JK Rowling tried to seduce transgender Paralympic sprinter Valentina Petrillo, but failed

If you thought JK Rowling was done attacking transgender athletes now that the Paris Olympics are over, you’d be wrong. After taking a two-week hiatus from social media, the once-beloved children’s author got back to work this week, speaking at length about Valentina Petrillo, a 51-year-old Italian Paralympic sprinter who happens to be transgender.

Rowling posted a grainy photo of Petrillo on X and wrote: “Why all the rage about the inspiring Petrillo? The cheating community has never been more visible! Outspoken cheaters like Petrillo prove that the era of cheater shaming is over. What a role model! I propose we give Lance Armstrong his medals back and move on. #Cheats #NoShame.”

Elsewhere, several of Rowling’s gender-critical allies have also denounced Petrillo’s participation in the Games as “unfair” and called on Paralympic officials to ban transgender women from the Games.

“This ‘inclusive’ policy, in the name of progress, is actually regressive because it excludes women because of BIOLOGY!” tennis legend Martina Navratilova wrote on X. Navratilova, who has long been vocal about her preference for excluding transgender women from womanhood in general, continued: “You will not find women who identify as men taking the place of men because of BIOLOGY. Men and women are different. Period.”

Sharron Davies, a former Olympic swimmer who has become a darling of anti-trans media, has called on sporting authorities to “do what everyone can see as right rather than what is easy” and ban trans athletes.

But Petrillo failed to qualify for the T12 400-meter final after finishing third in her semifinal. In that race, the transgender runner posted a personal best time of 57.58 seconds, finishing behind Iran’s Hajar Safarzadeh Ghahderijani by a second and a half. In sprint events, that’s an eternity.

Petrillo began her medical transition in 2019 after a long career in which she won national para-athletics titles as a male athlete. Her times are now significantly slower than before, suggesting the hormonal change has had a real impact on her athletic abilities.

Early in the Games, Ukrainian runner Oksana Boturchuk was one of Petrillo’s cisgender competitors who criticized Petrillo’s participation. “I find it unfair, in my opinion,” Boturchuk told BBC Sport. Boturchuk said she was not against transgender people in general, “but in this situation, I don’t understand and I don’t support it.” Unlike Petrillo, Boturchuk made it to the final, finishing well ahead of the transgender runner who she felt had an unfair advantage.

Petrillo’s failure to dominate — she failed to qualify for the final race of the T12 200 meters on Friday — is another example of a transgender athlete who “miraculously” failed to win an elite sporting event that figures like Rowling and Navratilova have called unfair. In 2016, transgender discus thrower Ingrid van Kranen finished ninth at the Paralympics, and no one even noticed her participation — because conservatives here and elsewhere had not yet chosen transgender athletes as a political target.

Without the political fervor fueled by conservatives and figures like Rowling, Petrillo’s participation would likely have gone unnoticed, much like that of weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who failed to complete a single lift and finished last in her weight class at the 2021 Tokyo Games.

We hear all the time that transgender athletes have a natural advantage in sports, and yet we have yet to see a transgender athlete win an elite international title in any sport. No, Lia Thomas doesn’t count. While Thomas did win an NCAA title, it was at the amateur college level, not the elite level, and her times weren’t necessarily comparable to those of the world’s best swimmers.

It seems that gender-critical activists have noticed that the fact that transgender athletes are losing major competitions contradicts their argument that they have an unfair advantage. So these activists have recently stopped claiming that transgender women will dominate all sports and have instead accused transgender women of “taking a spot” from a more deserving cisgender woman.

I’m a little more sympathetic to this argument, and it’s a clever play on emotions, especially for parents who may hope their daughters can one day get an athletic scholarship (and avoid crippling school debt). But this line of thinking also results in the complete exclusion of transgender athletes from all sports.

There has yet to be a trans athlete whose performance has improved, or even stayed the same, after starting estrogen. Their performance has generally deteriorated, consistent with the general difference in performance between cis men and cis women in many athletic measures. There is no way to achieve fairness for trans athletes by forcing them to compete against cis men. Biology or not, this type of exclusionary policy would amount to a de facto ban on transgender athletes altogether.

As we grapple with these new ideas about gender and equity, we must value trans humanity as much as cisgender people. The proof is in the pudding: trans women do not dominate women’s sports and never will. Petrillo’s relatively poor performance on the track should put Rowling’s anger to rest, but of course Rowling is past the point of no return. She will seethe with rage against trans people for the rest of her life, because she is intolerant.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com