Last week I posted ‘Rowling Rages Against Olympic Women’s Boxing Debacle,‘ in which piece I reported on the author’s sixteen tweets between 30 July and 3 August on the subject of men being permitted to compete against women in the 2024 Olympic Games. See that article for the facts about these karyotype XY boxers, the pushback against Rowling’s assertion that this is being allowed by a “misogynistic sporting establishment” rather than by an IOC cowed by feminists and their genderist offspring, and my thoughts about the relative importance of this story compared to the UK riots and incipient war between Iran and Israel.
Since I wrote that post, the Algerian and Taiwanese boxers won all their matches against biological women and were awarded gold medals. Rowling has tweeted and retweeted fifteen more times on this subject since 7 August; her only other three tweets in that time frame were one to condemn the UK riots targeting Muslim groups (nothing about those targeting “non Asian” populations or the causes of anti-Labour riots as well as the attacks on immigrants in the UK), one about the Islamist state’s abuse of women in Iraq, and another about those in Iran.
[Aside: again, nothing about the history of Islamist crimes against women in the United Kingdom or the context of the UK riots contra open immigration, making the irony and hypocrisy of her rioting post’s exclusivity that much more obvious. See ‘England Burning’ for the necessary historical perspective and typology of current populist protests in the US and UK that you won’t find in Rowling’s tweets.]
Regardless, Rowling has tweeted on the subject of men being able to beat up women in the 2024 Olympics more than thirty times since the end of July; thirty one out of thirty seven tweets and retweets have been on the Olympic boxing scandal or 84%. She hasn’t tweeted on the subject or any topic since 7 August.
Today this story took a predictable turn. One of the XY boxers, Imane Khelif, the Algerian who won a gold medal against XX competition, has initiated a law suit in France claiming that he has been the subject of “cyber bullying.” Rowling is said to be named among those accused of causing Khelif this harm. From the BBC report:
Boxer Imane Khelif has filed a lawsuit over alleged cyberbullying during the Paris 2024 Olympics, which reportedly names author JK Rowling and X owner Elon Musk.
The Algerian boxer won gold in Paris, despite being disqualified from last year’s World Championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA), after she was reported to have failed gender eligibility tests in 2023.
However, the International Olympic Committee strongly defended Khelif’s right to compete and ruled her to be eligible.
Her lawyer Nabil Boudi told Variety on Tuesday that Musk and Rowling would be named in the lawsuit, following comments they made on social media. [highlighting in original]
President Trump, according to the Variety story linked in the BBC piece, may also be named in the suit because of his social media posts tangential to this controversy in which he pledged, if re-elected, to make women’s sports exclusively for karyotype XX women, no ‘transgender,’ intersex, or DSD XY men allowed. I leave it to you to imagine the court room in which The Donald and The Presence are both in the dock for the same supposed crime.
This is a publicity stunt, though. Both boxers could ask the International Boxing Association (IBA) to release results of the two sex tests each took in WADA approved facilities that led to their disqualification to compete in the World Championships. They could appeal the IBA ban on their competing against women but have not because it would require they release the karyotype testing or submit to such testing. This lawsuit, in contrast, takes as its premise the much disputed idea that both boxers are women; hence the tweets by Rowling, Musk, Trump et alii, all decrying the XY boxers victories over XX women, constitute “cyberbullying.”
As predictable as this lawsuit was — the spin given this news is as if Khelif is actually defending his unquestionable biological status as a woman, which he certainly is not doing now nor has he done in the past — Rowling’s response is also a near surety, given her reaction to previous attempts to cow her by threatened legal action. The precedent is last April’s ‘Hate Speech’ law, the roll-out for which included online calls for the prosecution of J. K. Rowling because of her supposedly “transphobic” tweets in which she called “transgender women” men.
Rowling’s response to that was an epic twixter thread on the day the law went into effect in which she mocked ten “transgender women” in the public eye as pathetic men. Her conclusion to that thread included a plea for her arrest if speaking the truth was now a crime in “the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.” The police, no doubt under the guidance of politicians not wanting to give Rowling her day in court, elected not to bring charges against her. Read the BBC report of that failed bit of “lawfare.”
If this case does go forward, as much as I doubt that it will, expect Rowling in a replay of April to deploy her bunker of barracuda barristers to counter-sue for defamation. Khelif is a biological man and Rowling’s legal team will insist that cyber bullying cannot be a crime if the defendant only insisted that the fraud committed by Khelif and permitted by the IOC, a crime against the XX women in the event, be exposed and corrected. Khelif’s suit requires that Rowling, Musk, and Trump meant to injure him or cause others to injure him rather than simply speak the truth about him.
See Rowling’s quotation of Suzanne Moore’s point in a Telegraph article in which she made exactly this point: ‘Someone with a DSD cannot help the way they were born but they can choose not to cheat; they can choose not to take medals from women; they can choose not to cause injury.’ That’s not cyber-bullying; it’s truth telling. Rowling’s repeated tweets on this subject over a two week period to the near exclusion of all other subjects makes it plausible, in my mind at least, that, a la Hermione Granger’s media manipulation in Order of the Phoenix and the author’s own counter-attack in April to the ‘Hate Speech’ law, Rowling has invited Khelif and his supporters to sue her in order to force the issue into a winner-take-all airing of the issue in court.
As I said, I doubt this suit by Khelif is anything but a face-saving publicity stunt that will go exactly nowhere. The BBC reported that “a prominent French legal blogger wrote on X that it is unlikely Mr Musk or Ms Rowling would face prosecution, as French penal law doesn’t apply to acts committed outside of France against foreign nationals.” I expect this story to disappear now that Rowling, Musk, and Trump have been defamed publicly. We are entering the season of a Rowling-Galbraith book release, too, so I have to think we will be reading much more about Hallmarked Man on the author’s primary social media platform in the coming weeks and months than than about the XY Woman.
More anon, though, about this story if it goes anywhere.
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