On April Fool’s Day, the Scottish government’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act 2021 came into effect after years of pushback from religious leaders, legal scholars, and politicians. The law removed Scotland’s old blasphemy laws and instead enshrined a new speech regime—including a ban on “stirring up hate” against anyone based on a range of characteristics, including “transgender identity.” The law was deliberately vague for maximum chilling effect; trans activists were certain that it banned “misgendering” and other objections to their ideology, which they define as “hate.”
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling promptly volunteered to be the canary in the coal mine, posting a string of tweets sarcastically profiling various trans-identified male sexual predators as women and ending her thread with a challenge to Scottish authorities:
Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.
In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls. The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women’s and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.
For several years now, Scottish women have been pressured by their government and members of the police force to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, repudiate biological facts and embrace a neo-religious concept of gender that is unprovable and untestable. The re-definition of ‘woman’ to include every man who declares himself one has already had serious consequences for women’s and girls’ rights and safety in Scotland, with the strongest impact felt, as ever, by the most vulnerable, including female prisoners and rape survivors.
It is impossible to accurately describe or tackle the reality of violence and sexual violence committed against women and girls, or address the current assault on women’s and girls’ rights, unless we are allowed to call a man a man. Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.
I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment. If you agree with the views set out in this tweet, please retweet it.
She ended with a challenge: #ArrestMe. It was retweeted over 35,000 times. The Scottish government caved almost immediately. The police affirmed that complaints against Rowling had been filed, but that her posts were not a violation of the law. Rowling responded on X: “I hope every woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of biological sex will be reassured by this announcement, and I trust that all women—irrespective of profile or financial means—will be treated equally under the law. If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both at once.”
In a single and brilliant strategic move, J.K. Rowling neutered Scotland’s new blasphemy law and nullified the transgender movement’s victory. She leveraged her fame, her cultural power, and her wealth against a totalitarian speech regime on behalf of every dissident in Scotland, and she won. The authorities have become used to squelching the inconvenient voices of ordinary people who do not have the money or the name recognition to fight back. They may still try, but they won’t get away with it. Rowling has single-handedly defanged their hate speech law and their ability to persecute dissidents quietly.
The transgender movement—journalist Jennifer Bilek, in her exposés of the billionaire funders, questions whether it even constitutes a “movement”—has been imposed from the top down, with the complicity, collaboration, or cooperation of the elite class. This has been true for many aspects of the Sexual Revolution, including the redefinition of marriage (Darel Paul details this in his 2019 book From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage from Baylor University Press). But it is also true that a handful of extremely wealthy and powerful elites have spearheaded the backlash. J.K. Rowling is one of them—but it is no accident that her ability to reach a massive audience uncensored is thanks to another billionaire—Elon Musk.
In 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter, which he promptly renamed “X,” for $44 billion and announced that he would be overhauling the digital public square to ensure maximum freedom of speech. Prior to Musk’s takeover, “misgendering” or “deadnaming” on the platform was an offence that could get one permanently banned. In short, telling the truth about transgenderism on Twitter got you removed from Twitter and evicted from the debate. Musk changed that, and restored many accounts that had been banned for contradicting transgender claims. J.K. Rowling’s courageous stand against Scotland’s hate crime law was made possible by Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Without Musk’s commitment to free speech, Rowling would have been banned, too.
As the implosion of the transgender medical industry begins, I suspect we will see many rats fleeing the sinking ship. Rowling has already referenced this herself. Earlier this year, a poster mused that hopefully, former Harry Potter actors Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson would apologize to Rowling for condemning her defence of women’s rights, “safe in the knowledge” that Rowling would forgive them. “Not safe, I’m afraid,” Rowling replied. “Celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single-sex spaces.”
But there were a few elites willing to use their names and their platforms to oppose the transgender movement when it took courage to do so. In addition to Rowling and Musk (who has stated publicly that he agrees with her positions on the transgender issue), there is also Joe Rogan, who came out early against the transgender phenomenon as female athletes began to get hurt competing against trans-identified males. Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, is worth well over $200 million, and says precisely what he thinks. Like Rowling and Musk, he isn’t socially conservative on most issues—not by a long shot. But he also refuses to be cowed by those who tell him what to say and what to think.
That is why, on any given day, you’ll likely find a hit piece in some establishment publication targeting one of these dissident elites. They are elites against the elites, and their courage shines a harsh light on the complicity of the rest of their class. When the reckoning arrives for those who backed, pushed, and celebrated the greatest medical scandal since eugenics, many will have plenty of reason to regret their cowardice. A few, however, will not.
