Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Leo Varadkar and the real story of the Imane Khelif gender scandal

Canada's former prime minister Justin Trudeau and Ireland's ex-prime minister Leo Varadkar (Credit: Getty images)

Remember when Leo Varadkar egged on someone with male strength who was punching women in the face? It sounds made up, I know. Varadkar, the former Taoiseach of Ireland, is painfully PC. He might have started his political career as a small-c conservative. But he ended up guffawing with Justin Trudeau over their shared penchant for virtue-signalling socks, slamming Israel like a Trinity brat in a keffiyeh, and getting so lost in the weeds of transgenderism that he once said his government had ‘no official position’ on how many genders there are. (Leo, bro: it’s two.)

‘Truth is dying!’, they wailed for years, and yet now they kill biological truth with their own bare hands

Surely a man like that would never whoop as someone with male strength smacked a lady? Not so fast. It was August 2024. The Paris Olympics had just ended. And the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif had caused a global stink by competing in the women’s boxing there, even though many suspected this was a person with male chromosomes. Varadkar was in Khelif’s corner. He took to Instagram and wrote a three-word message of love. ‘Get em girl!!’, it said.

Have you ever heard anything so cringe? The former leader of a European nation issuing an Americanised, teenage-style cry for clicks and likes from the self-righteous of social media. Worse, he wrote his fawning note in bright pink. Maybe he was keen to drive home his point that Khelif is a woman. Women like pink, right?

This was after Khelif had pounded the Italian boxer Angela Carini with such ferocity that Carini threw in the towel after 46 seconds to ‘preserve her life’. It was after Khelif won gold, to the fury of many feminists who believed that a biological male was nabbing medals from actual women. And it was after Khelif had threatened legal action against JK Rowling for having the uppity-woman gall to question whether this person of questionable sex should be boxing women. Varadkar saw all that and still said ‘Get em girl!!’. Not to the wounded Carini, not to the plain-speaking Rowling — to Khelif.

Indeed, his ‘Get em girl’ was primarily said about Khelif’s legal rather than boxing antics. He said he hoped Khelif would get ‘financial support’ for the lawsuit. ‘I’d be happy to make a donation’, he said. Get em boy! 

Fast forward a year and there is now more controversy about Khelif. A leaked medical report claims Khelif is male. Or in the scientific lingo: ‘Chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype.’ Khelif has always insisted that she is a female and it remains unclear whether the report is legitimate. But if it turns out to be accurate, then it’s possible Varadkar was offering to help fund a lawsuit brought by a biological male who was seeking to legally reprimand a woman for daring to criticise the inclusion of blokes in women’s boxing. You do wonder if the right-on ever imagined they would find themselves standing against females like this.

If it’s true, Varadkar might say he didn’t know Khelif had ‘male karyotype’. Okay, but he could have tried listening to women – a big ask for some fellas, I know. 

I don’t mean to single out Varadkar. It’s just that his hot takes on this hot mess of a scandal brilliantly sum up today’s tyranny of credulity. The 21st-century ruling classes are shockingly gullible. They’ll believe any old crap if it sounds warm and fuzzy and wins them brownie points on the social-media circuit. Even truths humankind has known since we first came down from the trees can be cavalierly dispensed with in the name of accruing ever greater moral glory. 

These people claim to belong to the expert classes. When Varadkar was Taoiseach, he frequently bemoaned the scourge of misinformation. He lamented our ‘post-truth’ era. Yet his policies on transgenderism suggest he bowed obsequiously to the greatest post-truth of them all: namely, that a male can be female. That men can become women. That lesbians can have penises. That there are so many genders his government could not possibly come to an ‘official position’ on how many. He cosplayed as a paragon of rationalism yet drank from the cup of lunacy. 

Varadkar was not alone. Virtually every liberal, every Rest Is Politics bro, every New Atheist and every ‘Listen to the Science’ greenie now bows and prays at the altar of trans. People who looked down their noses at the religious are now religious fanatics for genderfluidity. ‘Truth is dying!’, they wailed for years, and yet now they kill biological truth with their own bare hands. 

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