Poilievre applauds J.K. Rowling's comment about Olympic ban of trans athletes from women's sports
Pierre Poilievre has applauded J.K. Rowling’s social media response to the International Olympic Committee’s new policy prohibiting transgender women from competing in women’s sports.
She posted a photo on X of boxer Imane Khelif and pointed to the controversy that erupted during the 2024 Paris Olympics over transgender women participating in women’s boxing. “Today’s ruling by the IOC means a welcome return to fair sport for women and girls, but I’ll never forget the scandal of Paris 2024, when people who consider themselves supremely virtuous and progressive publicly cheered on men punching women,” the renowned author wrote Thursday on X.
Poilievre’s comment was brief. “What she said,” the federal Conservative leader wrote in an X post, early Friday morning.
Khelif won gold in women’s 66kg boxing at the 2024 Paris Games. But in an earlier qualifying match, Italian boxer Angela Carini pulled out after two hard blows. “It could have been the match of a lifetime but I had to preserve my life as well in that moment,” Carini later told reporters. The win sparked controversy around fairness and safety in women’s sport.
What she said.???? https://t.co/TTMfNDrIKB
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) March 27, 2026
Later Thursday, Rowling responded to X user, Danny Webb . He questioned her position, saying it lacked complexity. She wrote: “There’s no complexity. Two men were permitted to box against women and robbed them of medals.”
There's no complexity. Two men were permitted to box against women and robbed them of medals.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) March 26, 2026
Rowling has been both lauded and criticized for her assertive stance on transgender women in women’s spaces. Back in 2020, the Harry Potter author released a 3,600 word essay expressing concern over transgender access to women-only spaces.
Khelif and another boxer who competed in Paris , Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, were disqualified from the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships by the International Boxing Association. The IBA said its testing indicated both athletes were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors. However, the International Olympic Committee subsequently stripped the IBA of its status as boxing’s governing body over allegations of corruption and took on oversight of boxing at the Paris games.
Women’s sports has been struggling with the issue of transgender, as well as athletes who are determined to be “DSD” (have differences in sex development). Khelif has been determined to be DSD . In such cases, chromosomes don’t fully correspond with the external genitals. For example, some people are born with one X and one Y chromosome in each cell, a condition known as 46, XY that results in much higher levels of testosterone compared to most female athletes.
Ahead of the Paris Games, the IOC urged media to avoid terms like “biological male,” “born male” or “born female” because those phrases “can be dehumanizing and inaccurate.”
However, in the 10-page document outlining its new policy, released this week, the IOC clarified that transgender women who have transitioned from male to female, and athletes who are DSD have the advantages of going through male puberty: “XY transgender athletes and athletes with XY-DSD typically have testes/testicles and testosterone levels in the male range.”
Further, the IOC stated: “The Olympic movement has a compelling interest in having a sex-based female category, because this is necessary to ensure fairness, safety and integrity in elite competition.”
The policy explains that for all Olympic sports, both individual and team, eligibility for any female category is limited to biological females.
Going forward, eligibility for female sports will be determined by a process called “SRY gene screening” to detect the absence or presence of the SRY gene.
“Based on scientific evidence, the IOC considers that the presence of the SRY gene is fixed throughout life and represents highly accurate evidence that an athlete has experienced male sex development.”
As a result, athletes with an SRY-positive screen “including XY transgender and androgen-sensitive XY-DSD athletes” will only be able to compete in “classifications for which they qualify … any male category, including a designated male slot within any mixed category.”
IOC President Kirsty Coventry said: “As a former athlete, I passionately believe in the rights of all Olympians to take part in fair competition. The policy that we have announced is based on science and has been led by medical experts.”
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