On Aug. 7, 2024, something unprecedented happened on the internet: J.K. Rowling actually shut up for once. The author has not posted anything on X (formerly Twitter) for over two weeks. Rowling has provided no explanation for her absence. But on August 13, the world learned that Rowling—along with Elon Musk and several other high-profile figures—had been named in a criminal complaint filed by Olympic boxer Imane Khelif with the Paris Prosecutor’s Office National Center for the Fight Against Online Hatred.
For those unfamiliar: Khelif, who won the gold medal for her weight class at this year’s Olympics, is a cis woman who has been subject to unconfirmed reports that she has XY chromosomes. Anti-trans figures seized on Khelif as the best proxy for their “trans women in sports” obsession, and Rowling was one of the loudest voices, insistently calling Khelif “a man” and “male” on X, and accusing her of cheating by entering the competition. At one point, she posted a picture of Khelif standing next to defeated opponent Angela Carini, calling Khelif’s expression “the smirk of a male who’s [sic] knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head.”
@xtramagazine Algerian boxer Imane Khelif has been the subject of a torrent of online misinformation after her match at the #olympics with Italian Angela Carini. Many online accounts are claiming Khelif is actually a trans woman or a man. But that’s false, and pushing anti-trans narratives like this only hurts all athletes, no matter their gender 🏳️⚧️🥊 #lgbtqnews #boxing #paris2024 #womeninsports #foryoupage ♬ original sound – Xtra Magazine
Predictably, Khelif was inundated with harassment, and thus, the criminal complaint was filed. There has been a lot of celebratory noise on social media about Khelif’s case—maybe she’ll end up owning the Harry Potter franchise! —and it’s true that the penalties are potentially steep. The French law Rowling stands accused of violating carries a penalty of up to two years in prison and a €30,000 fine, or three years in prison and a €45,000 fine if the victim is a minor. Those found guilty of violating the law are also banned from the service they used to harass the victim for up to one year. (Providers who fail to ban the harasser—meaning, presumably, Musk, although he also pitched in to join the bullying himself—can be ordered to pay a fine of €75,000.)
Many people feel justifiable relief and schadenfreude at the thought of Rowling facing any consequences at all for her transphobia. Here I—regretfully—have to burst your bubble. Many of the claims floating around online about Khelif’s case are overinflated, and it’s very unlikely that any one court case could stop an obsessive like Rowling.
For starters: the complaint is not for hate speech. It’s for cyberbullying. In France, that is a criminal offence—but criminal penalties typically go only to the users who send the most direct and egregious threats.
The most famous test of the law was probably the 2020 “Mila Affair,” in which a white teenage lesbian named Mila said on her Instagram Stories that she found Black women unattractive and that “Islam was trash.” (She claimed she was provoked by a Muslim blogger who had called her a “dirty lesbian.”) Mila’s lawyer said she received over “100,000 hate messages.” She was removed from school and placed under police protection. Out of potentially thousands of defendants, 11 people were convicted of cyberbullying; they were given suspended sentences and some were ordered to pay a fine of €1,500, along with €1,000 for Mila’s legal fees. One additional defendant, a 23-year-old, was sentenced to three years in prison for sending death threats.
A few things can be deduced from this: First, that the law does not necessarily defend marginalized people against bigotry in all cases. In the Mila Affair, both Mila and her harassers made bigoted statements, but the law protected her because she bore the brunt of the abuse. Second, the consequences to harassers are not necessarily disastrous; neither Rowling nor Musk sent direct death threats (that we know of) which makes jail time unlikely—and neither one would be much inconvenienced by having to pay a few thousand euros in fines.
That said, French advocates have had some luck in using the law to protest hate speech. Earlier this year, for instance, several French groups filed a complaint against far-right figure Marion Maréchal-Le Pen after she called award-winning trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón “a man.” That particular complaint did not go anywhere, but Étienne Deshoulières of Mousse, one of the LGBTQ+ advocacy groups that filed the complaint, says that French courts are typically receptive to the argument that bigoted speech causes real harm. In France, unlike other countries, you do not need to prove that hate speech is directed at a particular person. “You can go to court when there’s a speech directed to the group of people, on the ground of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” he says, which means that it’s possible to pursue legal penalties “any time someone in France, like a public person or a politician has an homophobic or transphobic speech. So this, in a way, it’s easier in France than in other countries.”
