JKR may insist we have the right to insult and offend, but with great power comes great responsibility
Following the new Scottish Hate Crime Act coming into force on 1st April, I have watched and listened with despair to endless debates on the importance of us all needing the right to insult and offend others. So I simply ask why we seriously believe it so important to hold onto a right and legal protection to be able to spread hate and misery?
I’ve witnessed politicians and media commentators talk of this vital element of free speech, as if our whole society and way of life depends on it; but in a world where hate crimes against every minority have been dramatically soaring out of control over the last five years, now reaching unprecedented levels and no more so than against trans people, why are we fighting so hard to protect the rights of bullies to inflict pain, rather than protecting those who suffer the awful consequences of it? Surely that’s precisely why this Act was introduced.
It’s all symptomatic of a society that this Tory Government in particular has created. Their ‘war on woke’ crusade is gleefully pursued by the likes of Braverman, Badenock, Truss and Sunak, as if they were fighting off the cruel and destructive rise of Nazism in the UK! They fight being ‘woke’ as if it a catastrophic disease that is destroying the very fabric of our wonderful society. Imagine that. The society they want us to have is where the true enemy is those protecting a kind and caring society. How did this ever become an environment to strive for?
And it’s not as if it’s enshrined in being a ‘true’ Tory. In David Cameron’s Conservative conference speech in October 2011 he said this about the need for laws permitting gay marriage:
“we’re consulting on legalising gay marriage. And to anyone who has reservations, I say: Yes, it’s about equality, but it’s also about something else: commitment. Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other. So I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative.”
But today, being a ‘Tory’ means the complete opposite, and I do ask where could it all end? How extreme do we have to go before the penny drops and see exactly what the UK has become?
The fact is that over this five-year period, America has been our guiding light and we have been only one small step behind the path and policies laid down by the likes of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. I have watched in horror as the anti-trans laws and legislation has swept into many US States, and at each turn thought how fortunate we are not to live under such conditions! And yet at each turn we remained only a few steps behind.
The most affected US States have witnessed the complete erosion of tans rights, with a 2024 anti-trans bill tracker showing current legislation bills seeking to block trans people from receiving basic healthcare, education, legal recognition, and ultimately the right to publicly exist, currently standing at 538 bills across 41 states with 15 having passed and 434 still active.
And even though believing nothing like that could ever happen here, in the UK we have witnessed a mirrored procession down the same discriminatory path. We have seen the introduction of Government guidance seeking to remove trans rights at our schools, proposals to prevent trans people using hospital wards they identify with, the complete erosion of trans healthcare (with the national average waiting time for even a first appointment now scandalously exceeding 26 years), and trans kids now being excluded and refused any kind of medical help despite the clear global evidence to the contrary (note the World’s largest psych association passes policy supporting trans youth care by massive margin). On top of this there is the ultimate push from our Government, and even more horrifically supported and aided by our very own Equalities and Human Rights Commission, to redefine the meaning of Sex within the Equality Act which would effectively remove all legal rights and protections to be transgender.
In the coming week we will also see the publication of the long awaited Cass Review on trans UK healthcare, which we already know has ignored all trans voices and trans evidence, and will follow a totally bias Gender Critical agenda. The harm it will cause if implemented and the literal cost to trans lives over the coming years could be both frightening and heart-breaking.
So the position is already truly frightening for the UK trans community and surely it couldn’t get any worse? Well if we are still taking our lead from the US, this is the latest development from across the pond;
“On Monday, former President Donald Trump announced his endorsement of Pastor Mark Burns for South Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District. The pastor has previously exhibited extremist rhetoric towards LGBTQLGBTQ LGBTQIA+ is an inclusive term that includes people of all genders and sexualities, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, queer, intersex, asexual, pansexual, and allies. While each letter in LGBTQIA+ stands for a specific group of people, the term encompasses the entire spectrum of gender fluidity and sexual identities. https://abbreviations.yourdictionary.com/what-does-lgbtqia-stand-for-full-acronym-explained.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT+ and transgender individuals, calling for the arrest and EXECUTION of those he accuses of LGBTQ+ and transgender “indoctrination.” Trump’s endorsement threatens to swing a crowded Republican primary in Burns’ direction. Given the heavily Republican lean of the district, Burns would emerge as the clear favourite to win the congressional seat should he win his primary.”
We may be nowhere near the talk of actual executions in the UK, as clearly this truly is horrific and extreme, but I never believed we would ever experience the rise and seeming acceptability of expressing such hate in UK In 2024. History has taught us never to assume the worst cannot happen and the worst scenarios in history have occurred when we sat back thinking it never could happen. This is not the time for complacency, but time to take stock and find ways to improve matters.
