The saga of the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif at the Olympics. The explosive Times feature about the “tradwife” Hannah Neeleman. Whatever has happened to the Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance to make him once insist that a coven of vengeful witches – sorry, “childless cat ladies” – are hexing ruin on people’s lives.

They’re not news stories. They’re concurrent threads in the dystopian nightmare being woven for western women by the kind of far-right political forces you wouldn’t want near you to darn your damn socks.

Khelif’s crime – in the eyes and relentless social media feeds of the “let us tell you how women should look, act, reproduce, breathe and exist on this earth” brigade – lies in choosing not to portray herself as an aspirational Sports Illustrated swimsuit model when her job as a professional athlete is, literally, to punch other people in the face. There’s an online community of “transvestigators” who spend their days with Adobe Photoshop filters and an alarmingly fragile sense of personal identity determining every prominent woman who takes her work seriously must secretly be a man, lest the confections of gender that they cling to collapse in the face of, um, concrete evidence to the contrary. They’ve been going on about Michelle Obama in this way for years.

Don’t be fooled by their rhetoric into thinking that Khelif terrifies because of her height or........

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