Author J.K. Rowling has fallen silent on her usually busy X (formerly Twitter) feed, after Olympic gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif filed a legal complaint in France for alleged cyber harassment over statements regarding her gender.
On August 9, lawyers for Khelif filed a lawsuit with a special unit of the public prosecutor’s office in Paris, stemming from false statements that spread online about her gender after the Algerian boxer defeated Italy’s Angela Carini in her first fight of the 2024 Olympic Games. Carini pulled out 46 seconds into the bout and told reporters afterwards that she had “never felt a punch like this.”
Oh no, consequences.
Only because she attacked a cis woman. No consequences from the years doing everything in her power to targetedly harass individual trans peolle, the community as a whole or publishing books about trans serial killers.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see her go quite, I hope she stays that way. But I’m bitter it wasn’t a realization that her crusade was mysgonstic hatred, only that she was a zealot who accidently friendly fired.
This isn’t friendly fire. TERFism is inherently white supremacist and Khelif was targeted for her race.
I abundetly agree that is correct. But I am doing my best to try to think of her personal viewpoint, in JK’s mind she is defending women from men. Hell, her stupid books are a racist allegory for how evil racism is, but when she gets praised from literaly white supramcists and dictarors, she makes excuses for being the greater good.
It’s only when from her twisted perspective, she (for the first time) attacked an “actual woman”, that she is finally giving pause. JK thinks she is feminist even if all she has done in actuality is outright misogyny. Which is why I am so frustrated, she didn’t wake up to what a monster she has been, just that she needs to be more careful in who she “righteously” attacks.
I don’t think Rowling is as capable of change as you do. I think Rowling still sees Khelif 100% as a male man, because she’s black. And I think Rowling is viewing this as the woke lobby taking away all her money and making her live on the street for challenging them. I think this is making Rowling incredibly outraged, and she’s only shut up out of fear. And that’s good. I want Rowling to be angry and scared and powerless. Because I don’t think anything in the world could ever convince her that trans women are women.
I miss trial by combat.
in JK’s mind she is defending women from men
You could have made this claim once, and it been believable.
Had Rowling made even one…just one comment about the literal child rapist (whose victim was a 12-year-old girl) that competed at this Olympics…you might have been able to keep believing this.
But her absolute silence about an issue where an actual girl was traumatised by the actions of an actual man, and insistence on going to war against a woman who she’s pretending is a man instead, completely removes any semblance of doubt there. Her goal is to delegitimise trans women. That’s not just an instrumental goal, it is the terminal goal: the cruelty is the entire point.
I’m not arguing, but how is TERFism white supremacy?
TERFism restricts feminism to a tightly defined and controlled ingroup. The criteria for determining who is a real woman, when employed by bigots, will inevitably come to describe the socially dominant form of femininity, which is white femininity. Black and Arab women like Khelif will always fail to pass the standards of white femininity, because they’re not white. The standards are racist. And TERFs invariably pick racist standards, because the kind of people who feel the need to police womanhood to appeal to an imagined ideal are people who will end up doing that in more ways than one. And also, TERFs are always hanging out and allying with overly white supremacist groups, because Nazis are the only people who will put up with assholes like Rowling. That’s why she’s always taking photos with fascists.
Don’t forget it’s also inherently misogynistic and attacks cis women all the time anyways.
I just had a great idea. You know how Rowling is always going on in the narration of the HP books about how X bad female character has “mannish hands”? Let’s turn Rowling and her mannish hands into a meme just to fuck with her
only that she was a zealot who accidently friendly fired.
Bigotry is illogical, and will always ‘friendly fire’. No one is ever safe. People have transvestigated Joanne Koanne Roanne and Andrew Tate. No one is ever safe.
tbf tho Tate is a little manlet. I am in disbelief that anyone takes their cues on traditional masculinity from him. Guy with a face like that, he should be preaching the virtues of open mindedness and tolerance. If he was, I’d respect his masculinity. But since he demands that men be judged for failing to embody masculinity, I’m happy to treat him as he wishes to be treated and conclude he is a tiny soyboy with a pathetic chin.
It’s the start, the lawsuit has more chance to win that way, and can pave a path for trans people to win cyberbullying lawsuits too
Someone finally got Rowling to shut up! Imane Khelif is my hero!
Getting JK Rowling to shut up is arguably a more impressive accomplishment than winning Olympic gold
Re: Your username. Do you sneakily swipe bread sticks, or use them as weapons? Also, how do you feel about garlic bread?
