Non-Binary Broke Their Brains

Trump and MAGA can’t handle the idea of anything beyond two choices.

The GOP can’t handle non-binary thinking. There are two clear, recent examples of this.

You probably heard the first one. On Wednesday, in a session with the National Association of Black Journalists, Donald Trump called into question Kamala Harris’s race, saying that he always knew her before as “Indian” until she “happened to turn Black,” causing gasps from the audience.

The second took place largely online in connection with the Olympics. Trump had posted a video of a boxing match at the Olympics, promising “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!” 

There was also a pile-on by Fox, MAGA trolls like Charlie Kirk, and TERFs like JK Rowling. All of them had misgendered Imane Khelif, a female boxer from Algeria whom they falsely claimed was a man. 

Trans panic has now reached the point where any woman who looks masculine can be attacked, bullied and shamed—the inevitable result of a belief system that insists on rigid gender norms and identity.

Today, I’ll dive more deeply into both of these attacks. As I’ll discuss, they reveal a fundamental limitation in thinking and a stunning blindness to the realities of the world, one that will result in significant political and electoral consequences for MAGA.

Actually, it’s both

When Trump made his remarks about Harris, he concluded by asking a telling question: “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

The possibility that the answer is “both” lay outside his comprehension. The simple truth is easy: Harris is of Black Jamaican and South Asian heritage. She is both Black and Indian. 

After widespread, bipartisan condemnation of his racist remark, Trump then doubled down and foolishly launched a meme war. On Thursday, he posted a photo of Harris with her mother’s family wearing traditional Indian clothing, sarcastically mocking her love of her “Indian Heritage.” 

Trump then defended his characterization of Harris, posting a video of her cooking Indian food with actress, screenwriter and producer Mindy Kaling and insisting that “Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black.”

The GOP, being a cult, took its cue from Dear Leader. At Trump’s speech in Pennsylvania, his campaign trolled Harris with a photo above the stage with a headline about her becoming the first “Indian-American US senator.” 

On cue, JD Vance leapt to defend Trump by claiming he had merely labeled Harris a “chameleon” who “pretends to be somebody different, depending on the audience she’s talking to.” Irony overdosed on MAGA fumes at this point, given how Vance himself has changed his own skin around Trump, from calling him “America’s Hitler” to becoming his VP running mate.

Trump and the MAGA right no doubt reveled in Harris’s public embrace of her Indian half and triumphantly thought, “Checkmate!” But it’s only because they couldn’t escape 2D chess thinking. And their meme war fizzled quickly in the face of receipts showing her embrace of the Black part of her identity, too.

The idea of multiple identities for Harris had to be put into a perspective that MAGA might understand.

And as for JD Vance, who himself is married to the daughter of South Asian immigrants, the Internet was undefeated and forever, per usual.

There was even this handy answer to Harris’s photo of her mother’s family in traditional Indian attire:

So far, neither Trump nor Vance has gotten to the point where they can even admit that Harris is both Black and Indian, which is likely highly confusing to everyone from Trinidad and Tobago. But with 34 million mixed race people in the U.S., or around 10 percent of the populace, they had better figure out how to get the idea through their heads before alienating yet another large group of voters.

Trans panic is weird

Racial binary thinking isn’t the only thing Trump and the MAGA right can’t get past. On Thursday, another bizarre, manufactured controversy broke out at the Olympics, this one not involving drag queens or misplaced butthurt feelings over The Last Supper (which was really the Feast of Dionysus, but try explaining that to them).

This time it was over a boxing match between Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and her Italian opponent, Angela Carini. Carini quit the match after just 46 seconds, then appeared to claim, without evidence and through tears, that Khelif was a male because she had never been hit in the face so hard before.

She has since issued an apology.

Prominent anti-trans activist JK Rowling falsely amplified Carini’s original claim, all while misgendering Khelif and creating a damaging and fake narrative:

Elon Musk amplified anti-trans activist Riley Gaines to his 193 million followers. Gaines had posted a picture of Carini declaring, “Men don’t belong in women’s sports. #StandWithAngelaCarini”

Fox News gleefully ran with stories about the “scandal,” calling Khelif, without basis, a “biological male” and even misreporting her as being trans. 

