The gender army really does want to shut down this uppity woman.

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The gender benders are cock-a-hoop. Switch on social media and you’ll see swarms of bepenised lesbians and they/thems leaping for joy. For they have achieved one of their core aims. They have won a historic victory. They have finally brought about the glorious utopia that’s been the stuff of their wet dreams for years. Yes, reader, they have made a woman shut the fuck up.

It’s JK Rowling. Of course it is. Champagne corks are a’popping across trans-land because Queen TERF hasn’t tweeted for 15 days. Or 15 ‘blissful days’, as one especially thrilled Rowlingphobe puts it. The glee is wild. Perhaps Rowling has been hit by the ‘old Silencio spell’, they chortle. Folk haven’t been this happy to see a woman struck dumb since the mob watched those witches dangle in Salem.

Their theory is that Rowling fled X in response to Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s ‘cyberbullying’ lawsuit. Khelif caused a stink at the Paris Olympics by fighting in the women’s category – and snatching gold – despite previously failing gender eligibility tests. In the blunt words of the president of the International Boxing Association, Khelif’s a fella. Rowling, with her quaint belief that men should not punch women in the face, or anywhere, tweeted her disapproval, Khelif fired back with the lawsuit, and now Rowling’s done a runner. Or so the woke hope.

‘Finally, someone shut JK Rowling up. Thank you, Imane Khelif’, says Egyptian-American feminist Mona Eltahawy. I hate to mansplain, but if you’re cheering on a biological male for making a woman shut her trap, maybe you’re feministing wrong? A writer for them relishes ‘the sound of silence’ on X now that Rowling’s moaning has been shushed. If only there was a word to describe people who love it when uppity women are gagged.

Blue-hairs across social media are feverishly sharing news reports that suggest Rowling has gone into hiding. ‘JK Rowling falls silent as she could be prosecuted in Imane Khelif lawsuit’, says Newsweek. ‘JK Rowling has gone silent on X’ in a ‘departure from her usually outspoken social-media presence’, says the New York Post. Her haters can’t believe their luck. Finally her ‘screeching nonsense’ has come to a halt, says one. Yeah, don’t you just hate women’s screeching? So grating.

Woke hacks are giddily dancing on the grave of Rowling’s transphobic noise. ‘Are you ok babe?’, laughs a prick at Daily Dot. A headline at Pride magazine invites us to enjoy ‘20 RUTHLESS reactions to JK Rowling’s going silent… that have us HOWLING’. I’m old enough to remember when tragic blokes would have to gather in the corner of a dingy pub if they wanted to ‘howl’ with laughter over the ‘ruthless’ mockery of a silenced woman – now they do it online and call it ‘trans rights’.

Some seem to be getting a freaky kick from visions of Rowling cowering in a corner somewhere. Yer man at Daily Dot favourably quotes a Rowling loather who said, ‘She’s scared, she’s scrambling… good’. ‘Do you think she’s scared?’, asks Creepy.org of its 1.6million followers on X. Creepy – you said it, fellas. ‘JK Rowling is shitting herself!’, squeaks one follower. You sad bastards. Run out of torture porn to watch, have you?

Incredibly – or not, perhaps – much of the Rowling / Khelif story seems to come from an American outlet called BroBible. Even the Daily Beast cites BroBible as the source for its claims that Rowling has not only fled X but has also deleted ‘a trove of tweets’. Watch the woman scurry and bury incriminating evidence! I’m going to put my neck on the line and say that anything printed on a website called ‘BroBible’ should be taken with a pinch of salt. And I’d be right. Because it would appear that the tales of Rowling running away out of dainty dread of a boxer’s lawsuit are complete bollocks.

I’m sorry to be a party-pooper at the whooping of the witchfinders, but it seems there’s no truth to your giddy dreams of a woman you hate being forced into silence. First, Rowling has not deleted her Khelif tweets. They’re all there. Including the most ‘infamous’ one – they say infamous, I say brilliant – in which she posted a photo of Khelif patting Italian boxer Angela Carini on the back after Carini withdrew from their clash after just 46 seconds. ‘Could any picture sum up our men’s rights movement better?’, Rowling wondered.

As to their fetish for imagining that Rowling is ‘scared’, ‘scrambling’, ‘shitting herself’, that she’s been ‘destroyed’ by Khelif, that finally someone has forced her to shut up, it seems this is pure fantasy. According to those who know Rowling, she’s on holiday. ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead’, cry a million misogynists, when in truth the witch is on a sun lounger somewhere. It’s going to be so funny when she comes back, tweets, and all the creeps will have to go back to blubbing into their macchiatos. It’s you guys who should be shitting yourself because the devil isn’t defeated – she’s on vacation.

And yet the wrongness of their gloating over Rowling should not distract us from the disgustingness of it. The gender ideology’s mask hasn’t only slipped this past week, it’s been completely destroyed. We have just witnessed an explosion in sexist intolerance, a riot of woman-hate, a borderline medieval rush to bask in the silence of a hushed hysterical woman. If anyone ever again tries to tell you that the gender ideology is ‘progressive’, remind them that its adherents literally danced with joy in the mistaken belief that a man had terrified a woman into silence. ‘Trans rights’ is the veil misogyny wears in the 21st century and that’s the end of it.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy