The Paris 2024 Olympics have barely started, it feels like, and have yet continued to be rocked by scandals in numbers seemingly equal to the number of shooting athletes which Twitter has decided to make the main character of the day.

Even before the games had started there was outrage about the E. coli levels in the Seine to the point where French Prime Minister, Emmanuel Macron, had promised to swim in it as a PR stunt in a bid to prove it was fine, actually.

Despite promises by French Twitter users that they were going to shit in the Seine in response, the river eventually passed muster, and the first Olympic scandal passed like sewage water under Le pont de la Concorde (though Macron has admittedly yet to complete his promised plunge).

As events started before the opening ceremonies, a number of pundits further pointed out that Israel’s presence at the game’s was noteworthy considering that not only had they refused to comply with the Olympic truce, but that they were actively bombing another participating nation. 

Nonetheless, Israel was not sanctioned by the IOC, despite the organizing body having made athletes from the Russian Federation compete independently and a number of them being banned for having been trained by the military (meanwhile, all Israeli citizens serve mandatory conscription with the IDF).

Yet despite a couple bleeding-heart thinkpieces lamenting the “lack of Olympic spirit” demonstrated by pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Israeli football matches, the initial outrage has largely made way for the nationalist hypetrain into which the Olympics tend to devolve.

That’s not to say all the Olympic scandals have been serious or existential. The opening ceremonies managed to offend American conservatives—including that bastion of free speech Elon Musk—for depictions of nobility decapitated in the French revolution, drag performers walking a runway, and what evangelicals interpreted as a “blasphemous” Last Supper.

It begs the question what exactly they expected of an Olympic games hosted by France.

Of course, my favourite scandal has had to have been the Team Canada women’s football team hiring a bunch of guys to spy on their competition, which—while yes, insidious and against all principles of good sportsmanship—is also on some level extremely funny. 

However, just as I was ready to declare Team Canada flying a very conspicuous drone over another team’s practice the dumbest scandal of the games to date, everyone decided to collectively lose their minds.

If you’re reading this, there’s a fair chance that you know what I’m talking about. On Thursday, Angela Carini of Italy fought Algeria’s Imane Khelif in a boxing qualifier. Within 46 seconds, Carini surrendered.

Despite winning the match, Khelif would quickly find herself on the apparent losing side of an online war of words which saw celebrities, columnists, and (surprise, surprise) far-right online zealots manufacture excuses to slander her on the basis that they claimed she was transgender.

Ol’ Joanne was by no means the first to get on this particular high horse. The usual grifters, trolls, and alt-right suspects were all there—including (surprise surprise) none other than Elon Musk—to accuse Khelif of the vague crime of having “failed a gender test” and generally working themselves into histrionics about a woman beating another woman in the sport of “who-can-punch-another-woman-harder.”

I’m not the first to point this out, nor am I likely to be the last, but this entire scandal is the dumbest the games have yet to produce on their face, if only because when one boils down the principal issue it is that of one athlete is mad that another beat her in a competition she herself signed up for.

When one presents it in such terms, of course, the scandal acquires the appearance of a grown woman crying like an elementary schooler, but granted, that is exactly why conservatives and brainwyrm-ridden online transphobes with nothing better to do with their time are not presenting it as such.

If one does concede, however, to the line of argumentation that a female athlete is “actually a man,” the scandal is still ludicrous on its face.

I can tell you definitively that Imane Khelif is not trans. Do you know how I know that? Because there are no transgender women competing in these Olympic games.

Despite an increasing number of vague platitudes from the IOC about how “sports are for everyone” in recent years, if you’ve spent any amount of time reading the news you are probably aware that both the IOC and a number of international sports regulating authorities have been cracking down on on the inclusion of trans women in sports.

Swimmer Lia Thomas lost an incredibly public legal battle over her right to compete in the Olympics after being the first out trans woman to win an NCAA Division I national championship. Likewise, BMX rider Chelsea Wolfe was prohibited from competing owing to changes by the world governing body for cycling, and French sprinter, Halba Diouf, equally had her dreams of competing at home in Paris smothered.

