J.K. Rowling Waits Until ‘Last Week Tonight’ Goes on Hiatus to Start A Beef With John Oliver

Harry Potter author and anti-trans-rights activist J.K. Rowling is going after John Oliver for defending trans children who want to participate in youth sports — and it only took a Donald Trump victory and a scheduled break from Last Week Tonight for her to find the courage.

On November 10th, Oliver and his team devoted the entire Sunday night episode of Last Week Tonight to unpacking the results of the 2024 General Election and analyzing the decisions and strategies that led to America choosing Trump and the Republican Party to lead us through the next four years. As anyone who watched TV even once during the second half of 2024 can attest, a key talking point on which Trump and his campaign hammered Vice President Kamala Harris in their attack ads was her support for transgender youth having the opportunity to participate in amateur athletics, an issue that’s become more important to half the country than any junior high girl’s lacrosse game has any right to be.

During his dissection of election day messaging, Oliver pushed back on the GOP’s elevation of trans athletes to national security threat #1, stating that there are “vanishingly few trans girls” participating in youth sports and arguing that there is “no evidence they pose any threat to safety or fairness.”

Over a week later, the world’s leading anti-trans author finally formulated her rebuttal, just hours after Oliver and Last Week Tonight concluded their 11th season and went into hiatus until 2025. If Rowling is so concerned about fair competition, then why would she pick a sparring partner who won’t get the chance to punch back for months?

To be clear, Oliver’s claim that the supposed threat transgender women pose to cisgendered competitors is based on the obvious empirical evidence that cisgendered women continue to dominate every major women’s athletic league and tournament in the world, up to and including in the Olympics, where Rowling was instrumental in orchestrating a smear campaign against gold medalist Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. Despite being born biologically female and coming from a country where gender transitions are illegal, this past summer, Khelif became the subject of a QAnon-style conspiracy wherein demagogues like Rowling and Elon Musk accused Khelif of being transgender and sparked harassment campaigns against her.

Additionally, studies such as this one from the National Institute of Health further corroborate Oliver’s claims, stating that, when it comes to sports, “There does not seem to be any reason to expect advantage for transgender people prior to puberty of or for transgender people whose gender-affirming treatment begins at the onset of puberty. To date, the only established driver of athletic advantage in men over women is testosterone. Further, the existing literature suggests that treatment to lower testosterone may be sufficient to erase that advantage in at least some athletic activities.”

Hopefully, we’ll hear more on these points from Oliver and Last Week Tonight when they return sometime next year, but, by then, Rowling’s lengthy assault on Oliver’s character will have spread across the the internet and closed countless minds. Curiously, this is far from the first time that Oliver has defended the transgender community against baseless, hateful rhetoric, the spreading of which Rowling has devoted the latter half of her career. This is, however, the first time Oliver’s made these points this close to a season finale.

We don’t know for sure when Last Week Tonight will return for Season 12, but I desperately hope that, when it does come back, it overlaps with the schedule for the upcoming Harry Potter series and that they both run on Sundays. 

Imagine the haymakers Oliver will land when he’s his opponent’s lead-in.