00:01:44.560Like every white guy in his 40s have a Substack.
00:01:47.900Feel free to subscribe to that too.0.98
00:01:49.720Sorry, I feel like I'm just plugging shit here.
00:01:51.880I mean, you should also rate and review us on iTunes while you're at it.0.74
00:01:54.160OK, I'll come clean and say that I, as a fan of Adrian Daub, I subscribe to his sub stack and I read his newsletter stemming from this most recent gender controversy at the Olympics.
00:02:06.600I thought it was the smartest thing I had read, unsurprisingly, not just on this particular, you know, faux cancel culture controversy, but also on like the gender politics of the Olympic Games in particular, which are so fraught.
00:02:23.080and so loaded and so weird when you think about them it's one of the most like esoteric
00:02:30.500creepy heavy-handed examples of gender binarism and gender essentialism that we sort of all just
00:02:38.160accept as a wholesome treat yeah and i say this with no disrespect to the people actually
00:02:43.900competing at the olympics who have nothing to do with any of this very impressive very impressive
00:02:47.980you know the there's the incredibly like fit young people performing feats of strength and
00:02:52.840then there are the rest of us like sweaty pale dweebs on couches assessing them how do you miss
00:03:00.740that says i as i wipe you know chips crumbs off off my yeah my face is just covered in chocolate
00:03:09.340and i'm like you gotta run faster yeah what the hell man so do you want to talk about like our
00:03:16.500most recent moral panic du jour and then we can expand a little more out into like what the
00:03:24.060olympics accomplish for uh the gender regime yeah so for those who have been spared all this uh
00:03:32.820things did not start well in terms of gender i mean they started well in an interesting way they
00:03:38.060like paris decided to do a kind of a different opening ceremony which i have to say given the
00:03:44.660frankly fascist aesthetic of recent olympic games i was all for i was like oh this is just going to
00:03:51.160be a little goofy and people did not take well to it it was a little goofy it was i would say
00:03:56.900a masterful performance but not a masterpiece in editing like there was the ultimate yes and
00:04:03.240performance like it just felt like like and also marie antoinette will show up without her head
00:04:08.460and you're like okay and then like uh the minions will be there because like apparently that's
00:04:13.840animated the minions are canonically french oh is that true yeah that the i don't know about their
00:04:19.640master the evil guy but the little yellow guys are all french i believe it's called oh yeah that's
00:04:25.540a french name too there you go yeah everybody's french in that movie yeah it was corny and over0.90
00:04:31.240the top in a way that i have come to expect from the french i think like americans tend to think0.60
00:04:35.500of the french as really classy and fancy and if you spend time there you actually come to realize
00:04:40.200that there are profoundly corny people.1.00
00:04:42.200Yeah, it was a kind of corny maximalism.
00:08:30.220Because it turns out we have a long tradition of playing with religious imagery in Western art, you know, and sometimes that can skirt the line to disrespectful, I would say.
00:08:42.460And that those are some of the best paintings.
00:08:45.180And but it's like for them, this was like the first time they had like the gazooks.
00:08:49.440I mean, I'm sorry, like the history of Christianity is all about appropriating other traditions and mimicking them or undoing them in various guises, like from Judaism itself through the, you know, European paganism.0.62
00:18:34.560So this question of naturalness, and we can sort of say what's natural and what's not, is central both to these bourgeois, not even disciplines, they're not disciplines of knowledge, they're just kind of habits, right?
00:18:49.200Like people would have these books at home of like famous faces where you can sort of like learn what a good face looks like, right?
00:19:45.160For reasons that don't make sense to me and which I probably could not defend, I love watching women's rugby.0.53
00:19:50.400But women's boxing had not been on my radar.
00:19:53.400And frankly, I don't think it had been on many people's radar.1.00
00:19:55.720Yeah. The same way that the feast-related holdings of the Louvre were not on anyone's bailiwick or very few people's bailiwick before people decided to make a huge fucking issue out of it. I think the same. Everyone became a fucking sports punch expert overnight. On August 1st, I believe it was, when Iman Khalif, a boxer from Algeria, fought Angela Karini, I believe, of Italy, and basically won the fight in 40 seconds.0.94
00:20:24.260Karini withdrew. She forfeited the match very quickly and afterwards appeared at a press conference in tears and seemed, you know, she said something to the effect of like, I've never been hit that hard in my life before. It's not fair.
