JK Rowling and the toxicity of social media pile-ons

Alex Kay-Jelski is the latest individual to realise that the internet never forgets and, when it suddenly remembers, the impact can be spectacular – and not in a good way. Kay-Jelski is the ‘soon-to-be Director of BBC Sport’ according to his account on X (formerly Twitter). But that’s as much as a casual observer will find out; the account is protected, presumably because of an all-to-familiar pile-on. The journalist has found himself in the centre of a Twitter storm over sex and gender, amplified in part by JK Rowling.

This particular story goes back five years when Kay-Jelski was sports editor at the Times. On 27 March 2019, he launched into the debate over transgender athletes in women’s sports. Kay-Jelski’s approach was rather unwise. He claimed that Martina Navratilova and Sharron Davies – two former sports stars who were courageously making the case that transwomen (like me) had no place in women’s sport – were not experts in the matter, before constructing the alternative case for transgender inclusion.