THE ongoing 2024 Paris Olympics has seen athletes in a valiant display of sportsmanship, waving their flags for their countries in joyful pride. It’s the ultimate avenue for uniting all shapes and colors of human there is for the love of sport. But regrettably and — because of social media — almost inevitably, there seems to be a convoluted offspringing of a unique kind of hate, targeting womanhood and women-identifying bodies.
The hate itself is spun by netizens who have curiously gone hyper-focused and hyper-fixated on whether or not certain athletes are “real women,” which became apparent after Algeria’s representative for women’s boxing Imane Khelif defeated Italy’s Angela Carini in merely 46 seconds. Angela Carini threw in the towel in tears, alleging that she could not proceed because Imane Khelif’s punch was too much.
In true internet fashion, fake news peddlers went on to post that Khelif was a transgender woman who posed a significant advantage in her physique against Carini. This caused an online uproar, of course, because the internet loves drama — despite having no other information from trusted sources.
Keyboard warriors commenting, “It’s unfair! Transgenders should not be allowed in women’s sports!” or “You gays always call for acceptance but then this is what you do!” Others go as far as to say that the Philippine’s SOGIE Equality Bill should be scrapped because of the “dangers” that transgender people pose on society.
Give. Me. A friggin break. It’s apparent that irresponsible internet users judged Khelif’s womanhood mainly on her physical appearance — tall, muscular, with facial bone structure that do not typically qualify as “feminine” to most beauty standards. Very few people bothered to wait for information from the IOC or from Khelif herself to come to light but instead reposted content from random Facebook pages or “content creators.”
Later on, as it turns out, Khelif is confirmed as “born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female and has a female passport,” according to the International Olympic Committee. Fake news consumers must feel sooo embarrassed. I hope.
Funnily enough, netizen’s weird hyper-fixation on people’s womanhood also translated to other personalities indirectly associated with the Olympics, like Chloe San Jose, the girlfriend of two-time Olympic gold medalist, Carlos Yulo.
People have wrongly tagged her a trans woman, as though it’s a crime to be one.
Where is all this hate coming from? Why do we care so much if someone is born a biological woman or a trans woman? Why do we immediately say someone is trans if they don’t fit into the Western mould of beauty (soft skin, long hair, soft features, etc.)?
Don’t we have other things to do in life, like maybe raise a generation that understands acceptance, tolerance and the fact that gender is not black and white but a wonderful, beautiful, fluid spectrum of colors? We should all stop being on the internet so much and go out in nature because all this hate makes us all look like un-evolved chimps.
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Atty. Joanna Paola R. Garado has been putting words to paper since childhood as a form of self-entertainment and escape. She is a Mass Communication degree-holder, and briefly worked in radio, print and digital media even before graduation until she pursued law school. She signed the Roll of Attorneys in May 2023. She is now running her private solo law practice, has a radio show, and is keen on pursuing creative endeavors that reignite her love for mass media.
