Imane Khelif And The Paranoid Style In American Politics
After a long hiatus, welcome back to The Weird Turn Pro! I started this Substack in 2021 with the idea to move my political stuff away from my blog at The Zen Pagan, but as some as you know, my life got nuts and writing fell off. But the going has not gotten any less weird since then — it’s only gotten moreso, in this election year. So we’re back, because when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
The recent discourse around intersex boxer Imane Khelif provides an example of how "the paranoid style", as Richard Hofstadter famously labeled it, has overwhelmed Blue Tribe.1
On its own, the story of Khelif being permitted to compete in the Olympics after being disqualified by the International Boxing Association would just be another instance of the IOC's failure to come to grips with the complexities posed by intersex athletes.
It's been a recognized problem for the Olympics since at least the 1930s: in order to have fair competition, athletes with bodies shaped by male levels of androgens need to be in separate divisions from athletes with bodies not so shaped. Yet intersex individuals with physiques shaped by male levels of androgens but with female-shaped genitals exist, and are socially and legally classified as women. (Or were, with such few exceptions that they could be discounted, until the trans and nonbinary rights movement of the past few years.)
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Resolving the necessary distinction between social/legal classification and athletic classification has required more courage than the IOC, or many other sports regulatory bodies, possess. That's a problem for athletics, and one that's growing as sex change medical therapies2 become more common.
And it points up a problem for the "woke" ideology of DEI, "diversity, equity, and inclusion." The entire concept of women's sports is exclusion: excluding bodies shaped by androgens. And this is done in order treat biologically female athletes equitably and increase the diversity of athletic competitions, which would be dominated by males if their were not women's divisions. There is a tension, a contradiction, between these values -- sometimes inclusion is inequitable.
But in our fraught political moment, the discourse has gone beyond questions of fairness in sports competition or considerations about the internal contradictions of the DEI ideology. It's taken a much darker turn into xenophobia and paranoia.
It has become the deep belief of many in Blue Tribe that Khelif is not intersex, but that she was falsely accused as part of a dastardly plot by Russia to boost its international prestige.
Let's be clear: there is no reasonable doubt that Khelif is intersex. While the IBA has not published the tests it used to disqualify Khelif, respected sports writer Alan Abrahamson has seen them, and reports they show an XY karotype. Any remaining doubt was removed when French magazine Le Point interviewed one of her trainers, Georges Cazorla, who admitted that tests at the Parisian University Hospital identified "a problem with her hormones, with her chromosomes" and that Khelif was undergoing medical therapies to reduce her testosterone level to normal female levels.
Given that she has a XY karotype and male testosterone levels, most likely she has the same 5-alpha-reductase deficiency as Olympic runner Caster Semenya. In this DSD, a genetically male person lacks an enzyme necessary to the process of masculinizing the external genitalia. Without advanced medical testing, they appear female as a child and are raised as girls. But a person with this condition still has testes (though internal and undescended) and the corresponding testosterone levels; and is responsive to that testosterone, experiencing masculinization of the physique at puberty. Some then come to identity as men and may undergo therapies to masculinize their genitalia; others continue to live as women.
But discussion of what should be an objective (if complicated) medical question has been displaced by a xenophobic conspiracy theory.
Because the president of the IBA is Russian, this PCT claims, nothing the IBA says can be trusted. Reports Khelif is intersex have been continually labeled "unsubstantiated" and "baseless" despite being based in a test administered by an international sports regulatory body (and now confirmed by her own camp). According to the conspiracy theorists, Khelif was falsely accused of failing a gender test in order to keep her from defeating a Russian boxer and thereby damaging Russia's international prestige.
Like most PCTs, this falls apart if we pause and consider whether competent conspirators would actually engage in the claimed behavior. If dastardly corrupt Russians wanted to disqualify a boxer and were going to fake a test to do so, would they make false claims about that boxer's chromosomes, which the boxer could easily disprove by taking another test? Or would they instead do something like fake a test for performance-enhancing drugs, where it's trivial to spike a sample, and the boxer cannot prove by taking a test today that they did not fail a test a month ago?
The accusation makes no sense, assigning to the purported conspirators both overwhelming power and ability to hide the truth, and overwhelming incompetence. But that's the nature of paranoia.
Let's review how we got here.
As you may recall, after Donald Trump's surprise victory in the 2016 election, Blue Tribe freaked the fsck out. It was completely impossible in their minds that after two terms of a Democratic president who started with much promise but turned out to be fairly bad, American voters weren't all in for a third Democratic term with a candidate selected via obvious nepotism.
Paranoid conspiracy theories about the loss became the norm, and Russia was the ready scapegoat. Why blame Russia, rather than China or another adversary?
