Mollie Shiflett ’26 is a history major who may also major in linguistics. She plays on the Gold Women’s Club Soccer team for the College of William and Mary and is an avid fan of most sports — except golf. Email Mollie at mrshiflett@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
The problem with the summer schedule is that we have to wait a while before we can publish anything, so this opinion is a little bit late.
The Boston Globe published a piece a few weeks ago, written by an Associated Press reporter, with the headline “Transgender Boxer Advances.” You know who I’m talking about unless you’ve been living under a rock for the whole of the Paris Olympics: Imane Khelif, an Algerian cisgender boxer who went on to win gold in the women’s boxing event. The boxer recently doubled down on the abuse she received with a cyberbullying lawsuit that names many well-known conservative members of the rich and famous, including JK Rowling.
Being a female athlete, even today, can be a slippery slope. Boxers and other athletes like Khelif need to defend their ability to be seen as women at all, just because their features aren’t dainty or stereotypically feminine. Yes, there are transgender athletes that participate in female sports, and they are fully within their rights to do so, but just because those athletes exist, conservative influencers believe that any female athlete that is taller or stronger must be transgender.
Right-leaning media outlets like Fox News live in a world where you can paint the world of female sports as under attack by men who are competing as women. We’ve come to expect that perspective from these places, where facts are suggestions. But after the fight between Khelif and Italian boxer Angela Carini, the last place I would have expected to buy into that narrative did: The Boston Globe.
I’m not here to attack The Boston Globe as a left-leaning screw up or a right-leaning liar, but the newspaper has won Pulitzer Prizes and has been one of the most respected newspapers since it was founded in 1872. They should have known better. What makes it worse, they used an article written by an Associated Press reporter, which did not once mention the word transgender. So not only can a Pulitzer Prize winning paper not edit, it also can’t be bothered to read the articles it prints.
It was a headline, for God’s sake. It would have had to make it through at least two levels of editors, and no one thought to ask “Is she actually transgender? Can you even be transgender in Algeria?” Like the bare minimum of common sense. Just because someone said she was does not mean a newspaper can just publish it.
There is a higher level of journalism than we should be accepting or expecting from mass media today. This is probably a one-off for The Boston Globe, but the damage is done. Organizations make mistakes, but this one was so egregious as to border on a reckless disregard for the truth. Doing things like that gives power to a perspective that shouldn’t ever see the light of day, let alone on the front of a sports page.
More and more media is dedicated to one point-of-view instead of good, honest reporting, and it shouldn’t be that way. We live in our bubbles of left or right-leaning media to confirm our own views, rather than ever face the idea of being uncomfortable. And having uncomfortable conversations is the only way we can grow as people and that our country can grow at all. That is what honest and competent journalism can do: make us uncomfortable with our preconceived notions of the world. Mistakes like this make it almost impossible for people to trust the thousands of good stories an organization like The Boston Globe can publish, and where does that leave us?
Fox News and its conspiracy theorists can do what they want, as much as we would like them to act differently, but organizations as historic as The Boston Globe and The New York Times and The Washington Post should have more respect for journalistic integrity, or at least general competency, than Sean Hannity.