The far right and its fellow gender fascists typically focus their attacks on trans people. When it comes to women’s and girls’ sports — a terrain cherished by anti-trans crusaders — the exclusion of trans women has been a Republican legislative priority, leading even to proposals for abusive genital testing requirements on girls whose assigned sex at birth is questioned. The fact that the latest high-profile case of gender policing is aimed at athletes who were indeed assigned female at birth should, however, come as no surprise.

Right-wing extremists — including Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk — alongside gender-binary zealots like J.K. Rowling are currently hurling vitriol at a cis woman boxer, Imane Khelif of Algeria, following the athlete’s swift defeat of her Italian opponent in an Olympic match in Paris on Thursday. Khelif is a female athlete who was deemed by the International Olympic Committee to be eligible to compete. She is only the latest woman of color in sports to be deemed insufficiently female by a right-wing commentariat obsessed with forging the strictest gender binaries, contrary to social, biological, and medical realities.

Attacks on Khelif — like previous discriminatory treatment of other female athletes like South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya — reveal the right’s gender ideology for what it is: intellectually untenable and racist. Pointing this out will not stop their vile gender policing; it should, however, give pause to anyone who might entertain Republican and trans-exclusionary positions on gender as worthy even of debate.

On the........

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