"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.”

  • @[email protected]
    1•4 months ago

    but there are other very successful women who have not been treated that way

    What I am actually saying is that the vast majority of successful women athletes didn’t suffer from this at this time at all. If this argument works only for Imane Khelif (not even the Taiwanese boxer, who has been mostly ignored), out of the hundreds of women who just won medals, maybe it is not an argument that can be generalized to “women of success”, and other causes have to be searched.

    This to me is basic common sense: if a thesis works only on a handful of examples and there are hundreds of counter examples, maybe the thesis is wrong. A tendency would require also more examples.

    • @iAvicenna
      2•4 months ago

      So are you claiming that there is no historical bias towards downplaying women’s successes in general or that in history there was but now as a whole Earth has progressed so far that we have left all those behind? Or is it just that it doesn’t happen in sports but happens in other areas? Or women have been downplayed but never because of success but always for other reasons?

      This to me is basic common sense: if a thesis works only on a handful of examples

      What you call a handful of examples is taking a magnifying glass and only looking at this particular event. If %10 of successful women have ever been downplayed because of their gender (due to unconscious biases for example) vs %1 of successful men, then this is still a handful of examples which nevertheless points to a significant bias.

      • @[email protected]
        1•4 months ago

        None of those, really. Just that downplaying successful women doesn’t happen as much in sport, and when it does it’s not by stating they are men.

        If %10 of successful women have ever been downplayed because of their gender (due to unconscious biases for example) vs %1 of successful men, then this is still a handful of examples which nevertheless points to a significant bias.

        1. Ok, but where is the data?
        2. Sure, it point to the fact that women’s success are downplayed. Not that when women are successful they are called men.