Opinion | 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 — 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.
