The Boston Globe seems to have noticed that they made a libelous claim.
Editor’s note A significant error was made in a headline on a story in Friday’s print sports section about Algerian boxer Imane Khelif incorrectly describing her as transgender. She is not. Additionally, our initial correction of this error neglected to note that she was born female. We recognize the magnitude of this mistake and have corrected it in the epaper, the electronic version of the printed Globe. This editing lapse is regretful and unacceptable and we apologize to Khelif, to Associated Press writer Greg Beacham, and to you, our readers.
The Boston Globe
I wonder if they’ll learn their lesson — that TERFs and transvestigators are not trustworthy sources — and if other nasty accusers will follow suit? JK Rowling & Jerry Coyne come to mind as two people who leapt on a lot of false premises and faulty conclusions in this non-story.
Neither will suffer one second of recrimination. That’s not how bigotry works.
And Elon, Martina, Liz Truss and heartbreakingly Judy Murray.
More evidence that bigotry against trans people inevitably becomes bigotry against cis people who don’t fit gender stereotypes.
All the claims that Imane Khelif had some sort of unfair advantage came from the Russian owned and headquartered International Boxing Association. No data was ever presented.
It was almost certainly just typical Russian lies usually called by an euphemism, Russian disinformation.
“3 days ago — Khelif holds a 37-9 record as a fighter at the amateur level …”
Imane Khelif isn’t invulnerable in the boxing ring.
She had been beaten 9 times by 9 other women.
Her boxing record doesn’t show any unfair advantages when fighting other women.
@3. Adam Lee : “More evidence that bigotry against trans people inevitably becomes bigotry against cis people who don’t fit gender stereotypes.”
Then there’s intersex people like Imane Khelif might just possibly might (?) be..
No doubt they have now issued full and sincere apologies for putting Ms. Khelif’s life at risk and …Whooooooooooshshsh!!!!
– Sorry, just had to duck to avoid a squadron of low-flying Gloucester Old Spots.
As a supposedly serious news source, why can’t they get their own correction right? The error is not regretful, it is regrettable. Unless the Globe thinks the error regrets itself. And it was a lot more than an ‘editing lapse.’ It was a failure to follow basic journalistic standards at all levels.
Still waiting for the Guardian to correct its appalling editorial on the matter, written by an author who was aware of the errors and lies spread by the transphobes at the time of writing but still blamed the IOC for the blowup and misrepresented Khelif as some kind of dangerous monster in the ring.
@chrislawson
Which editorial was that? I do read the Guardian sometimes, but not hugely often and I missed this bit.
Virtually all the British press went down the man beats up woman narrative. The UK is very transphobic.
StevoR @ 5,
While most of the dirt that has been thrown in a lot of the press has been anti-trans and racist, obviously there’s splash damage to intersex people and cisgender women having their presentation policed.
However, there is no actual evidence to suggest either Imane Khelif or Lin Yu-ting are intersex, since the IBA used ad hoc “tests”, refused to publish either the nature of the tests or the results, and most recently published a bizarre press release to further muddy the waters. The intersex allegation should be deemed as part of the whole disinformation effort.
Well, gosh, they’ve said sorry, what more do you want? I mean, it’s not a mistake with massive personal implications for the female boxer, `or for other people in general!
Maybe this one, CD: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/aug/02/boxing-imane-khelif-lin-yu-ting-facts-fairness-battering
The retraction is only in the e version?
DanDare, can’t change printed material after the fact.
A bit of follow-up from the Beeb: https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/articles/cq5dd2lz8y8o
Good level of detail and Q&A therein.
Reading the interview it is clear neither Kremlev nor Roberts have a fucking clue what they are talking about.
Thanks, John Morales, for your #12.
@Xanthë, #10
I’ve been saying this all over the internet, and yet outlets like the NYT have been repeating this shit as if it were fact.
They should have added “and even if Khelif were a trans person, that would be totally irrelevant, and we should never have paid attention to the trans haters in the first place”. Also, “born female” should be “assigned female at birth”.
@16:
Yeah, the interview reads like a silly SNL skit.
Imane Khelif is through to the gold medal match, so is guaranteed at least a silver medal.
Lin Yu-ting is guaranteed at least a bronze medal, depending on the outcome of her semi-final (the Olympics don’t have a play-off for third place in boxing).
I hope this is enough of a positive result for them to be celebrated when they return to Algeria and Taiwan respectively, rather than being further hounded by false accusations, and gross racist misogyny and transmisogyny.
Jamie Raines, who is known as the YouTuber Jammidodger, has a well-researched and extremely thorough coverage of the controversy with lots of good info: video
Xanthë @#21
I haven’t seen anything about Algeria’s reaction to this crap, but the reaction in Taiwan seems to be widespread fury and disgust from the general public to the politicians, so I think they will be welcoming Lin Yu-ting home as the world class boxer she undoubtedly is.
Imane Khelif won the gold medal. Take that, bigots!
Did becoming extremely rich turn J.K. Rowling into a disgusting bigot, or was she always that way?
@ KG
It’s theorised she suffered from a lack of problems so had to invent one (trans people). But also many have pointed out racist and classist tropes in her books.
Rebecca Watson has a thing or two to say.
KG: Another possibility is that Rowling found herself with an adoring fan-base, and thought “these are all such great people who support me!” And then maybe she didn’t guard herself from wrongheaded ideas when people she loved voiced them. And if enough of those adoring fans happened to be vocal adamant transphobes, then Rowling’s sympathy for them would likely lead her to agree with them and support their cause, as they’d supported her.
Remember: she got that adoring fan-base for writing popular books, NOT for being a political/movement leader. Which means she’d be less likely to think to tell her fans something like “Whoa, let’s be a little more careful what we say!” or “Whoa, I don’t really agree with that!” That’s more a movement-leader thing than a celebrity-entertainer thing.
It also means she was probably ignorant of transpeople before becoming famous (just as she was clearly ignorant of all the disgraceful backward stereotypes she’d written into some of her characters), and probably started with some vague prejudice about something many people consider “weird” and “icky.” So when more adamant transphobes popped up among her fans, she simply caved to their superior emotions and started repeating back to them what they wanted to hear.
I don’t understand why the media has bungled this particular story so badly. I keep hearing about right-wing extreme conspiracy theorists jumping on this issue and having a fit but the mainstream media itself seems to be perpetuating this themselves. It isn’t Fox News this time but “respected” journalists doing this.
rydan @ 28,
In some ways that is the most frightening part of the whole affair, in that there has been a global festival of hatred unleashed on someone hardly anyone in the world even knew about a month ago, and that it was conducted in a fact-free zone by some of the loudest voices on the planet, and including newspapers that are supposed to have responsible editorial controls like fact checking and legal departments.
You can argue that many of the newspapers in the United States are deliberately hostile to trans people, and that almost all of the mainstream media in the United Kingdom has become uniformly transphobic across their news divisions, but that does not explain why those organisations purported something to be true, that was only a case where many ill-intentioned people wanted it to be true.
For some excellent insights by two trans people digging into the whole sorry morass, I can recommend Matt Bernstein’s recent video on YouTube, in conversation with Natalie Wynn.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/14/jk-rowling-and-elon-musk-named-in-imane-khelif-cyberbullying-lawsuit