Comedian John Oliver has recently become the target of J.K. Rowling on social media after Oliver defended trans athlete’s participation in women’s sports on his show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

On Sunday, April 6, Oliver spoke at length on the issue of transgender people participating in sports, specifically about trans women in women’s sports. In the 42-minute segment, Oliver criticized the right for attempting to exclude transgender people from sports.

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Oliver has previously defended the LGBTQ+ community and trans rights on his HBO show. Rowling, who is also in a creative partnership with HBO through Warner Bros. Discovery, had, in Oliver’s words, “issued the single longest tweet I’ve ever seen in my life” after the airing of Last Week Tonight’s post-election episode. 

The tweet he was referring to was directed at Oliver, who in that episode stood up for trans rights in athletics as well as in other areas.

Rowling claimed in her tweet that Oliver was “happy to watch females suffer injury, humiliation and the loss of sporting opportunities to bolster an elitist post-modern ideology.”

Oliver joked about and referenced this in his recent episode.

“It feels a bit weird to catch that much heat from the creator of Harry Potter, especially when I clearly look like what would have happened if they had just left him in that cupboard for the rest of his life,” he joked.

The tweet would be referenced again in this episode, as Oliver dove deep into the falseness of a popular statistic the right bandies about: that 900 cis women had lost medals in sporting events to transgender athletes.

In what Oliver jokingly calls “J.K. Rowling’s latest tome,” Oliver highlights a passage she wrote reading, “According to the UN, female athletes have lost nearly 900 medals to trans-identified men competing against them in women’s sporting categories.”

Oliver debunked this by investigating the report she referenced and pointing out that it wasn’t even a UN report and that the number itself came from the website SheWon.org, an anti-trans website where anyone can submit an example of a trans woman beating a cisgender woman in any sporting competition anywhere in the world, and where there are multiple instances of the same incident being counted multiple times.

Oliver remarked that these “included competitions… down to the level of a fun run in Topeka, Kansas, and an Irish dance competition, as well as activities where gender confers no advantage, like poker.”

After the episode aired, Rowling responded on Twitter, quote-tweeting a clip from the episode with the caption, “I understand why men like Oliver, who’ve consistently mocked anti-science people on the right, sold out initially. They didn’t want to blow up their careers. Taking fashionable anti-women’s rights positions was the cost of doing business. But it’s time to read the f**king room.”

In another tweet, she added: “They’re still regurgitating Twitter TRA [trans rights activist] talking points from 2020. I can’t imagine anyone being so far up their own backside they haven’t noticed that this nonsensical crap is facing a massive grassroots backlash, that it loses elections and that girls and women are being harmed.”

It is worth noting that the episode reuploaded to Last Week Tonight’s YouTube channel is their most disliked, getting 147k dislikes to its 86k likes as of publication. Comparing this to an episode on transgender issues from two years ago with 152k likes and 26k dislikes, it further illustrates the change in the political landscape environment over this time period.

Something Oliver touched on in Sunday’s episode is that the Republican Party spent over $116 million last year on TV ads about trans athletes.

“The relentless focus on this over the years has had a meaningful impact, with one poll showing that 6 in 10 adults say trans girls and women should not be allowed to compete in girls and women’s sports including high school and youth levels.”

If this story affected you, just know you are not alone. The Trans Lifeline Hotline offers support to trans/nonbinary people struggling with mental health from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. PST Monday – Friday. Call (877) 565-8860 to be connected to a trans/nonbinary peer operator and receive full anonymity and confidentiality.

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