So how do we find ourselves in this position, and what are we doing about it. Well as already stated, in Scotland they have introduced Hate Crime Legislation, as the existing legislation only dealt with racism but this now includes all other forms of discrimination (with misogyny to follow shortly), but just look at the response to try to destroy this law before it has had any meaningful control on hate crime!
The reality is that Laws can never prevent all crime; what they do provide is a moral framework that sets out the social boundaries by which our society is required to live by. We all know murder is illegal, but the law will never prevent all murders. Theft is unlawful and the legislation is there to prosecute those who rob from banks or our homes, but that doesn’t mean we take every employee to court for stealing a paperclip from work; it’s still theft, just that the law was never intended to prosecute at that level.
But most importantly, what it does achieve is to act as a deterrent to crime. That is arguably where laws works at its best, in controlling our societies behaviour, because the primary aim is not to seek to prosecute against every crime that has been committed, as clearly this means there are victims who have suffered. Far better we have an effective law which deters the illegal act from happening in the first place.
And this is exactly what the Scottish Hate Crime legislation should be doing – it’s not there to prosecute every act of misgendering, but for deterring the harmful hate crime. However, it’s impact to deter will be minimal, if not non-existent, because of the likes of JK Rowling actively encouraging her 14m followers to ignore the law and to continue offending trans women.
But why is JK Rowling doing this? The reason is actually quite simple.
Those of us who have the full knowledge and information know that Gender Critical Ideology can never win on facts or evidence, because it doesn’t exist. In no area of this hateful culture war do they have any independent evidence to back up any of their wild claims; ‘an almost epidemic of gay kids being forced to be trans’, ‘predatory cis men pretending to be trans women to access female spaces’, ‘thousands of detranstioners lining up to take legal action against the NHS’, ‘trans women being a danger in single sex hospital wards’ or ‘trans women dominating women’s sport, breaking world records and winning elite Gold Medals’ – we hear these emotionally charged claims all the time, but not one claim is true.
So without any evidence, what they rely on is fear and scaremongering spreading through public opinion, but this will have no impact unless a society can be whipped up into a frenzy to join the Gender Critical instigators in pushing and spreading each lie. To spread their message it needs an army of angry ‘soldier ants’ to join the crusade, and so to achieve this, those Gender Critical have needed a society that believes it can say whatever it wants without fear of retribution, and social media provided the perfect platform to achieve this.
Your average social media keyboard warrior doesn’t have any interest or care for facts. They hear something, they accept it, they join in the ‘debate’ without any questioning or true understanding. And when the dialogue is so emotive, of course it’s very powerful; ‘Women’s rights are being removed!’, ‘kids being mutilated, made infertile and given experimental drugs!’, ‘women live in fear of bearded predatory men invading their safe spaces!’, ‘women’s sport is being destroyed by cheating men!’ – with no sight of any facts, it’s all too easy to build an army of online GC support ‘fighting the good fight to save women!’
So this explains why we have witnessed the concerted effort, ever since the leadership of Boris Johnson’s Tory Government and our complicit media, to hammer home the importance of ‘freedom of speech’.
The freedom to say what we want.
The freedom to spread the lies, no matter how hateful they are.
The freedom to insult and offend.
And this ensured that they created the required social environment that was vital to build and push a society that can undermine and demonise a minority; and the chosen target of this Government was immigrants and the trans community. It is ironic that the Government are now complaining so bitterly at the rise of the ‘angry mob’ and how MP’s are subjected to increasing level of threats of violence when they themselves are so culpable for inciting the rise in hate speech that is now out of control. What did they expect?
So the last thing those Gender Critical needed was a Scottish Government seeking to derail their ‘freedom to hate’ with legislation that makes hate crime an actual criminal offence!
With the introduction of the Hate Crime legislation they desperately need the public to believe they can continue to say whatever they want without any fear of reprisal, and this is where JK Rowling has stepped in. Her pretense of having had ‘a senior moment’, liking an anti-trans tweet several years ago, is now a long and distant memory as she has fully removed the mask revealing her full-on support for Gender Critical Ideology.
So her mission; to stop the hate crime law from stopping hate crime.
On the first day of the new law she published a tweet thread with the clear and unambiguous message to the Police:
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. #ArrestMe #AprilFools #HateCrimeActScotland
So she is openly mocking the new law, openly inciting others to also disregard the law, but interestingly, she’s clearly not as confident in her position as she has made out. At the foot of the thread I notice she listed three hashtags, one being ‘#AprilFools’ – no doubt this is literally a ‘get out of jail card free’ if she was actually arrested, and be able to claim “But it was only an April Fools joke …. Look, I clearly stated so at the end of the thread!” So maybe she’s not so super confident of her position in law after all!
As for the thread itself, it was intentionally hateful to make her point and challenge the Police, but was it acceptable?
