The Wonder Chronicles: 16
On Winning
Photo by Richard Pelham/Getty Images
This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On Radicals
Revenge is a dish best served gold.
“I’m very happy. For eight years, this has been my dream and I’m now the Olympic champion and gold medallist...I’ve worked for eight years, no sleep, eight years tired. Now I’m Olympic champion,” said Algerian boxer Imane Khelif after her victory in the women’s 66 kilogram boxing competition.
Qualifying for the Olympics is its own wonder–the discipline, the skill, the dedication. It is the wonder of overcoming: your fellow athletes and their discipline, skill, and dedication. And overcoming that voice inside you that can’t take another fucking minute of the pain of training, training, training.
“Qualifying” for a woman card issued by racist transphobes is its own olympian effort but one in which the goal posts constantly move (yes, I’m mixing my metaphors) and which merely by competing, you keep alive a racehorse that deserves to be put down already (see, I did it again.)
When those racist transphobes are spurred into action by the tears of a white woman who should’ve stayed out of the boxing ring because she couldn’t take the punches, you know that we win by refusing their gender binary goalposts and lose by playing their “Who is a real woman?’ charade.
Imane Khelif knows you can’t win for trying–if you follow their rules.
Her father barred her from sports when she was a girl because she was a girl and her detractors wanted to bar her from competing in the Olympics because she wasn’t “woman” enough for them.
Revenge is a dish best served gold.
Imane Khelif’s punches won her gold at the Olympics and silenced Chief Racist Trasnphobe Who Shall Not Be Named (CRTWSNBN) –an Olympican feat in and of itself considering that CRTWSNBN has 14.2 million followers on Twitter. And even sweeter: CRTWSNBN is now named in a criminal complaint filed to French authorities over “acts of aggravated cyber harassment” against the Algerian boxer.
Each time Imane Khelif won a match to qualify for the next round at the Olympics, her punches were blows to the white supremacist patriarchy.
We defeat that patriarchy not by “proving” our way to its approval but by denying its power to demand we prove anything.
We win our way to freedom from that patriarchal straitjacket–whether it is barring us from sports because we’re girls or because we’re not “woman enough” for it.
Merely by existing–by fighting to fight and by winning her fights–Imane Khelif discombobulated the gender police and anyone who dared tell her what a Muslim, Algerian woman could or could not do–whether it is box in the Olympics or claim that if she were a “real woman” she wouldn’t sit on the shoulders of her coach as he carried her through the air to celebrate her gold.
Imane Khelif knows that you can’t win for trying–if you follow their rules.
She knows you win by punching out your opponent–boxer or patriarchy.
Aim at patriarchy’s jaw. Deal your knockout!
My goal: that you are found by wonder.
My wish: that you intensely live.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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