Politics
J.K. Rowling went after trans Paralympian sprinter Valentina Petrillo — and failed
If you thought J.K. Rowling was done ranting about transgender athletes now that the Paris Olympic Games have long been over, you’d be wrong. After taking about two weeks off from social media, the once-beloved children’s author was back at it this week, going on at length about 51-year-old Valentina Petrillo, an Italian Paralympic sprinter who happens to be transgender.
Rowling’s gender critical allies also decried Petrillo’s participation in the Games as “unfair,” and called on Paralympic officials to ban trans women from the Games.
Rowling posted a grainy photo of Petrillo on X and wrote: “Why all the anger about the inspirational Petrillo? The cheat community has never had this kind of visibility! Out and proud cheats like Petrillo prove the era of cheat-shaming is over. What a role model! I say we give Lance Armstrong his medals back and move on. #Cheats #NoShame.”
Elsewhere, several of Rowling’s gender critical allies also decried Petrillo’s participation in the Games as “unfair,” and called on Paralympic officials to ban trans women from the Games.
“This ‘inclusive’ policy, in the name of being progressive, is actually regressive as the policy excludes women because BIOLOGY!” tennis legend Martina Navratilova wrote on X. Navratilova, who has long been vocal about her preference for excluding trans women from womanhood in general, continued, “You won’t find women who identify as men taking places of Males because BIOLOGY. Males and females are different. Period.”
Sharron Davies, a former Olympic swimmer turned anti-trans media darling, called on sport authorities to “do what everyone can see is right rather than what’s easy” and ban trans athletes.
But here’s the thing, Petrillo failed to qualify for the T12 400-meter final after she finished third in her semifinal heat. In that race, the trans runner recorded a personal best time of 57.58 seconds, finishing behind Iran’s Hajar Safarzadeh Ghahderijani by a full second and a half. In sprint events, that’s a lifetime.
Petrillo began her medical transition in 2019 after a long career winning Para athletic national titles as a male athlete. Her times now are significantly slower than they were before, which suggests that the hormone change had a real impact on her athletic ability.
As the Games began, Ukrainian runner Oksana Boturchuk was one of several of Petrillo’s cisgender female competitors critical of Petrillo’s participation. “I find this not fair, in my opinion,” Boturchuk told BBC Sport. Boturchuk said she is not against transgender people in general, “but in this situation I do not understand and don’t support it.” Unlike Petrillo, Boturchuk made the final, finishing well ahead of the trans runner she implied had an unfair advantage.
Petrillo’s failure to dominate —”https://www.paralympic.org/en/paris-2024-paralympics/results/para-athletics/women-s-200m—t12/sfnl——–” target=”_blank”>she came short of making the final race in the T12 200-meter dash Friday — is yet another example of a trans athlete “miraculously” not winning an elite sporting competition that people such as Rowling and Navratilova claimed would be unfair. In 2016, trans discus thrower Ingrid van Kranen finished ninth at the Paralympics, and no one even noticed her participation — because conservatives here and abroad hadn’t yet chosen trans athletes as a political target.
Without the political fervor stoked by conservatives and the likes of Rowling, Petrillo’s participation would probably have gone unnoticed as well. So would have 2021 Olympic weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who failed to record a single lift and finished last in her division at the Tokyo Games.
We keep hearing about how trans athletes have a natural advantage in sports, and yet we’ve yet to see a trans athlete win an elite international title in any sport — no, Lia Thomas does not count for this. While Thomas did win an NCAA title, it was at the amateur collegiate, not elite, level, and her times were not necessarily comparable with the best swimmers in the world.
Petrillo’s failure to dominate is yet another example of a trans athlete “miraculously” not winning an elite sporting competition that people such as Rowling and Navratilova claimed would be unfair.
It seems as if gender critical activists have noticed that trans athletes losing big competitions contradicts their argument that they have an unfair advantage. So those activists have recently shifted away from claiming that trans women would dominate all sports and instead accused trans women of “taking away a spot” from a more deserving cis woman.
