J.K. Rowling

[Laan Yaa Mo]

It is nice to see the noted author, J.K. Rowling, stepping up her game and taking on the cancel culture and woke crowd. She is not intimidated by them and does not fear their reaction to her views. Good for her.

JK Rowling: Why I decided to stand up for women
In exclusive extracts from a new book The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, the Harry Potter author, a broken-hearted mother and a former prison governor tell the inside story of their fight for rights
JK Rowling: “Nobody who’s been through a tsunami of death and rape threats will claim it’s fun”

DEBRA HURFORD BROWN
JK Rowling
Wednesday May 29 2024, 12.01am BST, The Times

By the standards of my world, I was a heretic. I’d come to believe that the socio-political movement insisting “trans women are women” was neither kind nor tolerant, but in fact profoundly misogynistic, regressive, dangerous in some of its objectives and nakedly authoritarian in its tactics. However, I kept my thoughts to myself in public, because people around me, including some I love, were begging me not to speak. So I watched from the sidelines as women with everything to lose rallied, in Scotland and across the UK, to defend their rights. My guilt that I wasn’t standing with them was with me daily, like a chronic pain.

What ultimately drove me to break cover were two separate legal events, both of which were happening in the UK.

In 2019, a researcher in England called Maya Forstater, who worked at a think tank, took her bosses to an employment tribunal. Forstater alleged that she’d been discriminated against for her belief that human beings cannot literally change sex. On the one hand, it seemed inconceivable that the tribunal would rule against Maya for holding and expressing a rational and factual belief, yet I had a dark, persistent feeling that she was going to lose, in which case the implications of such a loss for freedom of speech and belief in the UK, especially for women, would be far-reaching.

On the day in December 2019 that Maya lost her discrimination case (she’d go on to win on appeal, and gain substantial damages) I tweeted: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya.”

I then posted an essay on my website, elaborating on my concerns about gender identity ideology. I’ve been struck, since, by how many of the people who claim to know what I believe on this issue freely admit to never reading that essay. They don’t need to, they say, because their favourite trans influencers have already explained what I really meant. This peculiar stance seems to me to sum up the lack of critical thinking surrounding this issue, and the aversion of gender activists to exposing themselves to ideas that might shake their faith in their beloved slogans.

The following summer, in Scotland, where I’ve lived for three decades, the SNP government, led by the first minister Nicola Sturgeon, was gearing up to pass the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would remove all medical safeguarding from the transition process. A person would be able to change their legal gender as long as they’d lived in their “acquired gender” for three months, and made a statutory declaration that they intended to keep doing so. There was no definition of what “living in an acquired gender” meant and no requirement for psychological assessment, surgery or hormones. If the bill passed, it would mean that more male-bodied individuals could assert more strongly their right to enter spaces previously reserved for women, including abuse shelters, rape crisis centres, public changing rooms and prison cells.

Polling showed that the public strongly disagreed with what Sturgeon’s government was planning to do. I was so angry that the Scottish parliament looked set to push through the Gender Recognition Reform Bill over public opposition that on October 6, 2022, the day of a women’s protest outside Holyrood, I posted a picture of myself online wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan: Nicola Sturgeon, Destroyer of Women’s Rights.

The bill passed in December 2022. Incredibly, an amendment to prevent those previously convicted of sexual crimes such as rape from obtaining a gender recognition certificate was voted down, a stain on the Scottish parliament that will take a very long time to fade. (The bill was subsequently blocked by the UK government because it was in conflict with the Equality Act.)

Sturgeon, who has described herself as “feminist to my fingertips”, spoke out in 2023 about the “real” motivations of those who had objections to the ideology: “There are some people that I think have decided to use women’s rights as a sort of cloak of acceptability to cover up what is transphobia … just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find they are deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.”

Many were outraged by Sturgeon’s words — a friend of mine ripped up her SNP membership card because of them — but I wasn’t surprised. In the run up to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill vote the first minister had argued exclusively along standard trans activist lines, and one of the gender ideologues’ favourite talking points is that unless you buy into their philosophy, you’re a homophobic white supremacist.

The backlash towards me for speaking out about Maya, about gender ideology in general and about the situation in Scotland has been vicious. Nobody who’s been through an online monstering or a tsunami of death and rape threats will claim it’s fun, and I’m not going to pretend it’s anything other than disturbing and frightening, but I had a good idea of what was coming because I’d seen the same thing happen to other women, many of whom were risking careers and, sometimes, their physical safety. Very few high-profile women — with honourable exceptions, especially in sport, Martina Navratilova and Sharron Davies foremost among them — seemed prepared to stand up and give these women cover and support. I felt it was well past time that I stepped up too.