Of course, to know this, any of the celebrities rushing to perform their hysteria for the world to see would have had to do a full five minutes of research on some venue besides Twitter, but like many people, the woman who wrote some children’s books about wizard cops and the man who was supposed to put us on Mars ten years ago were seemingly unable to do that.

That’s because this is transparently not a scandal about the sanctity of sport. 

If it were, why aren’t these people bringing this same energy to the Women’s Football tournament, in which the Canadian Women’s team has been found demonstrably guilty of cheating?

The answer, of course, is that none of these people know anything about sport, and I’m disinclined to believe that they actually care. 

What this is, really, is less people bringing forward concerns about the integrity of sport than it is an excuse to turn what would have ordinarily been a nothing boxing match into the springboard for a good ol’ fashioned transvestigation.

For those possessive of a firm enough grip on reality and low enough screen time to not know about transvestigation, what it is, in brief, is an extension of a certain common archetype of conspiracy theory that holds that a cabal of deviants of some sort control large portions of the government and/or society.

Unlike the more widely known conspiracies which claim that the world is secretly run by humanoid lizard aliens, Jewish people, the Democratic party, or any combination thereof, transvestigative purists tend to hold that the majority of celebrities, politicians, and persons of general note are “gender inverted”—that is to say trans—and want to gain ultimate control of society to subvert Western traditional Christian gender roles or something.

This, by extension, gives them free licence to speculate (often publicly) about the appearance of random persons’ genitals, as to do so, in their mind, is an act of resistance to “gender ideologues.”

The behaviour of Rowling and other celebrities in response to Khelif’s boxing win is very much reminiscent of a sort of two-steps removed transvestigation. While lacking the specific vocabulary which can only evolve in hyper-isolated Facebook groups and the like, Rowling’s behaviour nonetheless employs the same strategies, the same hysteria, and the same framing of gender diversity as an immediate and existential harm.

As Defector’s Lauren Theisen rightly identifies, Rowling’s snap judgment about Khelif’s assigned sex is the product of years of her existing in an echo chamber in which transphobia is reaffirmed and validated as not just a legitimate worldview, but the only way in which to understand to world of today.

It is a product of a cultural climate—especially that in the United Kingdom—which has produced Guardian columnists aplenty who have made trans hysteria their primary beat, in which Julie Bindel is a household name as opposed to the moderator of a middlingly successful phrenology forum.

Likewise, Musk’s weighing in on the matter is hardly a surprise. The indications of his transphobia have always been there in his edgy, Reddit-tainted schtick. 

His subsequent approaches to pronouns and labeling the term “cis” a slur after his girlfriend left him for a trans woman confirmed what most found obvious, with his most recent round of comments about his trans daughter merely serving as the final nail in the coffin.

These are in each instance, for lack of a better term, a type of brainrot—trickle-down transphobia from the most chronically online conspiracists which has invariably seized the synapses of a couple middle-aged millionaires who spend way too much time on Twitter.

The aims of transvestigating an Olympic athlete are not, in any meaningful sense, anything to do with sports, or fairness, or even with women (cis women, at least) as a social category. Rather, they have everything to do with transness, and the public expression of transfemininity.

For my money this has never been about sport.

What it has always been is an excuse to publicly relitigate the existence of trans women.

Watching this scandal unfold, as a transgender woman myself, has proven a specific and potent type of psychological torture.

While a large part of that stems, admittedly, from opening basically any app/website/news periodical to find immediate updates which amount to basically a curated stream of transphobic rhetoric, the majority of it actually stems from the way so-called “allies” have tried to respond.

When the first volley of transphobia was fired last Thursday, people were quick to take to Twitter to point out that Khelif was, in fact, a “biological woman,” and had been assigned female at birth. 

As the scandal dragged on and increasingly became an echo chamber on both sides—with both Rowling and former middling university swimmer-turned-professional internet transphobe Riley Gaines doubling down on their insistence that Khelif was “a man”—allies helpfully pointed out that it is, in fact, illegal to be transgender in her home country of Algeria.

