Lauren Boebert refunds $67k after boxer rejects anti-trans campaign

Lauren Boebert is refunding over $67,000 in donations after Italian Olympic boxer Angela Carini rejected her anti-transgender fundraising efforts.

The right-wing representative launched the campaign on GiveSendGo following Carini's loss to Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who conservatives were falsely claiming is a transgender woman. Boebert aimed to raise $196,000, equal to Italy’s gold medal prize money, to make up for the reward "stolen" from Carini. The campaign had raised just $67,000 as of mid August.

However, Boebert said this week that the platform will be returning the donations after Carini's team directly declined them.

“After my team heard from Angela’s coach, we were informed that she didn’t want to continue with what has been a difficult chapter in her life,” Boebert wrote on Twitter/X. “While she appreciated the support by so many, she decided not to accept the funds. GiveSendGo refunded the contributions late last week as a result."

Carini's early withdrawal from her match against Khelif, after which she publicly lamented about her opponent's strength, manufactured outrage among conservatives, who latched on to unsubstantiated claims that Khelif has XY chromosomes and was born male, despite hailing from a country where it is illegal to identify as transgender and transition.

The boxer supposedly failed a gender eligibility test in 2023 under the International Boxing Association, which was later banned from Olympic participation for corruption. Khelif was disqualified from the IBA only after beating Russian athlete Azalia Amineva in a tournament, prompting the organization's Russian president, who brought in Russian state-owned money to sponsor the organization, to ban her.

After Carini's comments and the subsequent outrage, a spokesperson for the IOC emphasized in a statement that Khelif "was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport."

“This is not a transgender case. There has been some confusion that somehow it’s a man fighting a woman," they said. "This is just not the case, scientifically. On that, there is consensus. Scientifically, this is not a man fighting a woman. I think we need to kind of get that out.”

Carini soon after issued an apology "to [Khelif] and everyone else," telling Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport: " I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke.”

Despite this, Boebert insisted on hosting the fundraising campaign until Carini's explicit rejection, after which the conservative continued to falsely refer to Khelif as “a person with XY chromosomes" in her post online, still fallaciously decrying that she "was allowed to compete against actual, biological women in the Olympics."

Khelif, who went on to win the gold medal, has since filed a criminal complaint against some of the most vocal public figures who targeted her, including J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk, accusing them of “acts of aggravated cyber harassment.”