There is no justifiable reason for the naming the four trans women sex offenders. So why did she do this? We know that EVERY community contains vile people, so why specifically name trans offenders? The only possible intention is to imply that trans women are dangerous and pose an unacceptable threat to cis women and therefore the same as predatory cis men, but all it actually does is show some trans women are equally as vile as some cis women who offend (as depicted below). Her implication is that trans woman are a danger that cannot be trusted. Well just imagine if the thread had been about male offenders and she had chosen examples to show 4 black offenders. Clearly that would have caused outrage and called out for blatant racism. Implying trans women a danger is equally as disgusting. It’s nonfactual, non-evidence based scaremongering.
And then she goes on to attack our own Katie Neeves and TV presenter India Willoughby. Just linking them in the same thread with trans sex offenders is bad enough, but the way they were both insulted and demeaned was also hideous.
Why the mention of Katie supposedly ‘stealing’ her sisters knickers? She tried on her sisters clothes – how is that ‘stealing’, and the only reason to mention underwear is to paint the image of a sexual fetish by a pervert. Katie was FOUR years old! The facts are that the trying on of female clothes is a natural part of many trans kids discovering of their true gender identity – no more, no less. A natural act and with no sexual implication whatsoever.
What JKR also fails to state is that Katie was just one of around 6,000 UN Women delegates from the UK, which included in their number cis men and those non-binary. Those appointed were simply chosen due to a commitment and desire to support women and make the world a better place for women. Isn’t it a shame that JKR can’t focus her time and efforts that way rather than just stamping down on a minority that have little or no true impact in cis women’s daily lives.
Ultimately, she ended the thread by openly stating that all of the trans women in her thread “aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them”. So on top of the linking all trans women with violent sex offenders, she openly and intentionally misgendered India Willoughby, Katie Neeves, Munroe Bergdorf, Guilia Valentino & Mridul Wadhwa. So yet again, we ask the question if this is a transphobic hate crime as per the United Nations definition of Transphobia:
‘Any form of prejudice or hostile attitude towards transgender people, including denying their gender identity or refusing to acknowledge it.’
According to the new Scottish Hate Crime law, it will be judged on the basis as to whether any ‘reasonable’ person would consider the act an intentional hate crime. If, as according to the Police in their initial response, the JK Rowling thread doesn’t meet this level as per the UN definition of transphobia, I can only ask ‘what on earth does!’
Our entire society is in fact controlled by a level of fear. Thankfully in the UK it’s not the physical fear of violence, but the ‘fear of consequences’. If we believed we could ‘get away with it’ the vast majority of us would park right outside our place of destination ignoring any double yellow lines. But in a town centre the ‘fear’ of getting a parking ticket will deter most of us and ‘help’ us obey the rules. We don’t comply out of any moral responsibility, as if we could get away with it, most would, but because of fear of the penalty, ie the consequence being a costly parking ticket.
The benefit of the new Hate Crime law will not be the numbers that can be prosecuted, so we would not want to see thousands of cases going to court, but the public do need to believe there could be a genuine consequence of offending under this legislation. If there is a genuine fear, most will comply and as a result hate crime will surely start to fall.
The clear intention of the Scottish Government is that this will be the impact of the legislation. The clear intention of the English Government, Gender Critical believers and of course JKR, is that this must not be the impact.
The clear Gender Critical intention is protecting the ‘right’ to insult, offend and be as hateful as they like, and that a Hate Crime Act intended to stop Hate Crime does NOT prevent Hate Crime. It actually sounds like an April Fools, but Hate Crime is anything but a joke and does have serious, even fatal consequences. Transphobia has already been named by the Judge as a motivation factor for one of Brianna Ghey’s sadistic murderers and we know the trans community already has the highest recorded levels of attempted suicide. Even further levels of hate can only make this worse.
The new Scottish Act may need time to bed in and find its right level with the Police, but it’s important it does, and it also needs to be replicated in England. Hopefully this could be achievable under a new Labour Government, as they will surely need to find a way to turnaround the rise in hate crime, so a law that genuinely deters hate crime will clearly achieve this.
If it were proven that JKR was guilty of incitement of transphobia, that would have serious implications. With 14m followers and considerable celebrity status, JK Rowling does possess great power. ‘With great power comes great responsibility’ may be a proverb popularized by a fictional superhero, but it couldn’t be more relevant. Quite ironic that truth & reality comes from a character who changes their appearance to show us who they truly are.
But no matter which party is occupying No10 Downing Street, our society will always be stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other, and we do not achieve this if our primary concern is protecting a right to insult and offend each other.
Why would we favour a society that seeks to divide through prioritising hate over one that seeks a safe environment for all. The ever increasing levels of hate crime proved we needed the new legislation. We need to ensure it works.
