Considering the way it was seized upon by the likes of JD Vance and Elon Musk, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the controversy surrounding the gender of female Olympic boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting was stirred up by a right-leaning sports site like Outkick.
But it turns out that Reduxx, the website that stoked July’s debate over gender tests and testosterone levels, doesn’t consider itself conservative. In fact, according to co-founder and editor-in-chief Anna Slatz, the website is staffed almost entirely by “socialist radical feminists.”
That may be hard to believe for most readers, given that the bulk of the website’s content covers crimes committed by transwomen. But Reduxx’s writers represent an under-scrutinized faction in the culture wars, one that considers trans rights a threat to women not because they defy traditional gender norms, but because, in Slatz’s words, they “reaffirm and reinforce binaries surrounding femininity.”
“There is more to the ‘trans debate’ than this one-dimensional social progressivism vs. social conservatism paradigm,” Slatz told The Righting, via DM on X. “Trying to shove these radical feminists, who are literally lesbian anti-patriarchs, in a ‘socially conservative’ box would be stupid as fuck, but alas, I have seen people do it.”
An Anti-Trans Track Record
Slatz, who’s based in Canada, co-founded Reduxx in 2022 with Genevieve Gluck and Jennifer Seiland, fellow writers she met while working at 4W, another radical feminist, anti-trans website. Slatz gained notoriety in 2018 when, as the editor in chief of the University of New Brunswick St. John’s student newspaper, she published an op-ed by a local neo-Nazi leader. After getting fired from that position, she went on to log bylines at far-right sites The Rebel News and The Post Millennial.
Conceding that she’s “not a sports-minded person,” Slatz says that Reduxx “gets insight” on their sports coverage from the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS), a self-described “advocacy group” that’s currently suing the NCAA for allowing trans swimmer Lia Thomas to compete in the 2022 NCAA Swimming Championships.
An Olympic Flamewar
According to Slatz, she came across the Khelif and Lin story after ICONS co-founder Marshi Smith tipped her off to potential cases of athletes with differences in sex development (DSD) competing at the Olympics. Following up on the tip, Slatz says, she found out that the two boxers had been disqualified from the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championship (WWBC) for failing to meet the gender eligibility standards of the International Boxing Association (IBA). On July 27, Slatz published a story about Khelif and Lin competing in the Paris Olympics as women despite that earlier disqualification.
The story took off on social media, garnering retweets from conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey and SheWon.org, a website that catalogs female athletes who have lost to trans competitors. Outlets like Outkick, the Daily Wire, and the Daily Mail all credited Reduxx in their own articles about the two fighters.
It’s worth noting that Slatz has never claimed, as Donald Trump did, that Khelif and Lin are trans. Instead, Slatz wrote that “it is suspected that both are impacted by a Difference of Sexual Development (DSD),” which is defined by the St. Louis Children’s Hospital as a congenital condition in which a person is born with “reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit the typical definitions of female or male.” However, outside of the unpublished IBA tests, which the International Olympic Committee described as “so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with,” there is no evidence that Khelif or Lin were born with a DSD.
Despite the high-profile nature of the boxing story, Slatz said that Reduxx, which received “about 3 million total views in the past 10-12 months or so” and is completely reader supported, may not last much longer in its current form.
“If anything, there are plans to roll it back quite a bit,” Slatz said. “I can see Reduxx transition (lol) into a non-profit female journalism collective in the near future.”
As that joke about transitioning implies, Slatz isn’t one to pull punches. But when discussing her skepticism that Khelif and Lin are indeed who they say are, she provides her opponents with an ironic opening.
“Why have they not simply obtained an independent gender test of their own this entire time?” wonders Slatz. “I imagine they would enjoy the opportunity to sue the IBA, and a handful of media outlets, for spreading false information about them.”
