The Olympics are an inherently inspirational occasion, where the hardest-working, most passionate athletes from all over the world compete for the gold in countless different specialties, and simultaneously celebrate their grit and determination to be the very best.
This past summer, the world seemed to forget that for a moment, and went out of their way to try and make now-Olympic champion Imane Khelif forget that, too. Following her 46-second boxing bout against Italian competitor Angela Carini, which the latter indignantly withdrew from on account of Khelif’s superior strength and boxing prowess, accusations of Khelif being a transgender woman came in hard and fast.
Khelif, of course, was born a woman and has always competed as a woman, and her home country of Algeria is quite aggressively anti-LGBTQ. This has been covered and documented numerous times from numerous sources and is the last dead horse we should be beating right now.
What hasn’t been talked about as much, however, is Carini’s class act in owning up to her mistakes and repeatedly standing by them, once in her initial apology to Khelif and the wider Olympic community at large, twice when she rejected a $100,000 sum from the IBA back in August, and now a third time with her rejection of a $67,000 sum raised by Lauren Boebert, who peddled the same false rhetoric about Khelif in order to garner it.
In the tweet above, Boebert describes Carini’s reason for declining the offer as “she didn’t want to continue with what has been a difficult chapter in her life.” But consider Carini’s direct comments to Gazzetta dello Sport (per BBC) made not long after her fight with Khelif, when the aforementioned false rhetoric surrounding Khelif’s biology began to spike. All of a sudden, the vagueness of Boebert’s tweet becomes a bit more pronounced.
All this controversy makes me sad, I’m sorry for my opponent, too. If the IOC said she can fight, I respect that decision. [Not shaking her hand] wasn’t something I intended to do. Actually, I want to apologise to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke. If I were to meet her again, I would embrace her.
Indeed, Carini had every right to abandon her match with Khelif, and she was wise to do so if she felt unsafe, but Carini was simply outmatched. It had nothing to do with Khelif being transgender, because Khelif is, quite plainly, not transgender.
And what human being wouldn’t have the sort of emotional reaction that Carini did? She no doubt worked just as hard as every other athlete who found themselves on the world stage this past summer, and to have put in all that work only to drop out of her own accord in such an unceremonious fashion, it must have been immensely frustrating. And unfortunately, the resulting behavior she displayed on account of her frustration only fueled attacks on Khelif, whose cisness had been under scrutiny for some time before the Olympics.
But what did Carini do? She immediately owned up to her mistakes and offered as direct an apology to Khelif as she could muster. Because unlike Lauren Boebert, J.K. Rowling, and everyone else who insists on upholding this rhetoric on Khelif for the sake of saving face with their transphobic audiences, Carini has no interest in pillaging her dignity from others. And in a world that seems to increasingly encourage such a thing, that is something to be admired.
