Boxing is an activity wherein two imbeciles consensually seek to inflict upon each other injuries such as lacerations, concussions, fractured bones, and traumatic loss of consciousness.

In contrast to more enlightened practices such as BDSM, in which the participants are expected to consider everyone’s safety, boxing regards grievous injuries as a desirable victory condition.

I live in Fréjus, in the South of France. We’ve got Roman ruins around here. They’re nothing special, really. Just a bunch of stones, with a few plaques bolted on them telling you they’re about as old as Jesus.

We’ve also got arenas. Politicians turned them into a modern mess of concrete in 2007: they can now sit 10,000 punters.
The stone weathered gracefully for eighteen centuries. The concrete turned into a dirty mess in fewer than ten years.

Slaves used to be forced to kill each other there. Sometimes we also still murder a few bulls there, as it’s a traditional sport.

But mostly we just have B-list singers do their thing. Even when our arenas invite rappers whose reputation is built on their procilivity for crime, they somehow manage to entertain the audience without drawing blood.

Queer people love their complex categorizations, but wider society doesn’t; in fact, its taxonomy asks only two questions:

  1. Have we decided you’re male or female?
  2. Did do you perform correctly being what we’ve decided you are?

Transmisogyny is the term of the art for hatred of trans women, it’s a subcategory of transphobia. It has a counterpart regarding trans men, called either transandrophobia or transmisandry depending whom you ask: it’s contentious—i told you, queer people love their complex categorizations.

Reactionaries don’t. They only care to know whether you’re a man, or a subhuman.

You shouldn’t be surprised that transmisogyny always prefigures garden-variety cismisogyny—the type of misogyny we generally don’t prefix.

Imane Khelif entirely failed to perform “being an average cisgender woman”. Her chiseled features are optimized for only two things: hitting people and getting hit by people. That’s why she earned a gold medal at the French Olympics for being good at hitting people harder than people would hit her.

Before earning her medal, she faced allegations of being transgender, and we shall open this can of worms, and inspect every single worm:

  1. Worm #1: who the fuck cares if she actually were trans? Sports are all about finding the best genetic outlier in a specific category. If the sport requires you to be muscular, the best athletes will be. Weight classes ensure people compete against people with similar muscle mass, doctors say that’s good enough to make things fair. Muscle is incompatible with traditional cisgender womanhood, but how does it matter? The strongest will never look like a frail waif. Winners care about winning, not about making your dick hard.
  2. Worm #2: who the fuck cares about people hitting each other? Both combatants consent, so i do not object to what they do, but why must i treat a spectacle that causes injuries and long-term health conditions as a noble endeavor? I strongly resent having to give a shit about brutality.
  3. Worm #3: Ici on noie les Algériens. It is salient the story happens to an Algerian woman while the Olympics are happening in France: France’s contemporary relationship to its closest African neighbor can never be read outside a colonial matrix. You shouldn’t be surprised that misogyny also prefigures garden-variety racism.