“Final Week Tonight” host John Oliver ignited a fiery rebuke from writer J. Okay. Rowling after the liberal comic doubled down on defending transgender athletes in feminine sports activities on his Sunday night time HBO present.
“I perceive why males like Oliver, who’ve persistently mocked anti-science folks on the appropriate, bought out initially,” Rowling posted to X, together with a clip from the present.
“They didn’t wish to blow up their careers. Taking trendy anti-women’s rights positions was the price of doing enterprise. However it’s time to learn the f—ing room,” she wrote.
The famed “Harry Potter” writer is without doubt one of the most well-known critics of the transgender motion on the left. She has confronted immense backlash for her views on gender and activism to guard girls’s areas and sports activities.
Rowling fired again at John Oliver after he defended transgender athletes in girls’s sports activities once more on “Final Week Tonight.” (Picture by Gilbert Flores/Selection by way of Getty Photographs)
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Oliver spent over 40 minutes of the present analyzing the hot-button situation, beginning with bashing the Republicans’ “obsession” with banning transgender athletes.
Early on within the section, Oliver referenced how Rowling got here after him final November, calling him, “an undoubtedly clever one who spouts absolute bulls—.”
“It feels a bit bizarre to catch that a lot warmth from the creator of ‘Harry Potter,’ particularly after I clearly seem like what would have occurred to him in the event that they left him in that cabinet for the remainder of his life,” Oliver joked on Sunday.
The comic mentioned he stood by his previous feedback which angered Rowling when he mentioned, “There are vanishingly few trans women competing in excessive faculties anyplace … Trans youngsters, like all youngsters, fluctuate when it comes to athletic capacity, and there’s no proof they pose any risk to security or equity.”
J. Okay. Rowling arrives for the Guinness Six Nations match on the Scottish Gasoline Murrayfield Stadium, Edinburgh. Image date: Saturday February 24, 2024. (Andrew Milligan/PA Photographs by way of Getty Photographs)
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On the Sunday present, Oliver tackled totally different arguments questioning the protection and equity of trans athletes in feminine sports activities, arguing the difficulty wasn’t as black and white as the appropriate portrayed it to be.
He referred to as it “absurd” to imagine that male athletes transition to be able to achieve a aggressive benefit over organic females.
In response to Oliver, his present spoke to scientists “on all sides of the difficulty” who agreed that there at the moment shouldn’t be sufficient scientific analysis testing the influence that medical gender transition has on athletic efficiency.
Whether or not transgender athletes have any bodily benefit over feminine athletes depends on the precise sport or occasion, he argued.
Girls’s fencer Stephanie Turner kneels in protest in entrance of transgender athlete Redmond Sullivan. (Courtesy of ICONS)
“Normally, there’s lots of overlap within the common efficiency ranges of women and men. Principally, it isn’t the case that any man goes to be stronger or extra athletic than each lady, which is usually what will get implied right here,” he argued.
Oliver concluded the prolonged section by conceding the difficulty was “meaningfully sophisticated” however that there ought to be insurance policies that “steadiness competitors and inclusion” as a substitute of “blanket bans” on the elementary college degree.
He additionally urged those that disagree with him to acknowledge there’s a religious-based anti-transgender ingredient fueling the talk.
“The one factor I ask of you is to acknowledge the ugliness of how this situation will get mentioned and the way it will get cynically utilized by some to advance the eradication of trans folks typically to get again to what they know from scripture, that trans persons are a fantasy,” he mentioned mockingly.
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A consultant for Warner Bros. Discovery didn’t instantly return Fox Information Digital’s request for remark.
