditional values (…) and now men who change sex are allowed to fight with women at the Olympics”.
August 1
After the fight, which lasted 46 seconds, Meloni came out and declared that Imane had “a lot of testosterone” and it is once again Matteo Salvini who is promoting the false idea that Imane is a trans person. In her statements, the Italian Prime Minister, the far-right Giorgia Meloni, said: “With this level of testosterone, this is not a fair competition. Athletes with male characteristics should not be allowed in women’s competitions. However, Meloni has no way of knowing, as the International Boxing Association has only said that Khelif “did not meet the eligibility criteria to participate in the women’s competition” at the March 2023 trials (Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi). It is known that she was NOT tested for testosterone, it is only known that it was laboratory tests, the rest is classified. Meloni was supported by Eugenia Roccella, Italy’s Minister for the Family, Birth and Equal Opportunities, and again by Matteo Salvini, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister for Infrastructure and Transport.
Among the first public voices to join the witch-hunt against Imane was author J.K. Rowling, known for her radical anti-trans stance: “Could any image better sum up our new men’s rights movement? The smile of a man who knows he is being protected by a misogynistic sporting establishment, enjoying the agony of a woman he has just punched over the head and whose life’s ambition he has just shattered”.
Minutes later, coordinated messages began to be posted. The first message comes from the account @LogicLitLatte at 8:57 am (GMT-5). Soon, other accounts with similar profiles began replicating the message in whole or in part. On 1 August alone, the same message was posted 6,496 times. The last account to replicate it did so at 11:57 GMT-5.
By Friday morning 2 August, this first message had been replicated a total of 10,045 times on the X social network alone.
August 2
The standard messages continue. “A man beats a woman in front of the world. The fight lasted 45 seconds before she retired with a suspected broken nose” / “A man punching a woman in front of the world. The fight lasted 45 seconds before she was forced off with a suspected broken nose.” The first tweet of this news comes from the account @Suhailfayaz71 at exactly midnight.
That same Friday, the International Olympic Committee, through its chief spokesman Mark Adams, said at a press conference: “The Algerian boxer was born a woman, registered as a woman, lived her life as a woman, boxed as a woman and has a female passport. This is not a case of transsexualism.
In this new episode, several world political figures known for their anti-rights discourse also lent themselves to the disinformation and joined the wave, among them the President of Argentina, Javier Milei, Elon Musk, owner of the social network X, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, President of the Community of Madrid, América Rangel, transodiante and elected deputy of the National Action Party in Mexico, and the businessman Ricardo Salinas Pliego. On the same day that the scandal broke, the former US president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced that he would ban biological men (a euphemism for trans women) from competing in women’s sports. This attack caught our attention because bot farms are usually expensive and require simultaneous coordination.
In our report ‘Terfism: an erasure against trans people’, we pointed out the alliances of the global right and more conservative sectors (including, of course, the Vatican) with the transgender discourse, which has allowed them to co-opt the feminist agenda.
But the coordinated attack would not have had the same scope and impact without the (ir)responsibility and lack of journalistic ethics of international, regional, national and, to a lesser extent, local media. As the media critic and digital journalist Danielle Cruz points out in her newsletter “Crónica de la transfobia mediatizada: El déjà vu del discurso de odio” (and previously in the book Polarización y transfobia), the coverage of LGBT+ issues tends to be based on the following dynamics:
“Far-right media and anti-rights personalities on social networks publish something out of context, and it’s only a matter of time before national media pick it up with all the biases of these characters. In the case of the Imane Khelif news, it all started with transphobic accounts in the United States and England that picked up on the 2022 fight between Imane and the Mexican boxer […] From [conservative media] to supposedly ‘critical’ media (…) they reproduced two narratives (…): 1. To take for granted (with an editorial distance saying that they “accuse in networks”) that Imane is trans, and 2. The assumption that there is a “controversy” about her gender identity, both of which are crossed by rage-bait and disinformation strategies that show not only the priority of these media, but also the lack of concern they have for journalistic ethics and “the truth”, which they repeat ad nauseam”.
As can be seen from Cruz’s observations, the discrimination against boxer Imane Khelif not only demonstrated -once again- the existence of a systemic and coordinated attack against the trans community, but also that newsrooms continue to be complicit in violence not only towards trans populations; also against those who “do not fit” into the hegemonic, racist, xenophobic and biologicist definition of “woman.” One cannot overlook the involvement of Elon Musk, the owner of X, in the dissemination of this anti-rights hoax that serves to foment moral panics that portray trans people as a danger to cis women. Control of the narrative, at least at X, is concentrated in the hands of anti-rights.
The coordinated attack also reveals the ideological poverty of terfism, since it is no longer enough to have “a vulva” to be “a real woman”, as they have been falsely claiming. What seems to be new is that they want to set a limit on testosterone levels, as if they wanted to impose a biosurveillance regime to determine people’s sex. There is even speculation (some of it well-intentioned) that Khelif is “intersex because he has high testosterone levels” (for which there is no evidence), but this is an idea that misunderstands trans identities. Trans people are not trans because they “assume a gender opposite to their biological sex”, because “biological sex” is a much broader spectrum than is commonly believed, and its binary classification is a social construct. Trans identities assume a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, i.e. they resist an external diagnosis of their bodies, a cultural assignment, not a supposed biological condition.
The truth is that Imane Khelif is not a trans woman, she is a cis woman, that is how she presents herself and her passport confirms it. As for whether she is intersex, with XY chromosomes or with higher testosterone than the tests allow, there is no verifiable source. So far this is all speculation based on what happened in the 2023 tests. It is worth remembering that these tests have been highly questioned as they follow Eurocentric standards that need to be updated to stop discriminating against women with high testosterone levels, such as those suffering from polycystic ovary disease.
We call on the media and users of social networks to be aware of how these disinformative hoaxes work and to combat disinformation by confirming it before spreading it. Imane Khelif is not a trans person and trans people are not in danger. Rather, they are in danger because of this kind of moral panic propagated by the global far-right.