In what might be loosely described as my professional community, there was bewilderment that I’d abandoned the safe, generally approved position to support Maya and campaign against the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill. What was I playing at?

People who’d worked with me rushed to distance themselves from me or to add their public condemnation of my blasphemous views (though I should add that many former and current colleagues have been staunchly supportive). In truth, the condemnation of certain individuals was far less surprising to me than the fact that some of them then emailed me, or sent messages through third parties, to check that we were still friends.

The thing is, those appalled by my position often fail to grasp how truly despicable I find theirs. I’ve watched “no debate” become the slogan of those who once posed as defenders of free speech. I’ve witnessed supposedly progressive men arguing that women don’t exist as an observable biological class and don’t deserve biology-based rights. I’ve listened as certain female celebrities insist that there isn’t the slightest risk to women and girls in allowing any man who self-identifies as a woman to enter single-sex spaces reserved for women, including changing rooms, bathrooms or rape shelters.

I’ve asked people who consider themselves socialists and egalitarians what might be the practical consequences of erasing easily understood words like “woman” and “mother”, and replacing them with “cervix-haver”, “menstruator” and “birthing parent”, especially for those for whom English is a second language, or women whose understanding of their own bodies is limited. They seem confused and irritated by this question. Better that a hundred women who aren’t up to speed with the latest gender jargon miss public health information than that one trans-identified individual feels invalidated, seems to be the view.

When I’ve asked what the lack of female-only spaces would mean for women of certain faith groups, or survivors of sexual violence, the response is an almighty shrug. Over and again I’ve heard “no trans person has ever harmed a woman or a girl in a female space”, the speakers’ consciences apparently untroubled by the fact that they are parroting an easily disprovable lie, because there’s ample evidence that men claiming a female identity have committed sexual offences, acts of violence and voyeurism, both inside women’s spaces and without. Indeed, the Ministry of Justice’s own figures show that there are proportionately more trans-identified males in jail in the UK for sexual offences than among male prisoners as a whole. When this inconvenient fact is raised, I’m sometimes told trans-identified sex offenders “aren’t really trans, they’re just gaming the system”. Well, yes. That’s the point. If a system relies on an unfalsifiable sense of self rather than sex, it’s impossible to keep bad faith actors out.

One of the things that has most shocked me throughout this debacle has been the determined deafness of so many opinion-makers to whistleblowers at the UK’s now-discredited Tavistock gender identity clinic. Medics who were resigning from the service in unusually high numbers asserted that autistic and same sex-attracted young people, and those who’d experienced abuse — groups that were over-represented among those seeking to transition — were being fast-tracked towards irreversible medical interventions of questionable benefit by activist groups and ideologue medics. Those whistleblowers have since been completely vindicated: after an independent investigation, it’s to be closed.

Looking back now, and notwithstanding how unpleasant it’s been at times, I see that outing myself as gender-critical brought far more positives than negatives. The most important benefit of speaking out was that I was free to act.

One of my favourite writers, Colette, wrote in her book My Apprenticeships, “among all the forms of absurd courage, the courage of girls is outstanding.” For too long, I’d watched in silence as girls and women with everything to lose had stood up in the face of a modern-day witch hunt, braving threats and intimidation, not only from activists in black balaclavas holding placards promising to beat and murder them, but from institutions and employers telling them they must accept and espouse an ideology in which they don’t believe, and surrender their rights. In a sense, of course, all courage is absurd. Humans are hardwired to survive, to seek safety and comfort. Isn’t it more sensible to keep your head down, to hope somebody else sorts it out, to serve our self-interest, to court approval? Possibly.

But I believe that what is being done to troubled young people in the name of gender identity ideology is, indeed, a terrible medical scandal. I believe we’re witnessing the greatest assault of my lifetime on the rights our foremothers thought they’d guaranteed for all women. Ultimately, I spoke up because I’d have felt ashamed for the rest of my days if I hadn’t. If I feel any regret at all, it’s that I didn’t speak far sooner.

If we speak out, as parents, we get lambasted — or sent to social services

One mother reveals her family’s dystopian nightmare after her young daughter found a new ‘tribe’ at school. By Susan Dalgety

Esther is a broken-hearted parent. The mother of three girls, her family’s life has been dominated by gender identity for nearly five years. Her eldest, Lily, now 17, believes she is a man trapped in a woman’s body, having gone through a period of being non-binary. Her younger sister, Rachel, is 15. She has tried binding her breasts and taking testosterone supplements bought online, believing she can change her sex. Both have been affirmed by teachers at their secondary school, against their parents’ wishes, but in accordance with the Scottish government’s guidance issued to schools in 2021.

