Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Chris Revelle | Celebrity | August 22, 2024
You’ve likely heard about Olympic gold medalist Imane Khelif and how, despite being a cis-gendered woman, she was bullied by people all over the globe on the incorrect assumption that she was a trans woman competing in Olympic sports. As Natalie Wynn put it on a recent episode of A Bit Fruity, Khelif was the subject of a world-wide cyberbullying campaign that went beyond the usual dregs of trolls on the internet to include celebrities and professional assholes like JK Rowling, Elon Musk, and Logan Paul. Khelif recently filed a suit against Rowling and Musk for the scurrilous and hateful rhetoric they engaged in, and I think I speak for many of us when I say I hope Khelif takes a big chunk of their cash. As of today, noted FART and mediocre writer Rowling has not Tweeted for 14 days. For someone who seemingly couldn’t draw breath without attacking trans people, it’s notable that she hasn’t posted anything in two weeks! Ahhhh, the glorious sound of silence.
This pause is almost certainly a response to Khelif’s legal action against Rowling, as well as the fact that she’s deleting many of her Tweets, which seems to confirm that Rowling is desperately trying to avoid the consequences she earned. It’s almost like blathering transphobic nonsense ad nauseam is a bad and stupid thing to do!
Obviously, this story will develop as Khelif’s suit moves forward, but there are some takeaways from this ghastly affair I want to highlight. The first is that JK Rowling (and Elon Musk, Logan Paul, JD Vance, Donald Trump, etc) are people who seem largely uninterested in women’s sports and are just as much the weirdos that make up the current American Republican party. They care so much about dragging their transphobia into everything that they dog-piled a cis-woman for failing to present as a “real woman,” a notion so nebulous and subjective that it’s bonkers we’re even talking about this. It’s really weird to care this much about whether someone is trans as if there are spies among us and we must be vigilant.
It’s also curious that for as much as Rowling consistently presents herself as a feminist concerned for the freedoms of women, she evidently holds women to a really misogynistic standard. And what’s more, that standard seems to boil down to “whatever JK Rowling thinks.” It’s the heart of madness for “tranvestigators,” because if the only litmus test is their individual perception of what a woman “should” be/act/look like, what are we truly dealing with here? It feels like a new level of misogyny has been laid bare in the likes of Rowling and co: a woman can only be a woman if they look like what they think a woman should be.
It’s not surprising that a community of people who don’t otherwise speak or advocate for women, outside of the culture war against trans people, would hate women. It’s not surprising that when it became clear that Khelif was a cis-woman, they tried to have a fight about trans people in sports anyway. Rowling and her ilk are so singularly obsessed with this hateful crusade that they invented a battle over trans people in the Olympics because a woman won a boxing match. As Wynn said in the A Bit Fruity episode, if there were no trans people in the world, one gets the impression Rowling and the other FARTS would invent them to have a target to flog. Another takeaway is that even if Imane Khelif were a trans woman, the giant hate campaign led by Rowling would still be wrong. A lot of the language around this event emphasizes the irony of all these accusations flying at a cis-woman as if to imply that this is only wrong because she’s cis-gendered. Misgendering someone is wrong full-stop, but this would all still be horrible if Khelif were trans. These so-called “champions of women’s sports” have fully unmasked themselves as misogynists who seem to feel a woman is only a woman when she’s suitably “feminine” and they exemplify the gender madness transvestigators live with. All this creepy, obsessive focus on jawlines, hip-to-shoulder ratios, and all kinds of phrenology-adjacent pseudosciences, it’s all too mindless and weird.
It’s all extremely weird! It’s especially notable that despite Rowling’s talking points being parroted by proudly misogynistic trolls like Matt Walsh, Rowling doesn’t see what it might mean when haters of women agree with her. It’s almost like Rowling isn’t really a feminist as much as she uses the language of feminism to enact bigotry. And as much as I make light of Rowling’s recent silence, it’s genuinely a good thing that a bigot with that huge a platform is taking a break from spreading hate. Putting all Schadenfreude aside, one less transphobe attacking people online is a net win.
