J.K. Rowling Exposed the Hypocrisy of Her Transphobia in Olympic Boxing Rant

J.K. Rowling has been campaigning against transgender women for years at this point, and it has been a steady fall from grace for the once beloved author. Now, she is on a rampage against a cisgender female athlete at the Olympics, because that’s where obsessive gender policing leads.

Imane Khelif, an Algerian boxer at the Olympics, won a match against Italian boxer Angela Carini, which has drawn some attention because Carini quit the match early, in tears. The conversation quickly switched to Khelif’s testosterone levels, due to reports about why the International Boxing Association disqualified her from world championships in 2023:

Khelif reached the final of the 2023 world championships before she was abruptly disqualified by the IBA, which cited high levels of testosterone in her system. The circumstances of that disqualification have been considered highly unusual ever since it happened, and Khelif called it “a big conspiracy” at the time.

It’s more than worth noting that the IBA is seen as a corrupt organization, which is why the International Olympic Committee decided not to have them oversee Olympic boxing this year in the first place. Despite accusations about chromosomes and the IBA gender tests flying around, Khelif was born female, identifies as female, and has never identified otherwise.

To be clear, many women have higher testosterone levels for a number of reasons. Women who suffer from PCOS have them; that’s how the condition works—and that’s why it’s now trending on X (Twitter) in the wake of this news. It isn’t uncommon in cis women. Unsurprisingly though, Rowling completely ignored the facts that Khelif was born female to push her transphobic agenda. When in doubt, know that Rowling—like many transphobes—will somehow make any given issue about trans women and attack them relentlessly for no reason.

“Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better? 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,” she wrote on X.

Again, Khelif has been female her whole life. But that isn’t stopping Rowling from pushing this narrative. And to be clear, Khelif didn’t have overwhelming success in her boxing career prior to this. She was good, but wasn’t the Mike Tyson of female boxers. So for all this outrage to happen because Carini cried after being punched is pretty telling that transphobes are just looking for anything to confirm their narrative, even if they’re wrong.

Rowling continues to push this narrative that Khelif is a man, though, despite multiple people telling her that is not true: “The idea that those objecting to a male punching a female in the name of sport are objecting because they believe Khelif to be ‘trans’ is a joke. We object because we saw a male punching a female.”

Your transphobia has nothing to do with feminism

Rowling’s war on the trans community is hidden behind her claims of being a feminist. Okay, so where is her outrage over Steven van de Velde (a convicted rapist of a 12-year-old girl) playing in the Olympic games? Oh, she’s not tweeted at all about it? Not at all surprising. Rowling continually cries out that trans women are somehow a danger when Rowling is silent about people who are actually a danger to women.

It isn’t feminism. Khelif and all the trans women Rowling continues to lash out against are women. Her transphobia is so bad that she is now attacking cisgender women for not fitting into a specific mold of women. How, Miss Billionaire, is that feminism? This is exactly why narrow definitions of gender, and obsessive policing of them, are such a problem in the first place.

So Rowling sits up in her moldy castle, yelling about the trans community, and is now using her still large platform (stop following her!!) to attack a cisgender woman—exactly who she claims to be protecting with her transphobic rhetoric. No one should be subjected to transphobic attacks whether they’re a cisgender woman or not, but the fact that Khelif is exposes the particular hypocrisy of TERFs “protecting women.” It’s pathetic. Imane Khelif did what boxers do, and did it well, end of story.