Those are definitely weapons grade bread sticks. An unlimited supply of ammo. Kudos.
It’s about fucking time someone shut her up
Anyone with basic critical thinking skills would have known this whole scandal was bullshit in the first place. Did it not occur to any of these TERFs and transphobes that Algeria (a Muslim nation known for persecuting the LGBTQ community as a whole) is one of the least-likely nations to field a trans candidate?
Yes, it did not occur to them. They simply don’t care. Facts and reason can’t matter to the misogynistic anti-trans crowd. Their whole approach is built on hate and bullshit, and they know it.
Yeah, I’ve had a sad laugh about all this stupid alt-right knee-jerk reaction. Algeria, bastion of “wokeness”.
How out of touch are these people?
On the other hand, Algeria is a country unlikely to formally recognize an intersex person.
Are they more likely to be intersex than just doping with testosterone?
Doping with testosterone would certainly have been tested for (amongst other PEDs).
Does it come up different in the body than just normal testosterone?
Sorry, not a doping expert. Reports of cheating seem to focus on quantity of testosterone, not quality.
But in this case the discussion is moot. Imane Khelif didn’t have abnormal levels of testosterone.
You assume they even heard of Algeria before this. Or even during it. The country she represented was not part of the bigotry, just her looks/build.
The TEFRs notably did not choose a white woman to attack here.
Joanne has a full university education and has traveled the world. There is absolutely no way she doesn’t know Algeria is a Muslim country and that a Muslim country would in no way approve an openly queer athlete to be on their Olympics team.
She’s just a bigot.
They are just so desperate for an Olympic level “gotcha” in their cultural crusade that they just singled out a woman boxer for being “too butch” and just ran with their assumptions.
Then every try-hard wannabe right wing influencer type just gloms onto it hoping to be chosen by the algorithm for ten hot seconds of vainglorious right wing attention/validation.
This reminds me of moon landing deniers. Like, y’all don’t think that America’s greatest enemy of the time, the Soviet Union, with all of their resources, wouldn’t have been denying the US’s claim to having landed on the moon if there were any credible evidence that it hadn’t actually happened?
Removed by mod
She’s a bully. It’s time she actually faced consequences for her actions.
she thought she was Hermione. turns out she was just Malfoy.
I’m honestly confused how she could write a story where Harry Potter triumphs over he who must not be named, when he who must not be named was her hero.
It must have been really tough for her.
It’s less that and more the system of prejudice itself is her hero, because she never truly challenges it, and the final state of peace at the end of the books does not require fixing its problems. Voldemort was a bad apple, nothing more (according to her I’d imagine)
Yeah the way she kind of bullies Hermione with the whole ‘SPEW’ thing was so off. First, Hermione had style and was a genius. I think she would know that ‘SPEW’ is a bad acronym.
Also, making everyone turn away from her and no one supporting her - she didn’t need to really make it like that at all. Why couldnt the org have a cute name and Hermione and like Lavender Brown etc all get together to try to coordinate better working conditions for the elves. This then would later help with the plot involving the DA. It’s literally a fantasy and Harry gets magical hero results all the time. It’s just such a weird part of the books and negative when it really didn’t serve any purpose to be negative. Except to be shitty to lady activists.
Yeah the HP books are misogynist as fuck. When I was a little one and I found out they were written by a woman, I was in disbelief. Why would a woman write something so mean to women in general?
Well, the author of HP goes by Robert these days so I guess I had the right idea.
goes by Robert
I’m sorry, I think you just short circuited my brain. JK Rowling, who has so publicly and venomously been anti-trans… has spent the last few years pretending to be a man??? What in the hypocrisy is wrong with her!!!
And now that you mention it, I’d read a long time ago, before she became public with her TERF-ness, that she went by “J K” on the HP books instead of Joanne because she or the publishers didn’t want to discourage boys from picking up a book written by a woman. And now that I’m typing this, I realize the fact that she wrote her books from a boy’s perspective, too. So in all these examples, she’s inhabiting a male persona.
My brain… can list these facts, but cannot compute them together.
Robert Galbraith pretends to be a different gender in order to gain a political advantage and make money. Having absolutely no sense of empathy whatsoever, he assumes everyone else is like him. He assumes trans people are all pretending to be a different gender in order to gain a political advantage and make money. And the only political advantage you can get out of trans femininity (as opposed to trans masculinity) is the appropriation of feminist resources.
(I mean, you can also get great skin, beautiful flowing locks, and resistance to covid from trans femininity, but I don’t think Robert knows about those)
“resistance to covid”? Did I miss something?
yep.