I’m a little more sympathetic to this argument, and it’s a clever play on emotions, especially for parents who may be hoping their daughters can one day get an athletic scholarship (and avoid crippling educational debt). But this line of thinking also results in the total exclusion of trans women athletes from all sports.
There hasn’t been a trans athlete yet whose performance improved, or even remained the same, after starting estrogen. Those performances typically get worse consistent with the general difference between cis men’s and cis women’s performances in many athletic measurements. There is no way to get fairness for trans athletes by forcing them to compete against cis men. Biology or not, that type of exclusionary policy would be a de facto ban on trans women athletes completely.
As we wrestle with these new ideas of sex and fairness, we must value trans humanity equally with cis people. The proof is in the pudding: Trans women are not dominating women’s sports and never will. Petrillo’s relatively poor performance on the track should put an end to Rowling’s rage, but of course Rowling is past the point of no return. She will seethe and rage about trans people for the rest of her life, because she is a bigot.
Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. She was the first openly transgender Capitol Hill reporter in U.S. history.
The U.S. delegation in Seattle includes HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, according to a FIFA official, along with White House FIFA World Cup Task Force czar Andrew Giuliani. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy were among those who attended the U.S.’ first match, against Paraguay.
Britain wouldn’t have its latest likely next prime minister if not for soccer.
Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor elected to the U.K. Parliament in a closely-watched by-election on Thursday, is expected to oust Prime Minister Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader in a matter of weeks. The sport propelled his political rise.
The pivotal moment of Burnham’s long political career came in 2009, when he was the Cabinet minister for culture, media and sport under then-PM Gordon Brown. Burnham was asked to return to his native Liverpool for a memorial commemorating the Hillsborough Disaster.
The 1989 event remains Britain’s worst-ever sporting catastrophe. Almost 100 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at a cup game in South Yorkshire, following a series of disastrous crowd control errors by police chiefs and stadium staff.
The horror of the day was compounded in the immediate aftermath, when police sought to cover up their mistakes by falsely blaming drunken Liverpool fans for the crush. The lies were amplified by a willing national media and allowed to linger for years; the city grieved and demanded justice. Bereaved families campaigned for years. But no one listened, and no one was held accountable.
Born in Liverpool and steeped in soccer culture, Burnham knew all this as he headed to the memorial at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium 20 years later. He was well aware how a young government envoy would be greeted by the crowd, still raging at the injustice two decades on. But to his credit, he went anyway — and was met with a wall of heckles, chants and protest songs from the part of Anfield, known as the Kop, where the team’s loudest supporters congregate. (The video of his halting, shattered-looking appearance is well worth watching.)
Burnham — until then a typical career politician in Westminster — has described the day as a seminal moment. He returned to Cabinet and demanded a new inquiry into Hillsborough. Three years later its report revealed every claim made by the justice campaigners — of police failures and a scandalous cover-up — had been true. The government was forced to apologize.
Burnham was widely praised for his role in exposing the truth about Hillsborough. But more significant in his ultimate rise to power would be the shift in his own psyche. “I always say that I took my first steps out of Westminster on 15 April 2009 when I walked out to face the Kop,” he wrote in his memoir, “Head North,” penned with close friend (and Hillsborough survivor) Steve Rotheram. “Things were never the same after that day.”
Burnham says his experiences dealing with the Hillsborough justice campaign shaped his view of the Westminster political machine, as an arrogant and failing institution which ignores English regions outside of London. Eight years later he would quit Westminster altogether to become a mayor in his native northwest.
Fast-forward to 2026, and Burnham finds himself in an enviable position — an experienced politician able to cast himself as a political outsider ready to take on the Westminster elites. (While Starmer supports the North London-based champions Arsenal, Burnham is a season ticket holder at his beloved Everton F.C., and is regularly photographed jogging in a vintage Everton jersey.) It’s a familiar narrative which chimes with disgruntled voters everywhere.
Read Jack’s Blue Light News Magazine profile of Andy Burnham here and Blue Light News’s full coverage of the Makerfield by-election and its unfolding fallout here.
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