In 2014, continuing a longstanding program of projecting US/NATO power eastward, the Obama-Biden administration engineered a coup in Ukraine, causing the elected President there to call on Russia for help, leading to the first Russian "intervention" in Ukraine, and triggering the civil war that eventually blossomed into the current full-on Russia-Ukraine/NATO war. Obama explicitly declared he could "never have a constructive relationship" with Putin and that his goal was to "isolat[e]...Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world...effectively making it a pariah state."
So by 2016, what had been merely geopolitical rivalry had developed into direct conflict, with covert operations and overt military action, and with explicit propaganda campaigns on both sides.
When embarrassing email from the Clinton campaign was leaked, Russia was a ready-made boogeyman. Of course Russia was spying on the Clinton campaign -- it would be remarkable if they were not trying to gather intelligence on a American leader. But that does not in itself mean that that Russian state was responsible for leaking that data. Strong evidence that the leak most likely came from a disgruntled insider was ignored, as was any possibility that an outside hacker not operating on behalf of the Russian government was responsible.
The national security "deep state"3, comfortable with Clinton from a history of doing war crimes together and skeptical of outsider Trump, and hip-deep in the conflict with Russia over Ukraine, was happy to conclude that it had to be those dirty Rooskies -- even though no intelligence agency collected forensic evidence from the servers at the heart of the case. They relied on information provided by a contractor hired by Clinton's lawyer, Michael Sussmann.
For context about the quality of that evidence, we should consider that Sussman was later indicted, but not convicted, of lying to the FBI -- he was a prime instigator of the ridiculous Alfa Bank theory, which we'll get to in a moment. And the contractor he hired, Crowdstrike, recently was back in the news after their incompetence knocked millions of computers off-line in July 2024.
Anyway. If the Rooskies had leaked Democrats' email, Blue Tribe decided, it wasn't just general shit-stirring, it had to be personal -- they wanted Trump to win. And if they wanted Trump to win, it was because he was Putin's puppet.
This line of "reasoning" led to such ridiculous and entirely fictitious claims such as that the source of Russia's control over Trump was blackmail over a supposed "pee tape" of Trump watching prostitutes urinate on a bed.
Or there's my favorite, that Putin was secretly communicating with Trump via a covert channel using the timing of DNS lookups by a third-party mail server sending spam e-mail about Trump hotels to a Russian bank. This was the ludicrous theory, taken seriously for a news cycle by the MSM (and I think still believed by some ardent never-Trumpers), that Michael Sussmann pushed to the FBI.
A May 2017 Economist /YouGov poll found that 58% of Democrats believed that it was definitely or probably true that Russia tampered with vote tallies -- not only tried to influence the outcome with propaganda, but actually tampered with the vote -- to elect Trump.
With its 2016 loss Blue Tribe entered a psychotic state, suffering a breakdown of its reality-testing ability. With Trump nominated as the Republican presidential candidate for the third cycle running, and with US involvement in the Ukraine/Russia conflict only deepening, the Russophobic paranoia pilot light has never gone out.
And the Khelif controversy shows that anything involving Russia -- even peripherally -- can quickly bring the paranoia to a full boil.
As disconnected from reality as the MAGA movement is, Blue Tribe is not fundamentally any more sane, and we must resist the psychosis-inducing partisanship that is propelling us into the American Troubles.
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Members of "Blue Tribe" are mostly Democrats, but not all registered Democrats are part of it. The group also includes some people registered as independents or third-party voters, and even some "never Trump" Republicans or people who have tactically registered Republican. While it historically grew from movements that might be described as liberal or leftist, today it is increasingly illiberal and is solidly right wing, differing from the traditional "right" in that it wants a society with the professional-managerial class on top rather than the capitalist class. So while many would refer to them as "the Democratic base", "liberals", or "the left", these aren't quite right.
It has become a common obfuscatory euphemism to speak of these therapies as "gender confirming", but this is misleading. Gender, including the idea of classifying a as transgender, is a social construct. Sex change therapies alter the sex-related anatomical and physiological characteristic of a body. They don't alter society or how it constructs a person.
The term "deep state" was in use well before Trump entered politics. As Ryan Gingeras summarizes the idea, "As an entity separate from the transparent, officially recognized 'democratic' state, the deep state historically represented coalitions within the government that work to 'veto' or 'fine tune' policies related to national security."
It's one thing to have people at the EPA or HUD be insulated from the churn of electoral politics, but having large parts of the national security-industrial complex placed outside of the control of the democratic process is a problem. Extending the term "deep state" to include all unelected civil service bureaucrats clouds the issue -- the regulatory state can be annoying, even ruinous to businesspeople, but it doesn't have the power to command death on an industrial scale the way the natsec deep state does.