00:20:39.580She later tried to walk that back, but her post-forfeit comments were seized upon by the online right, by J.K. Rowling, by a series of people who want to make a fuss about their own transphobia and use any excuse to have their transphobia influence policy to suggest that Iman Khalif was transgender.
00:23:57.040This is all hung on allegedly like tests that were conducted on these two women's boxers by an unrelated sports accrediting agency that determined they were male somehow.
00:24:13.000Tell me, like, because this is what these transphobes who are smearing Iman Khalif are really hanging their whole argument on these old test results.
00:24:21.180And I don't actually know quite what they're talking about.
00:25:39.500So we don't know what they were actually tested for.
00:25:41.640Yeah, they don't know what the test is.
00:25:42.860On the 23rd of March, the results came through and it demonstrated the chromosomes that we refer to within the technical and competition rules that make both boxers ineligible.
00:25:57.680And that was then further ratified by the BOD, our board of directors, that was taken there to remove both boxers from the championships.
00:26:06.920we're not able to disclose uh the results of any tests now i haven't looked into this i don't know
00:26:16.900whether or not like that kind of testing is standard meaning what what's supposed to have
00:26:23.000happened like iman khalif hit her head real hard and got some acquired some y chromosomes that way
00:26:27.640like what like like surely this would have come up before right like um but no so we have this
00:26:33.040like alleged test. And presumably Iman Khalif and Lin Yuting, presumably they have also been
00:26:39.560tested for other competitions by other bodies, right? That's what I would imagine. I don't know.
00:26:45.720But so the thing is the IBA, for us normies, the story, and really also for the people freaking
00:26:51.440out, the story starts on August 1st, but it turns out that's not the case. Time Magazine has a very
00:26:56.420nice rundown of that, that basically the IBA, even though it wasn't allowed to be part of the
00:27:02.140paris olympics has been kind of pushing the story out via twitter during and even before the games
00:27:08.600right so uh they they told russian news agencies that ting and halif had x y chromosomes and were
00:27:15.740excluded from the event therefore blah blah but they also very clearly were interested in
00:27:23.260juking up a little bit of controversy about the paris olympics which they weren't allowed to be
00:27:27.360part of and you know russian athletes were not allowed to be part of so for instance uh the the
00:27:32.820head of the iba his name is kremlev wrote on july 26 of 2024 that the 2024 olympic games are outright
00:27:40.780sodomy and the destruction of traditional values throughout the world and thomas bach who is the
00:27:44.600ioc chairman uh is responsible for this right so like i don't know that sounds kind of like a good
00:27:49.160time i know i mean i would have gone if i had known that now you're telling me kremlev but
00:27:55.960But the point is, like, they were pushing this story out ahead of time.
00:28:50.560But all I want to say is that, like, all this fucking discourse based on just the flimsiest, the flimsiest of nudges that maybe there's something there, right?0.95
00:29:01.780Let's also be clear that, like, this is all about upholding a division of bodies into two binary categories.0.95
00:29:10.880It's not wholly arbitrary, but its relevance to each one of these specific sports might be, you know, questionable or contingent or imaginary.
00:29:20.560And like the division of upholding the sex division of these sports, that that commitment is not really being questioned throughout this.
00:29:30.820Yeah. Including by the IOC. That's right.
00:29:32.600Yeah. But nobody like even the defenses of Khalif are she's not trans.
00:29:38.340Yeah. Which raises the question to me, at least, is like, well, would it really be a problem if she was, you know?0.88
00:29:43.580But I'm also interested in how Khalif and the Algerians have responded to this, because what's really fascinating to me is that Algeria, which is not exactly a queer and trans-friendly country, it is illegal to change her sex on any kind of documentation there.0.51
00:30:03.520I believe homosexuality is illegal in Algeria.
00:30:38.160They're watching Battle of Algiers, like jazz themselves up for their for their press conferences.
00:30:43.940Yeah. You know, but like Iman Khalif, who, you know, I don't actually know a lot about this woman's life or identity, but she looks to me like a pretty standard, like millennial Gen Z, butch lesbian.0.98
00:30:57.540who is not who I think of as an icon of national pride for Algeria.
