Transgender sprinter Valentina Petrillo has responded to J.K. Rowling, following the controversial author’s comments about her competing in the 2024 Paris Paralympics.
As a refresher, certified TERF and once-beloved children’s novelist Rowling has been busy doing everything BUT checking her house for mould. During the 2024 Olympics, Rowling was one of multiple people, including Elon Musk (someone you don’t want to be grouped with) who felt compelled to weigh in on the gender of Olympic boxer Imane Khelif.
Khelif was the subject of widespread hysteria, including from Donald Trump (someone you also don’t want to be grouped with) when it was presumed that she was a man competing as a woman in the Olympics. Regardless of the fact that this was not the case (Khelif was born a woman, lives as a woman, and identifies as a woman), Rowling shared a post referring to the boxer as a “male” and describing her fight as “male violence against women becoming an Olympic sport.”
Getting her just desserts with the same brevity it takes for the apparate spell to work, Rowling was later named alongside Musk in a cyber bullying lawsuit filed by Khelif following the torrent of attacks. That might’ve been enough for a regular TERF to bow out of discussions of gender and sport, but Rowling just can’t resist adding fuel to the fire.
Now, the object of her attacks is Petrillo, a transgender and visually impaired sprinter who competed at the Paralympic Games. Taking to social media, Rowling described Petrillo as an “out and proud cheat,” saying her competing in the games meant “the cheat community has never had this kind of visibility.” Rowling went as far as mentioning actual cheater Lance Armstrong, and said the “cheat-shaming era is over.”
While this case of Rowling commenting on an athlete’s gender is a little different to that of Khelif’s — Petrillo transitioned in 2019 and has been competing in women’s categories since 2020 — the bigotry rooted in her post remains the same. Not only are the cheating claims false (Petrillo is now legally a woman, and based on the current rules, she is able to compete in female categories), but they speak to Rowling’s broader and constantly regurgitated belief.
Despite conceiving of magical worlds with wizards and spells and flying cars, it’s somehow beyond the realm of Rowling’s imagination that trans women are women, so her opposition to Petrillo is nothing we haven’t heard from the author before. In any case, the athlete got the last word, delivering a searing response that probably drove Rowling crazier than all those mold spores.
“I’m flattered that Rowling is talking about me,” Petrillo said (per The Telegraph), “I’ve never even read Harry Potter.” While that alone is a read so searing it could induce third-degree burns, Petrillo doubled down on her apathy towards Rowling’s biggest achievement, saying she was “told [Rowling] wrote [Harry Potter] but I didn’t read it.”
The sprinter finished off the one-two punch by offering a lesson to Rowling, saying she “expected different behavior” from the author since she wrote in her own book “about a sport where there is no gender.”
It’s a big win not only for the trans community but also for those of us who were once the subject of scowls when we admitted to never having read Harry Potter. Kudos are in order for Petrillo, who probably has a mold-free house and could literally run circles around Rowling.