Successive volleys of quote retweets were fired, screenshots of those tweets were taken and posted to Instagram, columnists began to write various “Who is Imane Khelif???” pieces, and so on. By this point, the discourse was well and truly out of hand, and it was inevitable that it would run rampant.

You see, if you’ve been around on the internet for long enough you’ll not there’s a predictable precession to these things. The initial round of “The Discourse™,” as it were, doesn’t stray far from the inciting incident.

However the longer the matter remains in the public spotlight, the less and less any discussion of it has to do with what incited its discussion in the first place.

The Twitter platform serves to create this perfect series of nesting abstractions, each quote retweet taking the discussion one step removed from the original matter. Tweets comprise very few characters, take a negligible amount of time to conceive, and a minute at most to type, so the speed at which this process can take place is exceedingly fast.

With such an exceedingly small amount of real estate in which to make a point, each Twitter volley needs to be focused, authoritative, and unshakingly confident in the point it is making. People pick a position, an interpretation of events, and present it as absolute.

As the shitstorm continues to unfold on Twitter, prominent accounts on Instagram and elsewhere post pastel-coloured slides and infographics collating the tweets which received the most traction, and trying to bring people up to speed with what is happening. Another round of people repost these to their stories, perhaps adding snappy commentary of their own, and further battle lines are drawn.

By the time conventional writers and cultural analysts have had time to digest the issue, write something about it, edit it, fact check it, and see it fit for publication, the subject of “The Discourse™” is no longer what it was originally about.

Pretty soon, you find yourself six hours deep into an ongoing Twitter storm, and people are posting things like “Is transphobia so bad that CIS women aren’t allowed to be women anymore???”—pretty soon, you find yourself talking about transphobia without actually talking about trans people.

By the time the discussion had metastasized to this point regarding Imane Khelif, no one was talking about the tweet that had set it all off anymore.

More to the point, those precious few who were talking about the original accusations; the accusers; the “scandal” as it originally existed, had long since excised it from the context of a particularly vitriolic conspiracist, and transphobic part of the internet, and transposed it into terms palatable for the internet at large.

That’s where these defenses that Khelif was “born a biological woman,” stem from. It’s putting transphobia in a context that cis people can understand.

And yet doing so carries a lot of implicit assumptions—that “biological woman” is a stable, coherent category; that one’s being a “biological woman” is a sufficient determinant of whether they should be permitted to participate in the Olympics, that a karyotype or a blood panel are a just standard on which to hang the supposed sanctity of sport.

Are trans women “biologically” female? Certainly they can frequently achieve relative estrogen and testosterone levels well within the female range. Often they fall even below it, and even then studies have called measuring testosterone levels alone “a flawed surrogate marker of antiandrogen therapy given some medications work predominantly through androgen receptor antagonism [blocking the body’s ability to process the available testosterone] rather than by decreasing testosterone levels.”

Studies have also shown that many transgender women have a lower average bone mineral density than their cis counterparts. 

All major studies on trans women’s athletic performance have demonstrated a significant reduction in muscle area and lean body mass within six months of starting feminizing hormone replacement therapy.

Further, none of these studies on trans women’s sporting performance have continued to evaluate athletic performance past three years HRT—the usual amount of time it takes to see the most “complete” and pronounced long-term changes of HRT.

In short: any proof of trans women’s “unfair” sporting advantage is tenuous, but there's plenty of scientifically rigorous evidence to say that by every endocrine measure trans women are “biologically” women.

However when people talk about “biological” women, they generally aren’t talking about people whose endocrine systems fall within the normal female range. Instead they’re talking about people who were “born a woman,” who were assigned female at birth, who have XX karyotypes, however one wants to express it.

What the discussion becomes is an argument over where to draw the parameters of womanhood, both sides of which seem to implicitly agree—that by consequence of them having been assigned male at birth—does not include trans women.