00:31:04.300And yet she has become so because of the way that her talent and hard work
00:31:09.780have been undermined and insulted by these Western officials, right?
00:31:13.240So you see this like upsurge of like a post-colonialist nationalist pride
00:31:17.860around a figure that like in some of these post-colonial like activist circles
00:31:23.440would be understood as like a decadent Western import, right?
00:31:27.540it's it's a very interesting clash yeah or like maybe non-intuitive unification yeah of like sex
00:31:34.100and racial politics so there's a precedent for this when when castor semenia was challenged on
00:31:39.740on her sex where's castor semenia from south africa south africa south africa which has
00:31:45.960really horrendous anti-lesbian homophobia yes but also but good laws oddly enough right um1.00
00:31:53.000good constitution on that stuff. But still people really came out to support and defend her. And
00:31:59.680there's a great article by Zine Magubane, I hope I'm saying that right, about this case pointing
00:32:05.180out that like part of it is that like the very category of intersex has sort of a colonial
00:32:10.880legacy. It was often used to kind of to class bodies that sort of didn't fit in with white
00:32:17.400European femininity. And so the argument of that piece is that that just had to raise heckles
00:32:23.980because people sort of understand what the disciplining function of these categories
00:32:28.920and of this way of reading bodies at all is, right? And I think there's definitely something
00:32:34.080to that, especially at the Olympics, right? Part of what happened here clearly is that,
00:32:38.340you know, the Olympics are a massive image factory. There's so many images produced by this.
00:32:44.740And one thing that happened with the Caliph fight is that these transphobes would just share stills from the fight, right?0.56
00:32:53.620In which, let's say, Caliph did indeed look not stereotypically feminine, right?
00:32:59.140Like, oh, you're telling me this is a woman, right?
00:33:01.140Like, I can take a snapshot of you with, like, your mouth in any shape, right?0.69
00:33:06.340Like, with a fast enough shutter speed, you can do that.
00:33:09.120But, like, we're used to these athletes' bodies being sort of scrutinized in this way, in slow motion, in stills, right, the photo finish, et cetera, et cetera.
00:33:18.900And so, like, people didn't notice that, like, they were being fed extremely selective visual evidence and they were being asked to kind of become armchair diagnosticians.
00:33:28.300But, of course, we're always asked to be armchair diagnosticians at the Olympics.
00:33:32.220One example I give in my Substack post is the way a lot of sports commentators still kind of joke about, like, Chinese athletes' age, right?
00:33:41.040Like, oh, this gymnast is, like, probably 12 or whatever.
00:33:46.620Like, maybe let's not contemplate this person's body beyond, like, what it's currently doing, right?0.78
00:33:51.640Like, I don't think we need to, like, comment on her boobs.
00:33:54.900Like, that's just, like, that feels weird.
00:33:56.720It compounds with various gendered racisms, right?
00:34:00.360So like Imani Khalif and Castro Semenya, they are Arab and black respectively, right?
00:34:06.040And those are populations that are subjected to a masculinizing racism.
00:34:10.760They are understood to be more manly and women from those populations are understood to be like less real as women.
00:34:17.460Whereas what's interesting to me also is that a Taiwanese boxer is implicated and that is a feminizing racism, again, that typically gets deployed against East Asians, right?
00:34:27.500And that is also an unusual confluence of racism and misogyny and transphobia all wrapped up in the controversy over this boxer. Can you tell me a little bit about her?
00:34:38.340I don't know that much about her. I mean, I think she she was lucky in that. I think her fights were not as widely like there wasn't a spectacular incident like with with Angela Karini, though.
00:34:51.000she also like uh caliph i think gave a gave a very good press conference where she0.91
00:34:55.740you know called all this out and sort of said like what what the hell are you doing in my life
00:35:00.680but yeah it's it's it's interesting right like it's it's very noticeable that we are
00:35:04.860like i i'm not an olympics historian but but it does feel like the big cases tend to involve
00:35:10.340non-white people right or non-europeans and candidly it's only ever women's sports
00:35:15.640Yeah. Nobody is ever going to, you know, an Olympic gymnast or even like even in sports where, you know, women are not necessarily perceived to be incapable of competing at an elite level, like, say, gymnastics.
