The past six months have been tough for the transgender movement; the past week has been terrible. President Donald Trump has signed a string of executive orders targeting gender ideology, affirming that the U.S. government recognizes only the male-female sex binary, protecting minors “from chemical and surgical mutilation,” and targeting LGBT indoctrination in schools. In Canada this week, two large-scale studies highlighted, once again, that evidence for the efficacy of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers is weak to the point of non-existence. This confirms the UK National Health Service’s Cass Review, published last April, which condemned the use of transgender “treatments” in minors.
A decade ago, the transgender movement was ascendant. Now, the pillars of their ideology are being broken across the West. The coalition of activists that has brought this about—from social conservatives to radical feminists, from Elon Musk to J.K. Rowling—is a truly strange one. There are many who deserve a portion of the credit for these victories, but perhaps no single figure has had the impact of J.K. Rowling, who on April 1st of last year, days before the Cass Review was published, single-handedly neutered Scotland’s hate speech bill.
The Scottish government’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act 2021, designed to replace the previous common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel, had finally come into effect after years of ineffectual pushback. It prohibits the vague offence of “stirring up hate” against anyone based on a range of characteristics, including “transgender identity.” The law was deliberately vague for maximum chilling effect, and trans activists triumphantly announced that “misgendering” and other public objections to their ideology were now illegal.
Rowling took aim and fired. First, she posted a string of tweets sarcastically referring to various trans-identified male sexual predators as “women.” She ended the thread by throwing down the gauntlet to the 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 …
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 folded.
On April 2nd, the police affirmed that complaints had been filed against Rowling, but that her “misgendering” posts and other statements opposing transgender ideology were not illegal. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak publicly expressed his support for her stance. Rowling declared victory 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.”
Rowling had become Public Enemy Number One for the transgender movement when, on December 19th, 2019, she came out publicly in defense of Maya Forstater, who had lost her job for social media posts identifying “transgender women” as men. The LGBT movement responded to Rowling’s tweet with a two-pronged strategy: They accused her of endangering “trans children,” and the LGBT lobby group GLAAD menacingly offered to host a re-education meeting for her where she could do penance and correct her thinking. Rowling contemptuously declined the offer. The public cancellation campaign heated up.
The LGBT movement threw everything at her. There was media condemnation; furious editorials; banishment from events associated with characters she had created. But Rowling, as it turned out, had done her research and was not interested in surrender. In fact, the trans jihad only made her angrier. She exposed their campaign of personal destruction on X, writing that women, including herself, face “endless death and rape threats, threats of loss of livelihood,” had their “employers targeted,” suffered “physical harassment,” and in one case a “family address posted online with [a] picture of [a] bomb-making manual.”
