One of Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders favorite zingers is some version of, “The left can’t even define what a woman is.” As jokes go, it’s a lot like Carlos Mencia’s: unoriginal and unfunny.
It’s also terribly ironic. As the last 24 hours have shown, Sanders and other Republicans can’t answer that question, either.
If you’re not perpetually online, you might have missed the hullabaloo on Thursday over Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif. The short version: Khelif drilled Italian boxer Angela Carini with a straight right hand to the face, causing Carini to quit less than a minute into their Olympic welterweight boxing match and giving Khelif the win.
Considering boxing is built around punching people in the face, this should not have been controversial. Unfortunately, the worst people on Twitter learned that Khelif had once been banned from a competition for elevated testosterone levels. (This was a single occurrence, and it was not a ban by the International Olympic Committee, but by the International Boxing Association, which was suspended as boxing’s Olympic governing body in 2019 and expelled by the IOC in 2023.) An unconfirmed rumor began circulating that Khelif was born with XY chromosomes. So, predictably, garbage Twitter accounts started claiming that Khelif was transgender.
Even after it came out that Khelif was born with female genitalia, was assigned female at birth, had competed (and lost) in the 2020 Olympics without incident or question about her gender, and had lost nine times in her career (all to women), right-wing troglodytes simply changed their tune from “Khelif is transgender” to “Khelif is a biological male.”
It’s an absurdly ignorant position, but, given the MAGA obsession with other people’s genitals, it unsurprisingly took hold anyway. By yesterday afternoon, Sanders tweeted about it, falsely pushing the narrative that Khelif is somehow “a man.”
Attorney General Tim Griffin, who never met a divisive issue he wouldn’t grandstand upon, quoted tweeted fifth-place 2022 200-yard NCAA freestyle finisher Riley Gaines, now a darling of the anti-trans activism world. He even found a way to use Gaines’ lies to brag about himself, which is pretty much the most Tim Griffin thing imaginable.
State Sen. Breanne Davis (R-Russellville) did Griffin one better and chimed in by quote tweeting transphobe and middling writer J.K. Rowling while claiming the Olympics allowed “a man to beat the crap out of a woman.”
The irony here is that all three of these dishonest grievance peddlers fancy themselves as being on the side that “protects women” and “cares about women’s sports.” Arkansas Republicans insist that someone’s gender is a simple matter, exclusively based on what genitalia they were born with. By that standard, Khelif is indisputably a woman. She has a vagina, ovaries and a uterus. She can theoretically get pregnant and give birth. There’s no evidence she has ever presented herself as or pretended to be anything other than a woman.
On top of all that, she’s from Algeria, where it is illegal for someone to change their gender. It’s absurd to think Algeria would not only allow Khelif to compete against women if she were biologically male, but would then send her to the Olympics to represent her country.
Not that such things matter to folks like Sanders, Griffin and Davis. When they say they want to “protect women,” what they mean is they want to discriminate against anyone who doesn’t fit the MAGA ideal of what a woman should be, do, and look like. And they are more than willing to use their platforms to spread bigotry and hate at the expense of an actual woman if it fits their broader narrative.