Esther, frustrated by years of trying to support her children as they struggle with their mental health, has a simple message for Nicola Sturgeon and her ministers who promoted gender identity in schools. “What were you thinking? Why would you impose an adult agenda on children? Don’t you realise what you have done?”

Esther and her husband, Chris, are exhausted by their family’s ordeal. In her cosy sitting room she recalls how pleased she and Chris had been when Lily first made friends. “She is on the autism spectrum and finds making friends difficult. She didn’t have any when she started secondary school. She spotted the rainbow flag at an open day at school — it was the flag that attracted her, she didn’t know what it meant. It was the Pride club and she was quickly signed up. She had found a ‘tribe’.”

Esther describes how Lily became obsessed by gender identity. “It was a non-stop discussion about gender and sexuality. At one point she talked about 96 different genders. She was looking for a reaction. We talked about it endlessly, at every family meal. And her younger sister became interested too. We tried to be as supportive as you can be as parents. They wanted flags, badges, all the paraphernalia, and we supported them. After all, what’s a badge? It is just a badge.”

• What the new sex education guidelines mean for schools and parents

Then came Covid and, like almost every teenager, Lily and her sister Rachel disappeared online. “At the start of lockdown, we did lots of things together as a family, like going for walks together. But it wasn’t a normal society and the girls started spending most of their time on their computers. We didn’t know that gender identity ideology was all over TikTok and YouTube, and of course the algorithms sucked them in deeper and deeper.”

Esther and Chris agreed to the school’s advice that the girls be known by their new names at school, having previously changed their pronouns at school without their parents’ knowledge. Esther explains: “The transgender guidance promotes the affirmation model, so we reluctantly went along with it.” Desperate, they sought help from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), only to find themselves reported to social workers for “unintentional emotional abuse” because they refused to affirm their daughter’s change of identity by using her chosen pronouns at home.

After a seven-month wait, social workers decided Esther and Chris had no case to answer, and suggested that the family be referred to CAMHS for support. “I laughed,” says Esther.

Five years after their oldest daughter started exploring her gender identity, Esther says she and her husband are now taking a “watchful waiting” approach. “We have spent time trying to reconnect with them to get our family unit back together … It is important to stay close. But they are thoroughly entrenched in the ideology they see online, which only presents a positive picture and none of the reality or risk.

“They are an idealistic generation; they don’t want to have a male–female divide. Anyone can be anything.As JK Rowling said in her tweet, ‘dress however you please …’ But this is different. By telling kids it is possible to change sex, it has confused everyone, and it is damaging. I see the whole world affirming my children — school, doctors, opticians, everywhere they go, all in the guise of ‘be kind’. It’s a dystopian nightmare. And if we speak out, as parents, we get lambasted or sent to social services. But everyone is affirming a delusion.”

Esther says her only hope now is time. “If we can keep them as far away as possible from testosterone and surgery as their brain matures, we hope by the time they reach the ‘magical’ age of 25, they will be comfortable in their bodies.”

Rhona Hotchkiss: “’Not on my watch,’ I remember telling my deputy”

Former governor Rhona Hotchkiss on why trans-identified males have no place in all-women prisons

In 2014, I fulfilled what had been an ambition since joining the prison service five years previously and moved to HMP Cornton Vale — Scotland’s only all-women prison — as governor in charge.

In my two years there, I encountered several trans-identified male prisoners and became implacably convinced that they should not be in a women’s jail. I listened to all the arguments: they are women; they live as women; they are particularly vulnerable. But not one of those claims stood up to close examination. Trans-identified males pose the same challenges to women as all men — everyone knows what those are and that’s why men as a group are not permitted unfettered access to women’s spaces, services and sports. Trans-identified males are not excluded from these spaces because they are trans but because they are male, and that should hold as true for prisons.

I wish people would remember that women in jails have no choice: they cannot get away. They cannot avoid sharing intimate spaces. They cannot “reframe their trauma”, as one prominent Scottish activist outrageously suggested to rape survivors uncomfortable with males in single-sex spaces.

Women prisoners must live in close, sometimes very close, proximity to whoever the prison service decides. They must say nothing while a man with an erection, visible through his tight leggings, enjoys their obvious discomfort. They must say nothing while an aggressive man punches walls, triggering adrenaline rushes of fear as women relive the male violence and abuse that they have suffered in the past. They must say nothing while a man, masquerading as a woman, describes in detail what he plans to do to his girlfriend with his penis when he gets out. And they must remain silent when a “trans woman” tells them he has no intention of living as a woman in the community.

These all too common incidents, all ones I have witnessed or had reported to me, are compounded by the fact that in the UK, but not only the UK, a disproportionately high number of trans-identified males in prison are convicted sex offenders. Knowing all this, no one should pretend it is ever acceptable to subject women prisoners to this level of discomfort and threat day in, day out. I can think of no other vulnerable group whose safeguarding is ignored in favour of another group — trans-identified males held in the prison system — whose self-expressed and largely unexamined demands pose such an obvious risk.

