I have to rant a little about what's happening at the Olympics because I'm feeling ashamed as an Italian and angry as a queer person. For those who don't know, there is an Algerian athlete competing in women's boxing named Imane Khelif, who just today had a match against her Italian competitor Angela Carini. Khelif is a cisgender woman who allegedly* naturally produces more testosterone than the average. She was previously disqualified from the IBA World Boxing Championships for failing an unspecified medical test but was cleared by the IOC to compete in the Olympics (side note, the IBA is currently unrecognised by the IOC for internal governance issues and ties to the Russian government). Fast forward to today, Carini decides to withdraw from the match after only 40-odd seconds because Khelif hit her on the nose and apparently it hurt too much. Unsurprisingly Khelif has become the target of a massive shitstorm, including the press mistakenly calling her transgender (which she isn't) and many people, including members of the Italian government and the elongated muskrat himself, spreading misinformation and disgusting transphobic and racist rhetoric. It was so bad that even the Algerian government intervened, and pictures of Khelif as a young girl have been publicly released. I know that the participation of trans people in sport is a thorny conversation, but this whole shitshow isn't helping anyone and the facts are just being weaponised to attack intersex and trans people by the same far-righters who don't give a rat's dick about actual women's rights. So I'm sad about Carini's loss because she's my compatriot, sure, but I'm even angrier at both those people who use Khelif, an innocent athlete who has all the right to compete against other women, as the target for their campaigns of hatred, and those who don't bother finding proper information and remain content in their prejudices.