Imane Khelif’s criminal complaint against JK Rowling is an absurdist assault on reason.

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Imane Khelif has some balls. Not content with fighting in the women’s category at the Paris Olympics, despite previously failing a gender-eligibility test, now the Algerian boxer is going after women who raised concerns about that sporting abomination. Well, one woman in particular. The worst woman. The woman feared as a witch by gender ideologues and their squeaking woke-bro allies. Yes, it’s JK Rowling. Khelif has named Rowling in a criminal complaint filed in France, accusing her of ‘acts of aggravated cyber harassment’. First Khelif takes down female boxers, now it seems it’s the turn of female critics of the sexist Olympics.

Khelif’s complaint was filed with the National Centre for the Fight Against Online Hatred at the Paris Prosecutor’s Office. It names Elon Musk, too. Rowling’s sinful act of ‘cyberbullying’ consisted of a tweet showing Khelif patting Italian boxer Angela Carini on the back after Carini withdrew from their fight just 46 seconds in, saying she’d never been walloped so hard and actually feared for her life. Rowling sharpened her pen. ‘The smirk of a male’, she said of Khelif, ‘who knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head’. Musk’s speechcrime had just one word. ‘Absolutely’, he said in a quote-tweet of US swimmer Riley Gaines who said of the Khelif-Carini clash: ‘Men don’t belong in women’s sports.’

Khelif’s case is a criminal one, meaning conviction could lead to two years in the slammer and a €30,000 fine. It is highly unlikely, bordering on impossible, that the world’s richest author and richest edgelord will find themselves in a squalid Paris cell for the blasphemy of saying ‘he’ about someone widely suspected of being a biological male. As the BBC notes, ‘French penal law doesn’t apply to acts committed outside of France against foreign nationals’. And yet Khelif’s case is still significant. It feels like a symbolic attack on those who dare to speak the truth about sex. It feels like an absurdist assault on reason that could have a horribly chilling effect on public discussion, especially in France.

Khelif’s inclusion in the women’s boxing category at Paris 2024 was controversial. Rightly so. This is a boxer who had failed genetic sex testing. Carried out by the International Boxing Association (IBA), the tests revealed, in the brusque words of IBA president Umar Kremlev, that Khelif is a man. The tests found, ‘conclusively’, that Khelif, and the Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting, ‘did not meet required necessary eligibility criteria’ and had ‘competitive advantages over other female competitors’. Khelif and Lin have ‘XY chromosomes’, said the IBA, which is science-speak for ‘they’re male’. And yet both were allowed to box women at the Paris Olympics. Khelif won gold in the women’s welterweight, Lin won gold in the women’s featherweight.

It makes perfect sense that women – actual women, with XX chromosomes – were fuming about this. No, Khelif and Lin are not ‘trans’. They’re not like those big fellas who wake up one day and say ‘I’m a lady!’ and then nab medals from women who’ve trained their whole lives for sporting glory. Rather, they were likely born with a disorder of sex development, meaning they may have had atypical genitalia and may have been raised as girls. And yet it seems very likely, judging from the IBA’s ‘conclusive’ tests, that they went through male puberty. And that rush of testosterone, with its lavish gifts of muscle mass and denser bones, means they have no place whatsoever in a women’s boxing ring. Rowling is right: to all intents and purposes, this was men hitting women, for sport.

It isn’t ‘cyberbullying’ to slam the inclusion of people with XY chromosomes in women’s sports. It isn’t ‘cyber-harassment’ to lament the ‘distress’ of a woman who’d just been ‘punched in the head’ by a suspected biological male, as Rowling did following the shameful Khelif-Carini fight. No, this is legitimate, heartfelt, truthful commentary, from women concerned for women’s rights. Khelif might not be ‘trans’, but this ill-advised criminal complaint borrows from the trans lobby’s tyrannical playbook. Just as feminism has pretty much been reimagined as ‘transphobia’, and women’s rights activists are breezily defamed as ‘TERFs’, now it seems criticism of men boxing women will be damned as ‘bullying’.

There’s hubris here. As someone who also went through male puberty, my advice to Khelif would be to avoid accusing other people of ‘bullying’ when you’ve just been publicly fighting women and winning their medals. Khelif’s cheerleaders in the cranky gender clique are even worse. These are the kind of people who turned a blind eye when Kellie Jay-Keen was rounded on by a mob of feral misogynists in New Zealand. And who shrugged when the male ex-con turned trans nutter Sarah Jane Baker told a crowd in London to punch TERFs ‘in the fucking face’. And who said ‘So what?’ when a sexist pig held up a placard saying ‘Decapitate TERFs’ at a pro-trans rally in Glasgow last year. And who said nothing when sports presenter Laura Woods received a storm of death threats – against both herself and her unborn child – merely for making a positive comment about a newspaper article that discussed the Khelif scandal. And yet now they bleat about bullying.

It’s so transparent. For these men’s-rights weirdos masquerading as progressives, when blokes in dresses insult and assault women, it’s ‘activism’, and when women push back, it’s ‘bullying’. A man exposing his cock in a women’s changing room is trans rights, a woman saying ‘Get the hell out of here’ is bigotry. Males invading women’s sports is ‘progress’, women standing up for women’s sports is ‘harassment’. That they cheered Khelif’s pummelling of female boxers and are now cheering Khelif’s criminal complaint against Rowling and others makes creepy sense – they love it when uppity women are slapped down, whether it’s physically or metaphorically. Whether it’s in the ring or in the courts. Whether it’s with a punch to the head or a gag to the mouth. Pipe down, bitches.

Khelif needs to back off. It is not right for you to box women, and it is not right for you to file a complaint against people who only said what they believe to be true. This case speaks to one of the most troubling trends of our time: the Orwellian rebranding of criticism as a crime. That it is even possible people will be punished for using their voices to defend women’s rights is a testament to how far down the rabbit hole of gender lunacy we have tumbled. Let’s ring the bell on this crap.