Of course, not every trans-identified male I met in prison posed an overt physical threat to women. However, I came to realise that less obvious emotional and psychological threats matter just as much, and that prisons have no effective way of assessing or eliminating such risk. It is not about nice men versus dastardly men, it is about men. Not all men, by a long way, but just as in every other place where it matters, women in prison must be protected from those men whose presence may harm them.

The final element of my growing discomfort came from knowing that there was absolutely no need to hold men, even those most at risk, with women. The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) has an excellent track record in protecting vulnerable men: gay men; former politicians; former police and prison officers; informers; and, yes, child killers and rapists. They are held, in considerable numbers, routinely and generally in safety. No one has ever suggested that the only safe place for these vulnerable males is in a women’s prison. Yet in my last few months in charge of Cornton Vale, it was mooted that a man — one of the most notorious, violent, manipulative and dangerous prisoners of the 8,500 held in Scotland — might be transferred to the women’s prison, as he had started identifying as female. “Not on my watch,” I remember telling my deputy. Any plans were dropped.

In the summer of 2017, I became governor in charge of HMP Greenock — a majority male prison, but with a women’s unit making up around one fifth of the population. It was the behaviour of trans-identified males there that finally prompted me to raise the issue internally, wherever I could, bolstered by the experience of my staff, many of whom told me that they did not agree with the policy. Not one ever said that they did.

I retired from the prison service, aged 57, in 2019. From the moment I felt at last able to speak out, invitations to talk about the plight of women in prison rolled in. It reached a frenzied zenith in the first few weeks of 2023 with the jailing of a violent male sex offender, Adam Graham (also known as Isla Bryson). After being found guilty of raping two women he was sent to Cornton Vale to await sentencing. It later emerged that the prison service had overruled an initial decision by the court service to take Graham/Bryson to Barlinnie, a men’s prison.

For three or four days, it seemed I was the only voice the media wanted to hear. Nicola Sturgeon’s normally composed manner seemed to desert her. Thousands of Scottish women screamed “we warned you”. Her stance about the impact of her gender recognition reforms failed in the face of this most rigorous of tests: reality.

Extracted from The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht: Voices from the Front-Line of Scotland’s Battle for Women’s Rights edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn (Constable £22), out tomorrow. © Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn 2024. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members

[tamada]

The tragic consequences of intrusive, misguided and small-minded government. There are some parallels in one of those stories with what my sister's children went through in their teen years but this was in England, well before Covid, TikTok and overt "tribalism." I consider that social media has only accelerated the dystopia.

On another note, with a net worth of $1.15 billion, J.K. Rowling can well afford to get all uppity.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

The tragic consequences of intrusive, misguided and small-minded government. There are some parallels in one of those stories with what my sister's children went through in their teen years but this was in England, well before Covid, TikTok and overt "tribalism." I consider that social media has only accelerated the dystopia.

On another note, with a net worth of $1.15 billion, J.K. Rowling can well afford to get all uppity.

Could you repeat that? I couldn't quite catch it all. It is time to get my hearing tested. I'm not sure if it is one of your usual profound comments or if it is one your throwaways because you are upset that she might be a wee bit wealthier than you.

[tamada]

The tragic consequences of intrusive, misguided and small-minded government. There are some parallels in one of those stories with what my sister's children went through in their teen years but this was in England, well before Covid, TikTok and overt "tribalism." I consider that social media has only accelerated the dystopia.

On another note, with a net worth of $1.15 billion, J.K. Rowling can well afford to get all uppity.

Could you repeat that? I couldn't quite catch it all. It is time to get my hearing tested. I'm not sure if it is one of your usual profound comments or if it is one your throwaways because you are upset that she might be a wee bit wealthier than you.

It means the Jockinese were being led up the woke garden path by a minority party of questionable integrity waving the freedom banner.

All power to JK in helping to destroy the SNP and pillory all the useful idiots that cleave to their ridiculous vision of a diverse, inclusive and unbigoted highland utopia.

Her wealth simply means that if push comes to shove and there are legal challenges, she has the resources to fight the good fight in court rather than donate to the SNP's political rivals.

Then again, maybe she's simply cadging for a seat in Starmer's Assembly of the Nations and Regions, after he turns the lights out on the Lords.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

I thought that's what you said before.

hearing horn 1.jpg (7.02 KiB) Viewed 377 times

[ricks]

getting more like thailand when the rich can say f**k the law

[Laan Yaa Mo]

getting more like thailand when the rich can say f**k the law

\
Please explain where you think she is wrong in this debate.