Khelif is a cisgender woman.

Then, to top things off, they somehow made this all about (checks notes) Kamala Harris. Jesse Watters of Fox, who never misses a moment to demonstrate his own weirdness, railed, “You have a female nominee for president of the United States, of the free world, and this is one of the biggest gender controversies of the year, in the Olympics, and Kamala Harris hasn’t said anything, and she hasn’t even been asked about it. And that’s a cover up.”

No, he really said that. Take a listen:

A few points here and some background on the manufactured controversy.

First, Imane Khelif is a woman. She has the anatomy of a female, was born and raised female, and considers herself female. But to MAGA faithful, because she happens to be big and strong, she must be a man.

Second, Khelif is not trans. She is cisgender. In fact, if she were trans, there is no world in which Algeria, a conservative Islamic country where it is illegal to be LGBTQ+, would have selected or allowed her to compete.

Third, and this is a real head scratcher, somehow this is all Kamala Harris’s fault. The MAGA right are literally attacking a Black woman for competing in a woman’s sport, yet shifting the political blame to a different Black woman, whom they also claim isn’t even Black.

Truly head-spinning.

So on what do they base their spurious claim? Per reporting by the Washington Post, Khelif, along with a Taiwanese boxer named Lin Yu-ting, was barred at the last minute from competing in New Delhi in 2023 by the International Boxing Association (IBA)—a shady organization that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has stripped of recognition over scandals and governance issues. 

The IBA’s president, Umar Kremlev, told a Russian news agency that the disqualification was because “it was proven they have XY chromosomes.” Pro-tip: Don’t ever trust what the  Russians say or do. 

Indeed, the IOC cast doubt upon that very claim. “We have no knowledge of what the tests were,” the IOC’s spokesman Mark Adams said. “They were cobbled together, as I understand, overnight to change the results.” Fun fact: The disqualifications came three days after Khelif defeated Russian Azalia Amineva.

Nice timing there. 

The IOC, which decertified the IBA, has operated the boxing competition over the past two Olympics. And it had cleared both Khelif and Lin to compete this year without issue, meaning they passed all the drug tests and screenings that the IOC has in place.

End. Of. Story.

Digging their own graves

The Right, to no one’s surprise, is digging in and just won’t let it go. And that could hurt them with voters who are tired of their culture wars, tired of their nonsense, and tired of their hypocrisy.

JD Vance, once again confirming why no one likes him, declared of the Khelif question, “This is where Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender lead: to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match. This is disgusting, and all of our leaders should condemn it.”

What’s disgusting, in fact, is how obsessed the Right is about gender, to the point where their own transphobia predictably results in misgendering and causing harm to cisgender women who are competing legally in their respective sports.

Their rank hypocrisy is also quite evident. While MAGA elected officials spend their online capital criticizing a woman boxer for beating another woman boxer in the ring, women voters know that these same politicians turn a blind eye when actual men beat women, often in their own homes. Indeed, the far right even argues that these men should still be entitled to possess firearms, even though they have a history of domestic violence.

And few Black voters can miss the racial component at work here, too. It is consistently Black women, after all, who are routinely accused of being “men” while outperforming their white women counterparts. Tennis icon Serena Williams, runner Caster Semenya, and now Imane Khelif come immediately to mind. See a pattern?

Finally, Americans who just want to enjoy the Olympics are instead barraged with MAGA culture war absurdities, grotesque online bullying, and dramatic pearl clutching, none of which has anything to do with something actually important, and all of which distracts from the things that bring us together—like a gold winning performance by the U.S. women’s gymnastic team and individually by Simone Biles.

Even with the incomparable Biles, MAGA has had trouble supporting her through her past struggles, and there was little joy in or attention on her triumph yesterday.

I wonder why that is?