Trans women are understood to be conferred an intrinsic advantage by having been “born male,” something a lot of these studies tacitly admit when they conclude that despite drastic reductions in muscle mass, having gone through male puberty nonetheless affords trans women some ineffable advantage.

Many have rightly pointed out that humans are a species which encompass enormous diversity in body shape, and few people are telling Michael Phelps he can’t compete in the Olympics because of what puberty did to him.

Hell, I’m 6’4” not just because I went through “male” puberty, but also because both my parents, and their parents, and their parents were all well over 6’. 

The Olympics aren’t supposed to be treated like a stock car race, and yet that seems to be how most international sporting committees want to treat women’s sports. I needn’t then point out, too, that these standards—as well as the idea of “gender testing” itself—are products of when the Olympics were both run and hosted by literal Nazis.

This fixation with “biological women” is just one of the ways in which online discussions of the scandal tend to flatten the dimensions of the issue at play. In using “biological” womanhood as one’s trump card, one rhetorically positions a subject as either inside or outside a charmed circle.

In invoking the fact that Khelif was “born a woman,” they inadvertently cede ground to the idea that trans women are not, in fact “biologically” women, and in turn inadvertently bolster the argument of the very bigots they nominally oppose.

You see, Twitter is good for “gotchas!” What Twitter is not good for is nuanced discussions of social issues—it just so happens that we have collectively decided that Twitter is the place where nuanced discussions of social issues should take place.

The consequence is that discussion on Twitter is a series of lightning-fast single subject snippets—like a bulleted list, only purposefully harder to follow. As opposed to a fulsome presentation of information with a clearly laid out argument, Twitter discussions become, in effect, an aggregate of “Um, actually”-esque retorts—gotchas.

“Gotcha! Algeria actually imprisons trans people, so she can’t actually be trans!”

“Gotcha! All these other non-white cis women have also had people transvestigate them!”

“Gotcha! J.K. Rowling has mold on her walls!”

Online discussions increasingly posture toward the idea of nuance as opposed to the injection of nuance itself; reframing discourse through a new perspective so as to appear clever even when it isn’t necessarily contributing new or valuable information to furthering one’s understanding of the matter.

This is not intersectionality, merely the veneer of it.

Intersectionality is not the invocation of one axis of oppression to explain the manifestation of another. It is the analysis of the ways in which unique systems of oppression intersect with one another, and how they affect people of different and overlapping marginalized identities.

Misogynoir, for instance, is a very real and pervasive social structure, and the “ungendering” of Black women and Black athletes in particular is a well documented phenomenon. That being said, racism is not the only prevailing social structure working against Khelif. 

There is after all a key difference between someone like Khelif, or Serena Williams, to whom she’s frequently compared throughout this scandal, and another would-be Black female Olympian—Halba Diouf—who isn’t competing. Diouf is trans.

What has protected both Khelif and Williams from accusations of their being “secretly men,” as offensive—and yes, even racist—as those presumptions are, is that they have their cisness to fall back upon. They have that trump card of “biological womanhood.”

So while the comparisons to an international superstar like Williams are flattering, they ring hollow in my mind when the people making them fail to bring that same energy for the Black athletes like Diouf who aren’t being permitted to compete in the Olympics. It’s a misdiagnosis of the matter at hand, and a misunderstanding of the underlying reasons for which Khelif’s participation was contentious once her femininity was brought under scrutiny.

Unfortunately, this is symptomatic of the fundamental problems with hashing these discussions out on Twitter. By the nature of the medium it only permits certain limited means of expression. Twitter deals in one subject at a time, and in so doing replaces nuance with compartmentalism.

Ignore context, and everything can be a gotcha.

I cannot tell you how often I think about this tweet. It’s like twice a day at least.

For instance: what all the people tweeting about how Rowling can supposedly only see White people as women ignore is the fact that Rowling publicly defended former Tory Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, when she was publicly criticized by actor David Tennant.

