‘Your lawyers will be very busy in the months to come’: J. K. Rowling returns to X and promptly fails to recognize the irony in her tweet

On Aug. 14, 2024, Beauty Code made an Instagram post featuring Olympic champion Imane Khelif, in which the boxer starts the video au naturel, boxing gloves and all before the camera gets covered up by her fist and we’re introduced to Khelif in full makeover mode, and she looks all sort of beautiful.

On August 16, someone named Colin Wright wrote a Substack post called “Imane Khelif Launches Hyper-Feminizing PR Campaign as a Distraction,” in which he suggests that if Khelif wants us all to believe that she’s a woman, then she should just make her DNA test public instead of launch a hyper-feminine PR campaign and apply thick layers of makeup. J. K. Rowling can be seen below piggybacking on Wright’s sentiment, breaking her long, refreshing silence on the platform.

Rowling’s tweet likely came about due to her lawyers urging her to stay off of X in light of the cyberbullying lawsuit that Khelif has filed against her and several other individuals (including Elon Musk) ever since the 2024 Paris Olympics controversy. Her lawyers, unfortunately, probably didn’t realize that it was Opposite Day when they met with Rowling and gave her that advice.

But let’s get to the actual matter at hand…

The unrelenting irony with which Wright refers to Khelif’s collaboration with Beauty Code as a distraction.

Why is this ironic? Because distractions are precisely the place from which people like Wright and Rowling operate. What either of these two have to say are not starting points for discussions surrounding organized athletic sex testing any more than they’re starting points for discussions on trans lives and rights. Theirs are nothing but boring, undignified, and incredibly shallow narratives that are entirely motivated by insecurity in the face of a reality that’s far more nebulous than they’re comfortable with accepting.

I’ve been compelled in the past to offer counter-arguments and research as a rebuttal to the cases of the Imane Khelif’s controversy and J. K. Rowling’s wider antics. But it’s since become exceedingly clear that by even acknowledging the terms that people like Rowling or Wright are setting, we become tied up in a distraction; a distraction that is antithetical to any nutritious or intellectual talking point rooted in the betterment of society and compassion for one another.

So I’m not going to get into the details of all this again. The whole ordeal has been so widely publicized that repeating it again here is just a waste of time in every sense of the word. Instead, here are a few names that I feel compelled to list: Ewa Kłobukowska, Maria José Martínez-Patiño, Francine Niyonsaba, Santhi Soundarajan, and Margaret Wambui.

Carry on.