"Harry Potter" author Rowling has been absent from social media for several days, after erroneously calling female Olympic boxer Khelif a "man."

Author J.K. Rowling has fallen silent on her usually busy X (formerly Twitter) feed, after Olympic gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif filed a legal complaint in France for alleged cyber harassment over statements regarding her gender.

On August 9, lawyers for Khelif filed a lawsuit with a special unit of the public prosecutor’s office in Paris, stemming from false statements that spread online about her gender after the Algerian boxer defeated Italy’s Angela Carini in her first fight of the 2024 Olympic Games. Carini pulled out 46 seconds into the bout and told reporters afterwards that she had “never felt a punch like this.”

  • Lemminary
    11•25 days ago

    Don’t shame, but educate. There’s no need to be rude over this.

    • @[email protected]English
      -6•25 days ago

      Sure there is. That mouth breather is refusing to use a woman’s feminine pronouns over an unsubstantiated rumour about a minor medical abnormality. They’re being ten times as rude as I am.

      • Lemminary
        5•25 days ago

        refusing to use a woman’s feminine pronouns

        Where?

          • @[email protected]
            4•24 days ago

            I’m sorry but no. Using gender-neutral language does not describe gender; using ‘they’ isn’t to misgender, it just leaves the gender unspecified.

            You can correctly use ‘they’ for anyone. If they’d said ‘he’, now that would’ve been different…

            (Edit: typo)

            • Lemminary
              2•25 days ago

              Yeah, it’s so minor. I think that commenter is only looking for a reason to be upset on behalf of someone else and use that as an excuse to blow up.

            • @[email protected]English
              -4•25 days ago

              I didn’t say they were misgendering her, I said they refused to use her preferred pronouns. Surely you can agree with the factual accuracy of that statement.

              • @[email protected]
                2•25 days ago

                yea, nah.

                Edit: Using a word is not the same as refusing to use another word in its place.

                • @[email protected]English
                  -2•25 days ago

                  I am a woman, like any other woman. I was born a woman. I have lived as a woman. I compete as a woman. There is no doubt about that.

                  Imane is a Muslim from a country where being trans is illegal. I think she’s said enough words to the effect of preferring she/her despite the language barrier. If you expect her to be familiar enough with English to describe her preferences with regard to the specific grammatical rules of it, I find your demand xenophobic and racist. Her preferences can easily be inferred from the translations of what she says in her own language, in the context of her own country’s and religion’s social norms.

                  • @[email protected]
                    2•25 days ago

                    again, gender-neutral wording like they/them don’t say anything about gender or her own identity. ‘They’ does not refer to a third gender. I’m not demanding anything from her. You’re the one who brought up using the correct pronouns. So I expect you to be familiar with English grammar.

                    I think your language-policing is ridiculous. You can’t expect someone unfamiliar with a situation to be up-to-date with how to affirm someone’s gender correctly. Gender-neutral language functions as a safe fall-back in such situations. You can rightfully expect people to not misgender people. You cannot be rightfully offended at people using gender-neutral language. The only person I’m making demands of currently is you, because you’re making this discussion unnecessarily hostile.