00:35:29.540Yeah. Nobody's looking at a gymnast and saying he's too impossibly tiny. He cannot really be a man.
00:35:36.180He must be secretly a woman. Yeah. Like trying to cheat. Like that's not happening. It's womanhood that's being policed and disciplined.1.00
00:35:42.300Yes, except that, of course, that the whole, you know, oh, this person got doped, right? Like, it's also like a way that can work for both genders, I feel like, you know, I mean, it's really all about gender construction, right? It's like, which ones are the salient biological features that make up someone's, quote unquote, sex? And what are the things that are just the way he is, right? Like, Michael Phelps is a, sorry, but a freak of nature, absolute freak of nature.0.97
00:36:07.240He all but has gills. It's nuts. He's got, what has he got? Like webbed feet and the really long0.98
00:36:12.020wingspan and the- Like double jointed, which some people are, some people aren't. There's some kind
00:36:18.520of acid that doesn't build up as quickly, meaning his muscles don't tire. Didn't you have an example
00:36:24.880in your newsletter of one athlete who just like literally didn't feel pain? Was that it?
00:36:29.100Oh no, that was someone else, but they saw that. Yeah, yeah. Like it's exactly right. I mean,
00:36:32.740like that's close to a fucking x-man at that point right like you know you should start for1.00
00:36:37.280dr xavier's school for the gifted youngsters but like that's somehow okay you know the the power0.96
00:36:44.560that is imputed to iman halif's non-existent y chromosome is like really kind of amazing right
00:36:50.300like when we count on all these other things i mean i'm gonna say something controversial here
00:36:54.000but like there was a picture going around of simone biles standing next to shack and like
00:36:57.400she also like isn't possibly tiny. Like that is like, I didn't know people came that small. I'm
00:37:03.380sorry. Um, I mean, next to Shaq, we all look quite tiny. All right. Like as a woman of five,1.00
00:37:08.820two experience, um, she might be like four, eight or something like that. Right. She's like very
00:37:13.540short. She's quite small. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure that helps. Right. But like, that's not salient.0.99
00:37:17.780And we don't talk about that. Like I didn't realize how small she was. I just thought she
00:37:21.080was a powerful athlete. And of course no one would break down crying and refuse to shake0.99
00:37:26.820Simone Biles' hand or Michael Phelps' hand and say, that was not fair, right? That's the thing.
00:37:32.060It's not just about what's scientific. People can couch it in all the craniometry and all the
00:37:38.460weird face measuring they want. But is that what a man's face looks like, right? Is that what a
00:37:44.480woman's face looks like? They can do that all they want. This is ultimately about the moralization1.00
00:37:47.940of nature, right? It's never a question about what is the effect. It's the question of, is it
00:37:52.580fair. Right. And my point is that like in the Olympics, we accept unfairness sort of at the
00:37:59.720word go. Well, this is just the nature of athletic competition, right? Is that it is a mix of the
00:38:06.580things that we kind of talk about in, you know, misty eyed, sentimental terms, like dedication,
00:38:12.460passion, perseverance, like legitimately moralizable qualities. Like a lot of these
00:38:18.160athletes are people who, I mean, Simone Biles is a great example, legitimately had to overcome
00:38:23.320tremendous hardship. Like legitimately had to spend tons and tons and tons of time, which you
00:38:28.800probably would have rather been doing other things, practicing over and over and over again,
00:38:32.940right? Like there's part of the Simone Biles story that is profoundly moralizable, right?
00:38:39.940And I think quite literally so. And then there's the part of the Simone Biles story and every
00:38:43.880athlete story that is completely unmoralizable yeah right that is completely devoid of input by1.00
00:38:52.280human agency uh that is devoid of like moral cause you know she's short she didn't do anything0.97
00:38:58.780to make herself short right that was a genetic roll of the dice that happened to be in her favor
00:39:04.520and it's nobody's it's to nobody's credit and it is nobody's fault right like she just is yeah
00:39:10.380Michael Phelps has all of his weird things, completely amoral, roll of the dice.
00:39:48.820It's going to selectively draw, like a lot of women's sports selectively draw from women who have more masculine interests and will develop as a result of those interests, more masculine physiques.
00:43:26.480I'm sorry, it's separate spheres. That's all it is.
