Author J.K. Rowling has fallen silent on her usually busy X (formerly Twitter) feed, after Olympic gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif filed a legal complaint in France for alleged cyber harassment over statements regarding her gender.
On August 9, lawyers for Khelif filed a lawsuit with a special unit of the public prosecutor’s office in Paris, stemming from false statements that spread online about her gender after the Algerian boxer defeated Italy’s Angela Carini in her first fight of the 2024 Olympic Games. Carini pulled out 46 seconds into the bout and told reporters afterwards that she had “never felt a punch like this.”
all of this started when the (Russian controlled) IBA suddenly disqualified Khelif (who had been boxing for many years without issue) after beating a Russian. Since then IOC banned the IBA due to ties with organized crime, fixing fights, and financial instability, so now IBA has no influence on olympic boxing whatsoever.
fast forward a couple years to the bigger stage of the olympics, twitter warriors pick up on the story again based on nothing more than “looks like a man” which happens disproportionately more to women of color. So yes, this kind of thing often does have racial undertones.