Musk is Malfoy. Rowling is Crabbe.
Okay, now explain it like Star Trek.
She thought she was Kirk, turns out she was just that dumb girl that helped Khan.
I’d say she was young and naïve and attracted to a guy who was literally superhuman. She wasn’t stupid though, she was the ship’s historian. She basically fell in love with what she was supposed to study. It happens in the real world too… doctors falling in love with patients at the like.
Okay then you do one!
Thinks she’s Sisko, but she’s Kai Winn.
She thought she was Dax, but she’s really Damar. Elon Musk is Gul Dukat.
He’s not smart enough. More like the Grand Negus.
Zek is a lot smarter than Dukat.
Grand Nagus Brunt.
Spare me these twisted visions, cruel spectre!
I can see this one.
She thinks she’s Future Guy, but she’s really Silik.
Daniels?
Rowling is Umbridge.
She’s a Stan Shunpike- radicalized offscreen, leaving everyone else confused
She’s not Malfoy, she’s Umbridge.
She doesn’t have quite enough of a backpfeifengesicht to be Umbridge. She’s Umbridge from Wish
TemUmbridge
Heaven forbid she lose money. Literally the only thing that could make her
stopbriefly pause harassing people on the internet.She has billions. No matter how much she loses she’ll still be obscenely rich.
Maybe they can sue for billions. Gawker got sued out of existence, I hope she gets some good US attorneys and files in a jurisdiction that has unlimited damages. Maybe we can all use the new “K” platform after she owns “X”.
Peter Thiel is the reason they were sued out of existence.
Yep. Because they outed him. And he couldn’t sue them for that, so he waited around until he found something he could use to sink his teeth into them.
People were cheering when Gawker lost and got shut down because Gawker sucked. Not me. I saw a billionaire using the justice system successfully for a personal vendetta and was horrified.
Is anyone suing Peter Thiel out of existence?
Don’t think the UK has the potential for redicolously high damages that exists in some US states.
the only thing
I mean, there are other ways, but…
And here I thought that she would happily go to jail over her bigotry: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jk-rowling-willing-jail-misgendering_n_65314d65e4b00565b6234d11
I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised that a fantasy author has a lot of silly fantasies about herself.
Did anything come of the rumors that she plagiarized at least the first book, and premise of the entire series?
Are you referring to The Legend of Rah and the Muggles? That was found to be bullshit the second people read the book. It’s an extremely weird story about nuclear fallout, talking animals, and a shit ton of meandering filler. The only similarity was use of the word “muggle”, which doesn’t even mean the same thing in both stories. JK may be a TERF now, but she is not a plagiarist.
Maybe? I just remembered some thread from ages ago where people were saying that some guy had written a book that wasn’t popular, and she reworked it. This may have been pre-reddit, it was that long ago.
Hence why I said rumors. I didn’t remember anything that was a smoking gun, or a conclusion to that rumor.
Almost none of the ideas in any of those books are original, they’re all cribbed from somewhere else, but that’s always the way art is created whether the creator knows it or not. The premise of a kid discovering he’s special and entering a secret world of other special people is not something new to childrens’ literature
She’s not a plagiarist per se, but the idea of an elite school for wizards is not exactly original to her. There’s The Worst Witch series of books. The first one was published in 1974. They were a huge hit, especially in the UK, leading eventually to a TV movie with a very impressive cast list in the 1980s, which, you will note, was decades before Rowling wrote any Harry Potter book.
There’s absolutely no way she was not aware of those books. In fact, considering she was nine years old when the first one came out- the exact age for those books- she almost certainly read it and treasured it and it almost certainly inspired her to write Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
On top of that, there was Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea novels, the first of which takes place in large part at a boarding school for wizards where a poor boy who is from a non-magical family is sent after showing that he has magical powers and ends up being the most powerful wizard in the world, fighting the ultimate magical evil.
That was published in 1968 and I would be very surprised if Rowling hadn’t read it before she wrote her books, because that is just too similar.
Transgender people in competitive sports that are already segregated by biological sex is relatively uncharted, and should be carefully navigated. There are ways, and appropriate settings, to bring this topic up respectfully. Twitter is not the place, and these people are not qualified to offer their opinion. JK (and others) aren’t fighting some good cause, they’re just being assholes.
On top of invalidating the lived experience of a cis-woman because this Olympic boxer with more muscle than most men looks kinda masculine in some pictures.
So much for the “we can always tell”.