Acknowledging that Badenoch is a Black, cisgender woman who was Minister when the Cass Report was published; accused people of “exploiting” trans identity; and is ultimately responsible for the regressive steps Britain has taken to claw away trans healthcare nationwide would, of course, be inconvenient to such a narrative. 

This is a woman, by the way, who wrote a column titled “Gagging of the brave has let gender ideologies seize control” for the Sunday Times. 

To provide this context in the place of simple gotchas would require an acknowledgement that Rowling’s primary maxim is equal-opportunity transphobia—something that she has gotten away with for a very long time. To do so is, of course, an uncomfortable prospect for a cisgender population who have largely coddled her for this time. It’s easier to imply, therefore, that she is only now somehow “stepping up her game” (Aside: this sort of retroactive pardoning of cis people for Joanne’s transphobia is in some ways the same thing the mold jokes accomplish).

Secondly, the idea that a Black woman like Badenoch can be responsible for the structural marginalization of another group of women—and a diverse group of them, at that—is not compatible with a worldview which sees certain identity labels as proof of one's incapability of reproducing harm.

(Now might also be a good time to point out that the person who said Rowling is “one bottle of gin away from saying that only white people can be women” is—drumroll please—a white dude!)

So we’re back to square one. Transness is the matter of the hour. Transfemininity is the thing on trial. Transgender women are already banned from the Olympics provided they went through male puberty which—as a consequence of more and more legislation being passed to force trans children to suffer through a puberty they do not want—is not all that unlikely.

However, as a consequence of the increased scrutiny of trans women in sport, the IOC has imposed constrictive limitations on what they consider to be womanhood. If anything, the widespread implementation of testosterone testing by the IOC has cast too wide a net, and several cisgender athletes have been caught in the organization’s shotgun-blast attempts to level the playing field, with Khelif just the most recent (and public) example of collateral damage.

The question of the hour thus becomes: is transphobia so bad that even cis women are beginning to feel the fallout? 

Maybe, but if it is, it can only be because many so-called “allies” only began to care once it had already reached that point.

The rhetoric about “biological women” aside, one of the most insidious and frustrating things to which I’ve had to bear witness for the entirety of this debacle is the lamenting about cis women being victims of transphobia.

While it’s true that transphobia has reached a point in its cultural normalization where women who aren’t trans have begun to feel its (albeit misdirected) effects, to decry the exceptionalism of this sole instance of transphobia, the unique plight of this particular victim, undermines the adversity to which every trans woman—and especially every trans athlete—has been subject to up to this point.

Imane Khelif has been put through the ringer, and I have absolutely no desire to be in her place. However, her being a cis woman has also afforded her the privilege of being able to compete in the first place and to have the eyes of the world on her and in support of her when push came to shove.

Had it been a trans woman in her place, one can safely assume that the outcome would not have been the same.

But then, it wouldn’t have been a trans woman in her place, would it have? 

Hers is not a position which trans women, and specifically trans female athletes have been or are being afforded. The IOC and other regulatory bodies have conspired to create a system in which a strict definition of womanhood has been constructed, and continues to be policed through the repressive standards mandated by sporting organizations.

Every now and then a cisgender woman like Khelif gets caught in the crossfire, and inevitably it makes headlines, but do you know who is rarely afforded the privilege of telling their story?

Actual trans women.

At every level—judicial, regulatory, and cultural, trans women are systemically barred from participating in sports, discriminated against, and maligned.

Even in countries where our existence is not legally outlawed, or else being medically mandated out of public existence, we are prevented from participating in athletics, team sports, and most organized recreational activities.

People wonder why most trans women are stereotyped as reclusive shut-ins, when they are widely prevented from playing on teams which match their desired gender expression, with teammates who they consider their friends and peers. 

These are systemic obstacles which cis women do not face, and an experience which they cannot fundamentally understand.

Do you want to know how I know this? Because I used to be an athlete, and subsequently made the decision that I didn’t want to be a trans athlete.

I stopped swimming when I got too dysphoric. I stopped curling when I decided to transition. These are concessions which I and a lot of other trans people make when forced to weigh our happiness in our own bodies against continuing to do something we enjoy.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not the biggest decision which transition presents, and yet I’d like to hope that it’s a decision that the children I raise will never have to make.

