Rowling tweeted this in response to a fan who joked about her supposedly heading to Greenland to escape criticism of her stand against the gold medal winning boxers in this summer’s Paris Olympic Games.
To no one’s surprise, she seems to be doing her best to sail again to the far north for her birthday next year. Yesterday she tweeted about Fabrizio ‘Valentina’ Petrillo, a 47 year old Italian “transgender woman” who satisfied the Paralympic guidelines for men-competing-as-women with respect to current testosterone levels. These guidelines are ridiculous because, once having passed through puberty, the male human body is significantly stronger and faster than the average female body, an advantage that is not off-set by lowering testosterone and elevating estrogen. Rowling sarcastically called Petrillo “inspirational” and a “role model,” if only to “the cheat community” of men-competing-as-women.
The first comments to this thread were behind Rowling and against Petrillo, not an unheard of thing now that Rowling’s 14 million twitter followers include significant numbers of Gender Critical feminists, two of whom noted that “transgender” Petrillo’s specific practices from youth forward with respect to his mother’s and wife’s clothing was understood by psychologists as “transvestic fetishism.”
Rowling responded acidly:
Rowling is ‘off,’ unfortunately, with her assertion that it is “always the underwear;” in a 2021 BBC profile, Petrillo explained it was putting on his “mother’s skirt” that was a “touch of heaven” at nine years old.
The LGBTQ+ tribe, though, was ready with the ‘Republicans Pounce‘ headlines, here of course, it is “Rowling Attacks Visually Impaired Trans Paralympian Athlete: She’s a Cheater!” The article, as you’d expect, took as its premises that biological men can become women and that Rowling is a “transphobe.” It cited this response from a champion of “transgenderism” ‘The Pissed Off Lawyer,’ who insisted from his legal perspective that if one is obeying the rules, one cannot be a cheater — and the person who shouts “Cheater!” is a bigot advancing untrue stereotypes about “transgender women” athletes, i.e., men-competing-against-women.
Rowling clarified that she was obviously not talking about all “transgender” people but only those competing against biological women. Regardless of their conformity to senseless rules with respect to quantities of male and female hormones, “knowing you have an unfair advantage and exploiting it anyway is pretty much the definition of cheating.”
Petrillo’s goal of qualifying for the 400m Paralympic final in Paris ended with his third place finish in the semi-finals (you can read here all about how the loser of that race was given all the attention by the assembled media, who turned it into a celebration of “transgender” heroism and martyrdom memes). There was no mention, of course, of the visually impaired woman Paralympian athlete whose dream of making the 400m semi-finals in Paris was crushed by Petrillo having displaced her.
Circling back to the top of this post, Rowling has stated her mission: “to keep arguing for the reality and immutability of human sex.” This is an odd position for a feminist, if not unknown; it was, for example, a first principle of many First Generation feminists, the Suffragettes, whence their disavowal of “infanticide,” what today is known by the “abortion” euphemism. Rowling is certainly not of that mind. In coming posts, I will explore the credo of an American feminist, one whose literary preferences as much as her controversial “It’s the biology, stupid!” retorts to contemporary women academics and activists align with Rowling’s.
Stay tuned.
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