If you are in a position where you reach an audience, you have a responsibility to respect that audience, not to prey upon the impulses they may fall back on when a topic comes along that confronts their worldview.
If you are a media personality with an audience as significant as Piers Morgan’s, you’ve also got a responsibility not only to present your commentary with a factual backbone, but also from a place of love. This is especially if a vulnerable and misunderstood group of people are even tangentially involved, because honest education and communication prevent further distortion of such people.
So when presented with the opportunity to offer some thoughts on Imane Khelif — the Algerian boxer competing at the 2024 Paris Olympics who was born as a woman, identifies as a woman, and will live the rest of her life as a woman — Piers Morgan absolutely should not have chosen to make a snarky, senseless comment on the matter, but he did anyway.
For those of you who may not be in the know, Imane Khelif is at the center of an utterly myopic controversy wherein she’s being accused of being a biological male who altered her gender identity to compete in women’s boxing.
In Algeria, it is illegal to socially change your gender or medically transition, and there is no evidence that Khelif was born with XY chromosomes. There is resounding evidence, however, that Khelif was born as a woman and has lived as a woman her entire life.
Does she, by most all Western standards, appear particularly masculine? Yes, absolutely. Does her natural build give her a competitive advantage? Arguably so, yes. But neither of those things have any bearing on the fact that she is not transgender, and that Khelif’s case is not in any sense a “trans issue.”
So for Morgan to disregard all of that, and instead contribute to this discourse with a tired, attack-helicopter-adjacent joke that only heaps even more unwarranted scrutiny and disrespect on Khelif, is severely irresponsible. There is no adherence to fact, and there is no attempt to understand the situation; there is just a gross commitment to aggression in hopes of invalidating anyone or anything that conflicts with how Morgan, and people like him, choose to move through the world.
If Khelif’s body makes you uncomfortable, take it up with your therapist instead of social media.