TWIBS: JK Rowling Goes Radio Silent
For the last few weeks, the verified queen of posting through it herself, JK Rowling, has been mysteriously silent on social media.
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
It seems the queen of posting… has been silenced.
That’s right, JK Rowling, very recently an alarmingly prolific Twitter (formerly known as X) user whose greatest joy in life seemed to be hopping online to post about how much she hates the nasty wicked transgenders, has stopped posting. They said it would never happen! They said it couldn’t be done! They said I was off my rocker for even hoping it might come to pass! But it appears, for some presumably brief period of time, ding dong, the witch is dead.
It must be said: We cannot know exactly why Rowling has ceased her incessant digital yammering. But we can certainly point out that, since she was named in a criminal complaint by Olympic boxer and gold medalist Imane Khelief, Rowling has not twote a single tweet. What’s more, according to statistics published by Social Blade, she appears to be losing tweets at a rather significant rate! Assuming the website’s stats are correct, Rowling is down 34 tweets since August 11th. It’s unclear whether or not the reviled Harry Potter hack author and partial Holocaust denier is deleting her tweets, but it sure would be funny if she was!
It is worth mentioning that, as of the writing of this article, Rowling has not deleted her most vicious tweet about Imane Khelif, in which she described Khelif as “a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.” As we’ve mentioned before, Khelif’s opponent in the fight Rowling waxed poetically about, Italian boxer Angela Carini, almost immediately recanted any statements she may have made disparaging Khelief. And just in case you’re only now tuning in to this despicable international drama, the only “proof” we have of Khelif supposedly being trans or intersex is the word of an organization ousted for lying and cheating.
Which is to say, there is no proof at all.
Rowling is no stranger to embarrassing behavior, of course. She has, in the past, publicly supported a transphobe who appears to collaborate with actual Nazis, cited a known anti-trans propagandist/pseudoscience promoting organization when suggesting she knows how to “cure” trans kids (who are, in fact, not afflicted creatures in need of a cure, thank you very much), and found herself pranked by somebody pretending to be the president of Ukraine.
It’s curious, however, that she would go dark after realizing there might be consequences for her actions. If you’ll recall, the very first time I wrote about JK Rowling for Assigned, in October of last year (I was so young, and full of hope!) I mentioned that Rowling had just days before expressed a strong desire to be imprisoned for her transphobic nonsense. “I’ll happily do two years [in prison] if the alternative is compelled speech and forced denial of the reality and importance of sex,” Rowling insisted. “Bring on the court case, I say. It’ll be more fun than I’ve ever had on a red carpet.”
Well, here we are, Jo! We’re staring down the barrel of a French lawsuit over your horrendous and all consuming need to talk shit about trans people, which has led you to flatly accuse a cisgender woman of being a man just because she doesn’t quite fit into your white European standards of femininity. Your dream might just come true.
So… why the radio silence?
Ironically, Rowling tweeted again for the first time in over two weeks roughly two hours after publication.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
