Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling took her April Fools’ joke a little too far this year. She started off by sarcastically describing various transgender individuals who identify as women, including criminals, charity organizers, and TV personalities. Then, she followed up her biographies with an April Fools’ punchline in spite of a new Scottish hate crime law. “Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.”
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. The maximum penalty for transgressions is seven years in prison.
Rowling Deliberately Misgenders Many Prominent Scottish Transgender Women
A person could be found guilty of an offense if they communicate material, or behave in a manner, “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive,” with the intention of stirring up hatred based on the protected minority groups outlined above.
Rowling, whose deliberate misgendering of trans public figures has earned her the ‘transphobic’ label, said, “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.” She is currently out of the country.
“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,” Rowling wrote.
Among the transgender women named in Rowling’s post were convicted sex offenders Isla Bryson and Katie Dolatowski; Gaelic footballer Guilia Valentino; Mridul Wadhwa, the head of a Scottish rape crisis center; public campaigner Munroe Bergdorf; and TV presenter India Willoughby, among others.
J.K. Rowling has publicly expressed her opinions on transgender people and related civil rights since 2017. These views have been described as transphobic by the LGBTQ+ community and have divided feminists, thrown freedom of speech into question, and ignited cancel culture. She has been referred to as a TERF, a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” but seems to hold the title proudly.