Yet even as I write this, there are dozens of trans kids pondering that very decision for themselves. As society continues to tighten its grip on the trans community, to repress transition through both overt and implicit means, a generation of trans children growing up right now are being forced to contemplate their own future.

They are seeing the bathroom bills pass, seeing Senators slander the elders in their community, seeing their rights being litigated on the public stage, and they are trying to figure out whether they could ever feel at home in a world like ours.

More to the point, a generation of trans children is watching the Olympics for the first time, and they are not going to like what they see. When they watch the events they aren’t dreaming of making the big stage—they don’t see anyone who looks like them up there.

Instead, a generation of trans children is watching a cis woman be pilloried under the presumption of her transness, and they are thinking “if I ever become an athlete, that will be me.”

Worse still, the whole world is assuring them not to worry—the sanctity of the sport has been ensured. That woman wasn’t a tranny.

What kind of fucking message does that send?

If a cis woman is the victim of the moment it is because trans women’s marginalization has been so thoroughly normalized as to be unremarkable. Trans women athletes’ existence has been erased to the point wherein their oppression can only be understood insofar as it affects a woman who is not trans.

What’s worse is that everyone is peddling a transphobic aphorism as a choice rebuttal.

If a cis woman being the victim of the moment is testimony of anything, it should be to how transphobic society really is. If everyone clamouring to her defense, ignoring the countless trans women barred from even reaching the place she has is testimony to anything else, it must be how little anyone actually cares.

What happened this week is nothing especially novel. It is frankly what many trans women go through most days of their lives, the difference being that they are not Olympic athletes with millions of eyes on them, and hundreds of thousands of people ready to go to bat for them on Twitter.

It’s a shame more cis women aren’t subject to transvestigation, really, cause I’ve never seen more people care about transphobia than in this moment.

For all the thousands of tweets spilled on the matter, this strikes me as little more than a case of supreme social ratfucking. The sanctity of cis womanhood has been upheld. Trans women remain outside the charmed circle (or ring, if you will), exactly where they belong.

When I say that ContraPoints has the only good tweet about this I am being so serious.

If we are to do more to actively combat transphobia, to change the structures which led to the existence of this scandal, and to create a future in which the next generation is not forced to choose between their passions and their right to live, we need cis people to be better allies.

Cis women in particular need to understand that while a cis woman was the epicentre of this particular scandal, cis womanhood was not in the slightest what this scandal was about.

Imane Khelif was ultimately a target of convenience for a number of billionaires with too much time on their hands and too many holes in their brains from endlessly consuming transphobic, paranoiac, rhetorical slop.

This attack was not directed at her, really. She was merely standing in the way.

Had this been a trans woman, I’m hard pressed to believe this story would have made headlines in the way it did. For better, but largely for the worse, people cared because Imane Khelif was a cis woman.

If all of the people who farmed clout from this scandal on Twitter dot com want to be taken seriously as actual trans allies, they need to actually go to bat for trans people when it's not in vogue.

I’m tired of people talking about how much this has affected cis women. I’m tired of people giving Joanne Rowling the time of day. I’m tired of people using a very public instance of vitriolic transphobia as the basis on which to make memes.

If cis people want to be trans allies they need to stop putting themselves at the centre of our every issue. If cis people want to be allies they need to stop enshrining an idea of “biological womanhood,” and take those words out of their fucking vocabulary.

If cis people want to be trans allies they need to listen to trans women when it’s trans womens’ existence which is being litigated.

I think it is a really fucking dire sign if the only way cis people can sympathize with transness is if they think they can understand transphobia. They can’t, they won’t, and if that’s what's required for a meaningful improvement in trans rights, I think that’s a bad, bad omen.

This has never been, and never will be, about any of you.

So, while I don’t bear any ill will towards Imane Khelif, forgive me if I’m sick to death of hearing this shit from all of you.