Former President Donald Trump echoed a repeatedly debunked hoax at a North Carolina speech to accept the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police, claiming that a woman boxer who competed for Algeria in the Paris Olympics was transgender.
"Why would anybody say, we don't want to have a border?" said Trump. "Why would anybody say the whole world can empty out into our country, even though it's not sustainable? Why would anybody say something so simple as, we want men to play in women's sports?"
"Did you see the Olympics where they had two transitioned fighters, that's the proper way of saying it, I say it just in case, I don't want to get myself in trouble with the media, the fake news, and they had two fighters, and you see the one young lady, beautiful young lady, and she was a fighter from Italy, and she fought a transitioned person who gave her just, BOOM, a left jab," said Trump.
"Now a jab, for those who don't know fight, that's just sort of, BOOM, then he did another jab and she quit. She said, I've never been hit like that in my life!"
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Imane Khelif, who won by forfeit against Italian boxer Angela Carini after less that a minute, is not transgender. She was born a woman and has never identified as anything else. Her home country of Algeria doesn't even allow gender transitions.
The controversy stems from the fact that she allegedly "failed" a gender verification test administered by the International Boxing Association, an organization widely regarded as corrupt and controlled by Russian oligarchs.
Nonetheless, this didn't stop widespread false claims on the right that Khelif was transgender. Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, slammed her as a "grown man pummeling a woman." Fox News' Jesse Watters bemoaned the fact that "We're now at the point where we're going to give gold medals to men for beating up women."
Meanwhile, tech billionaire Elon Musk and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, both widely known for their anti-transgender views, made similar comments attacking Khelif, which led her to name them in a cyber harassment complaint filed in France.
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