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Should we even bother sending our children to university these days? Certainly not to any arts departments, where the many ideas and research being produced are beyond parody.

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Take these lines, from the opening of a master’s thesis recently accepted by the University of Toronto, for instance: “I also wrote this paper for myself, because I needed an explanation for my own existence. It became a method of explaining why I don’t exist yet,” wrote Narisa Vickers.

Moving on from the author’s existential crisis, Vickers’ thesis is titled, “Female Dopers, Gender Fraudulences, and Racialized Bodies: The Misgendering of Imane Khelif.”

Vickers describes her work as “grounded in Black transgender feminist theory and decolonial queer of colour critique,” in its examination of “online reactions to Khelif as a case study shaped by histories of transphobia and colonialism in North America and Algeria.”

In plain English, this is a master’s thesis about how allegedly mean, transphobic, colonialist and even “violent” individuals on the internet were in reaction to Algerian boxer Imane Khelif winning gold in women’s boxing at the Paris 2024 Olympics.

In the lead-up to the Games, Khelif failed a gender eligibility test mandated by the International Boxing Association, but was nevertheless allowed by the........

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