It’s a double whammy of bigotry.
this Olympic boxer with more muscle than most men
Just a false statement that furthers the bigoted narrative we’re discussing in this thread lol
What about this statement is false?
Huh?
She’s has more muscle than me.
This is right. This requires a discussion a bit wider than 420 letters, even more when they come from Rowling
I’m a Conservative championing Genital Inspections on Children to make sure ONLY PEOPLE with Vaginas play Girl’s Sports but also THIS Women with a Vagina is ACTUALLY A MAN!
It’s about PROTECTING WOMEN! And if I have to hurt a bunch of women to protect them from hypothetical scenarios I made up to demonize trans people, so be it!
JKR is so far off base here that even if you are a dyed-in-the-wool TERF this is basically impossible to defend.
Gate-keeping feminity by excluding women born with a vagina who are too butch by your opinion to be considered “women” is going too far… even if you are otherwise onboard with gate-keeping “womanhood” from trans women.
It’s just proof that the F in TERF is a lie. Rowling is in no way a feminist, even if you define feminism as only promoting the rights of cis women.
Rowling is not a feminist, she’s a bigot who thinks that cis women who don’t pass her requirements for femininity and whiteness count as women.
Don’t forget the criteria of what makes a women, women constantly changes to fit whatever warped narrative they have.
Sorry, was I wrong to be a hateful bigot and use my celebrity to spread hate?
Conservatives have a real fixation on people’s gentials. Not the fun, sexy way more like a weird, pervy way.
“Just Kidding” Rowling
And let this be a lesson to all internet people, I know y’all hear about the first amendment a lot, but it only applies in America. You have to actually follow the laws of the country you’re in
Also, the first amendment only applies to free speech against the US government. You can’t chat shit about any private individual without them having the option to sue you.
There’s a whole lot here that’s just slightly off the mark. I’ll give you the general sentiment, but the details need work.
Ok, sorry. I’m British, I couldn’t really give a fuck about the first amendment.
That apparently doesn’t stop you from talking like you’re an authority on it
This is the internet, where we’re all an authority on all things American because Americans won’t shut the fuck up talking about themselves.
Have you tried steering the conversation towards the magna carta or the code of Hammurabi?
Except that’s bullshit, you can get sued for libel and slander in the USA.
The first amendment does not give every US citizen carte blanche to say whatever they want. This is often misunderstood, even amongst a lot of the US population.
You can, however, call The POTUS whatever names you want, just don’t even imply any sort of harm may come to them.
It’s so weird of Rowling to call her a man, considering they have a similar face structure.
I was just noticing that, facial features are very alike
Her post facelift face anyway.
[aliens meme]
projecting
Is Rowling even subject to French legal proceedings?
The harassment lawsuit alleges “aggravated cyber-harassment” against Khelif, according to a statement from the boxer’s lawyer, Nabil Boudi, who was quoted by The Associated Press. Variety reported that the complaint was filed against X, which means under French law that it was filed against unknown persons. Investigators at the Paris prosecutor’s office will determine who could be at fault in Khelif’s complaint.
If she ends up being found liable in an EU country, I bet she won’t be able to travel to any EU country without facing that liability. X is an international platform, and she’s broadcasting her words internationally, so yes, she can be held accountable in countries where this carries civil or criminal liability.
Also any EU royalty payments could be garnished until her debt from her liability is paid in full.
With the sales numbers of Harry Potter stuff, i doubt there will be a problem of securing the money.
I imagine that her Harry Potter stuff is owned by a corporation. That is probably all separate legally from her.
So her Harry Potter stuff is probably fine as she is getting sued not the Harry Potter corporation.
It will mainly affect her ability to travel around Europe.
She’s also one of the richest women in the world, so she won’t really suffer any major loss unfortunately.
That’s not how legal jurisdiction works in the EU. Member states are still sovereign; if you’re liable for something in France and you get off a plane in Germany then France still needs to ask Germany nicely, and sans an extraditable conviction nothing is likely to come of it.
Rich people often have their fingers in a lot of pies, so I wouldn’t be shocked. You know how the saying goes,“Mo’ money (that you’re semi-illicilty hiding internationally to evade domestic taxes), mo’ problems.”
Well at the very least it could block her from going to France? Which as a rich British middle-aged woman I’m sure she would hate not being able to do.
“Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better?” the writer asked. “The smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.”
This fucking smug cunt.
Some people need a punch to the head to stop being so smug
throw Rowling into the ring
Damn is that actually what she said?
According to the article, yeah.
