John Oliver Defended Transgender Athletes Competing in Women’s Sports. JK Rowling Responded.

 

This week, best-selling author J.K. Rowling ripped into HBO’s John Oliver for one of his recent monologues defending transgender athletes in women’s sports. 

“There are vanishingly few trans girls competing in high schools anywhere, even if there were more, trans kids like all kids vary in terms of athletic ability, and there is no evidence they pose any threat to safety or fairness,” Oliver said on Friday.

Rowling responded in a lengthy post shared on X.

“An undoubtedly intelligent person spouts absolute bullshit to support something he wants to be true, but isn’t,” Rowling wrote, before delving into the fact that a recent report from the UN showed that women have lost nearly 900 medals to men.

“Again and again I’ve come up against men who argue exactly what Oliver does here, using the very same talking points. With a straight face, the ‘believe the science’ guys will say ‘actually, we don’t yet have enough data to say whether men and boys are stronger and faster than women and girls’. The ‘be kind’ crew can’t see what the issue is. ‘Why are you bothered, it only affects a tiny minority of females?’” she added. 

“They’ll stare unabashedly into a camera and insist that their audiences’ eyeballs are incapable of seeing what’s plain as day, and that there’s something wrong with the great unwashed for believing that girls are being robbed of opportunities and put at physical risk. If you want to tell the world you’re happy to watch females suffer injury, humiliation and the loss of sporting opportunities to bolster an elitist post-modern ideology embraced by a minute fraction of the world’s population, fair enough; you’re allowed your opinion. But if you’ve just told girls they don’t deserve fair sport, maybe rethink using all too real and common sexual predation against young women as a punchline for your ‘edgy’ closing joke,” she concluded.

Nothing about this feels good, because John Oliver generously gave his time for my charity Lumos and I liked him very much when I met him, but God knows, if you ever need an example of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, this video’s for you. An undoubtedly intelligent… https://t.co/3IS4onzXq0— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 17, 2024

Rowling has long been outspoken about transgenders competing in women’s sports. In May, Townhall covered how she was accused of “bullying” after she called a transgender soccer manager a “straight, white, middle-aged bloke” on social media. Rowling’s statement came after a new law was enacted in Scotland making “misgendering” someone a crime. 

That’s not all. In recent months, Townhall has covered how Rowling fired back at a news outlet that referred to a so-called “transgender” killer as a woman. In addition, the United Kingdom’s first “transgender” news anchor reported Rowling to the police for intentionally “misgendering” “her” as a “man” on social media.