However, Deshoulières estimates that 99 percent of these complaints are never investigated. The real utility of lawsuits, according to Deshoulières, is the way they draw attention to the defendants; once someone like Le Pen is convicted as an “enemy of the LGBTQ+ people,” he says, “hopefully LGBTQ+ people won’t vote for her party.”
So we are back to Rowling, who, not having made any direct death threats that we know of, is probably not going to see the inside of a French prison anytime soon. This is not to say that what Rowling did isn’t violent. It is, and it’s had real-life consequences for people with far less power than Imane Khelif. “Most trans women I know have had at least one or two transphobic JKR fan experiences in real life,” Aranock, a non-binary trans woman and YouTube creator, tells me over DM.
In January 2023, Aranock and her co-creator Jessie Gender released a video about Rowling’s transphobia. In it, Aranock describes being mobbed online by people with J.K. Rowling references in their names and user bios. She also talks about being followed through stores by people wearing Harry Potter merchandise. One woman was stopped by security because her intent to attack Aranock was just that clear.
Both Aranock and her co-writer had had run-ins with Rowling before—Rowling had picked a fight with Jessie Gender on X over her criticism of the Hogwarts Legacy video game—but after the video’s release, Aranock tells me, Rowling’s supporters “sent us death threats on every platform they could on a near daily basis for about eight months.”
This is what a figure with the fame of a J.K. Rowling can do: not just insult or harass people directly, but subject them to a climate of constant ambient online and offline hate. That has happened to an alarmingly large number of trans people, and even those who haven’t been directly targeted by Rowling know it could happen, and thus live in fear of her. (Researching this article, I spoke to someone who’d had to lock down her account simply because Rowling liked a post mocking her.)
There is no wall of containment. What happens online leaks out into the real world. Ask yourself: How often do you have a conversation with someone who uses a Harry Potter reference or metaphor? How safe would you be if every single one of those people had been told to hate you?
“This is what a figure with the fame of a J.K. Rowling can do: not just insult or harass people directly, but subject them to a climate of constant ambient online and offline hate.”
The way a ringleader like Rowling operates—building an atmosphere of suspicion and hate around a particular target, then standing back and letting their fans and followers do the dirty work—is dangerous precisely because the impact radius is so wide and the ringleaders’ hands remain so relatively clean. There really isn’t a criminal or civil statute on the books that can redress that kind of damage. Imane Khelif is not even the only person to try, in recent years—while writing this piece, trans broadcaster India Willoughby, who has reported Rowling to the U.K. police for harassment, told me that the police would not investigate Rowling, but did agree to record the harassment as an “NCHI” ora “non-crime hate incident”—sort of the Diet Coke of hate crime.
Complicating matters, Khelif—the one woman whose complaint against Rowling is going to court—is not even trans. In fact, her lack of transness is key to the case as she understands it. Khelif has stressed that she was “raised as a girl” in most interviews defending herself, and seems to consider it insulting to be mistaken for a trans person: “They don’t have the right to say I’m a transgender. This is a big shame for my family, for the honour of my family, for the honour of Algeria,” she said in an interview with Algerian TV channel El Bilad. Nabil Boudi, the human rights lawyer handling Khelif’s case, has called the crusade against her “misogynistic, racist and sexist.” He has not, so far, labelled it transphobic, which says something about the precedent being set: Is it wrong to harass someone for being trans? Or is it just insulting for a cis person to be called trans, because being trans is a bad thing?
For many trans people, the Khelif situation has become frustrating precisely because she is getting all the support they needed and did not receive: “Where was the media every time trans women, myself, my siblings, who have no power and very little support were harassed?” says Aranock. “For far too many people, the only reason they care about Imane is because she isn’t trans. If she were a trans athlete, they wouldn’t be defending her, they would be having endless debates about if she should compete at all.”
Again: there is copious schadenfreude to be had in the spectacle of Rowling being hauled into court to account for her bad tweets. Anything that can get her to log off for a few days is probably a good thing. Yet the realities remain grisly: trans people are at elevated risk of harassment, online and off, and whatever celebrity-on-celebrity violence may occur in the headlines is primarily useful as a way of drawing public attention to that problem. It will take more than one lawsuit, and more than one person, to make genuine change.
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