Asking Alexandria’s Danny Worsnop Makes Misinformed Comments About Olympic Boxer
The recent controversy over Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif revealed a shocking lack of critical thinking skills on behalf of a significant portion of the population. And it turns out that Asking Alexandria‘s frontman Danny Worsnop might be among them.
On Sunday, Worsnop took to Twitter to talk out of his ass about the controversy surrounding the Women’s Boxing event at the Olympics. Along with his comments, he retweeted an article that claimed there was new evidence supporting a dubious claim about Khelif’s supposed “problem with chromosomes” and wrote a wildly misinformed and bigoted post about it:
“I mean… how long are we going to play this game? Personal life y’all do what you wanna do. But in combat sports this is not okay by any moral or measurable degree. Tolerance and acceptance has a line and we have to draw it to protect our women. We’re nothing without them.”
If you’ve somehow been living in a cave the past month, here’s what sparked the whole thing. In an Olympic boxing match between Khelif and Angela Carini of Italy, Khelif knocked out Carini in 46 seconds with two punches, causing Carini to supposedly shout “It’s not fair!” Based on that ambiguous statement, some people took it to mean that Carini thought the fight was unfair because Khelif was a trans woman.
For the record, Khelif comes from a country where trans people don’t have any rights and can’t legally change their gender identity on any documents and Khelif’s father confirmed that his daughter was born a girl. There were claims that, supposedly, the International Boxing Association (IBA) conducted tests that found Khelif to have XY chromosomes, but the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said the tests were deeply flawed, with spokesperson Mark Adams saying:
“Those tests are not legitimate tests. The tests themselves, the process of the tests, the ad hoc nature of the tests are not legitimate.”
Even if Khelif did have XY chromosomes, which there’s no proof of, the fact that she was obviously born a girl would mean that she has something called Swyer Syndrome, an intersex condition that causes a person with XY chromosomes to be born with female genitalia.
So that’s settled, right? Khelif is not a trans woman and this issue isn’t about trans rights in the first place, so that should be the end of it, right? Well, apparently that’s all still not enough for Worsnop. He then followed up his previous statement with an even stupider one, saying:
“To clarify, I do not believe in equality. We as men do everything in our power to provide and create for the women of this world, who are magical and wonderful creatures. And we fight relentlessly to protect their elegance and innocence.”
The article that Worsnop retweeted with that comment came from Reduxx, a notorious far-right, anti-transgender rights website started by Canadian “journalist” Anna Slatz. Reminder, this is a woman who was fired from her editor position at her college newspaper in 2018 for publishing an opinion piece by and an interview with the leader of a neo-Nazi group.
In an attempt to smooth things over after receiving criticism online, Worsnop later tried to clarify his comments (with an apparent “sober brain”).
“Just want to (with sober brain) clarify and fine-tune my post from yesterday so there’s not a misunderstanding.
“By ‘I do not believe in equality’ I mean I do not believe we (men/women) are the same and comparable. I think each have our right an unique strengths and weaknesses.
“I believe those differences are important and should be celebrated and adored. I think rum may have messed up the delivery of that.”
There was an attempt at contrition… but then he added this to shoot his whole clarification in the ass:
“What do very much do not believe in is men being allowed to climb into a ring and beat up women… was the point I think I was trying to get to.”
Again — Khelif is a cis woman. There’s no proof of her being anything otherwise and this all stemmed from an Italian boxer that couldn’t handle getting punched in the face. Reeeeeal bad look here.
So Worsnop has posted a piece from a far-right website and refused to believe the facts about Khelif, and that’s two very stupid things that he’s done before we even get into how completely fucked up his comments would be even if he was right about Khelif being transgender.
Worsnop should be careful because Khelif has said that she intends to start filing lawsuits against her harassers and she seems to be actually following up on her legal threats.