00:43:28.880Yeah. But if they're then going around being like, oh, this is not a woman.1.00
00:43:32.180She doesn't belong here. It's like, yeah, so you're just kicking lesbians or women who present1.00
00:43:37.480too masculine out of like women's spaces. Like who now is destroying those spaces, right? Like0.94
00:43:43.480who now is hostile to lesbians the people you keep trying who never asked for this you know1.00
00:43:49.800these like weird british boomer straight women yeah who are obsessed nominally about me and my1.00
00:43:56.220welfare and then also give me shit when they see me in the bathroom you know it's like please1.00
00:44:00.060leave me alone like i don't want to be living in your head rent free like this again i just i just0.99
00:44:05.600had a margarita and i need to we can we can talk about how to define woman in a second but right1.00
00:44:12.820now i'm i'm having i'm having a case of ass spraying mayhem um in this in this our sanctum
00:44:19.780it's it's nuts right i mean like that's that's in some way i mean like i feel horrible for the
00:44:24.660athletes in all this but it it was almost darkly funny to observe these people's categories come
00:44:31.620completely unglued in the in the space of like 24 hours right like as you say like the ones who
00:44:36.740They're like, we must protect lesbians.1.00
00:44:38.940And then they see women, they're like, everybody needs to be protected from this evil lesbian, you know?0.99
00:44:44.440It's like the category of women just gets smaller and smaller and smaller in their imagination in order to exclude anything that makes them uncomfortable.0.98
00:44:52.980And I'm sorry, it's just too many people.0.99
00:44:54.760Like, it's just too many people for all of them to be somebody that you like.
00:44:59.540I mean, this is not a new point, but people have pointed out that that's probably the reason why TERFism is so dominant in the UK.
00:45:08.180It is ultimately an imperial feminism, right?0.98
00:45:10.400It's a feminism that wants to teach other women how to be women.
00:45:14.660And a lot of the categories that they're applying to Iman Khalif seem to me to come out of that project, out of the project of imperialism, right?0.52
00:45:25.020Where it's like, oh, no, you guys are doing gender wrong, and so therefore we must teach you.0.67
00:45:29.540Sometimes in my life, I get assigned to be like a turf whisperer.0.97
00:45:34.340Somebody will be like, look, can you talk to my mom and get her off of it?
00:45:37.640Like this happens to me every now and then.
00:45:39.360And it's something that like I have enough privilege and frankly enough patience that I can do.
00:45:44.500Like I can go and sit down with somebody and I can convince them to take my own commitment to like, you know, alleviating cis women's oppression seriously enough that they can trust me and I can try and reason with them out of this.0.53
00:45:57.660And I will say it's actually not as hard as I used to fear it would be. Like people are reasonable with if they trust your commitment to feminism. But this specific kind of spectacle or imagined spectacle of a very violent sport with a large audience in which a cis woman winds up crying, that is exactly the kind of thing that would undo all of those conversations.0.54
00:46:25.440Right. Because it is a punch. Yeah. And these are people who are alert, I think, not unfairly to the widespread nature and, you know, pretty much universal acceptance of men's violence against women. Right.0.82
00:46:42.960Um, and part of it is this like weird insult of the media substitution in which this instance, which is not men's violence against women, right? It is two women competing in a sport gets assigned all of the moral outrage that isn't being applied to actual male violence against women, right?
00:47:04.960Actual life beaters. Yeah. Yeah. And like actual domestic abuse, which is a fucking epidemic
00:47:09.960and kills a tremendous amount of women. Right. It's almost like this photo negative. Right.1.00
00:47:16.180Because all of the attention that is not being paid to violence by actual men that enforces this
00:47:23.200gender hierarchy, all of that moral attention that is absent becomes present in policing the
00:47:31.220same gender hierarchy in the name of protecting women. That is very interesting to me. Right.
00:47:35.640It's almost like how like people who don't give a shit about rape get very, very up in arms about0.98
00:47:40.700the prospect of false rape allegations, which like aren't really happening. Right. It's like,0.98
00:47:45.420okay, this is how you are dealing with the shame of accepting and functionally tolerating
00:47:52.140domestic violence in your actual life and communities is that you're sort of inverting
00:47:56.780that shame and externalizing it onto random people who you can make, you know, projection
00:48:04.740screens for the things you don't like about yourself.