Tag Archive for: J.K. Rowling

J. K. Rowling’s courageous stand for truth

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This year’s was a particularly memorable April Fools’ Day.

First, Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act came into force, making it illegal to “stir up hatred” against people based on their age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or other protected characteristics.

It’s a fool’s errand to try to police hatred — a subjective and internalised feeling if ever there was one — not to mention the even more ambiguous “crime” of stirring up hatred.

But fools rush in, and thanks to the new woke law, anyone found guilty of sufficiently hurting another person’s feelings in Scotland, even in their private residence or online, will face up to seven years in prison. A fool’s paradise indeed.

Into the breach

In response to all this foolishness, bestselling author J. K. Rowling, who calls Scotland home, shared her own April Fools’ joke in the form of a lengthy X thread.

“Scotland’s Hate Crime Act comes into effect today,” she began. “Women gain no additional protections, of course, but well-known trans activist Beth Douglas, darling of prominent Scottish politicians, falls within a protected category. Phew!”

Rowling’s words captioned two screenshots of social media posts made by Douglas that show the trans activist wielding knives and axes, and stating that “direct action gets the goods” and “you can take the change by force”.

But Rowling wasn’t done.

“Lovely Scottish lass and convicted double rapist Isla Bryson found her true authentic female self shortly before she was due to be sentenced,” wrote Rowling, posting photos of an evidently male criminal who apparently hoped for lighter sentencing with a newfound trans identity.

“Misgendering is hate, so respect Isla’s pronouns, please,” Rowling added sarcastically.

Eight more tweets followed, cataloguing an assortment of sporting opportunists, undeserving women’s rights appointees, and convicted criminals.

Then for the punchline:

“April Fools!” Rowling declared.

“Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.”

She ended her post with a thoughtful critique of the new law, which, she argues, prioritises male self-identification over the rights of actual women, and that will inevitably hurt girls, incentivise abuse, scramble crime data, silence dissent and outlaw biology.

Then came her most courageous words:

“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.”

Rowling’s parting remarks won praise from all corners of the internet, and for good reason. It was a brilliant play — arguably a first-move checkmate that neutered Scotland’s dystopian law out of the gate.

Checkmate

By very unambiguously and very publicly breaking the Hate Crime Act on its very first day, Rowling cornered Scottish authorities, forcing them to respond in one of two ways, both equally fatal.

Option one would be to enforce the law, arrest Rowling, and shine an international spotlight on the law’s abject insanity. Option two would be to not enforce the law and thereby render it as worthless as the paper it’s written on. Heads she wins, tails they lose.

They lost.

Within a day, Police Scotland had announced that Rowling’s post was not being treated as criminal.

Rowling welcomed the news, writing,

“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.”

In response to the fear that Scottish authorities will still target people who don’t have the means to defend themselves, Rowling announced,

“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.”

It is difficult to overstate the heroic courage of J. K. Rowling. She was willing to put her freedom, wealth and remaining good name on the line, venturing where angels fear to tread, in order to speak the truth and defend the vulnerable.

By doing so, let’s just hope she has inspired a generation of young women to do the same.

AUTHOR

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate architect, a primary school teacher, a missionary, and a young adult pastor.

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

J.K. Rowling: ‘There is something dangerous’ about transgender movement ‘and it must be challenged’

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Despite vicious woke attacks against acclaimed Harry Potter author J.K Rowling, she refuses to back down from her warranted criticism of the trans movement, which has gone out of control.

It shouldn’t be a movement to begin with. Some obvious examples of how the trans movement has become so “dangerous,” as Rowling says: the rape of women by men identifying as women; the trans takeover of female sports; the potential physical harm to females in prisons and to youngsters in schools; the sexualization of small children during what should be innocent reading and learning time, not drag shows; vulgar exhibitionism at pools in full view of young girls; and increasing incidents of outright weirdness that threaten women to an extent never previously thought possible, such as the male who identifies as a woman with a birthing fetish, who has now been arrested for fraud and sex assaults.

No limits is what makes this movement scary and so dangerous, as the rights and safety of others are trampled. Too many weak politicians have surrendered to special interest groups.

J.K. Rowling: ‘There’s Something Dangerous’ About the Transgender Movement

by Paul Bois, Breitbart, March 17, 2023:

Author J.K. Rowling continued to prove she will not back down in her criticism of transgender radicalism in a recent podcast episode in which she called the movement “dangerous.”

Speaking on the Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling podcast, the acclaimed Harry Potter author said she tried listening to transgender activists to better understand their views but ultimately concluded that something “dangerous” lurked within.

“I can only say that I’ve thought about it deeply and hard and long. And I’ve listened, I promise, to the other side,” Rowling said. “And I believe, absolutely, that there is something dangerous about this movement, and it must be challenged.”

The British author addressed the trolls who say she somehow “betrayed” the values espoused in her books.

“I’m constantly told that I have betrayed my own books, but my position is that I’m absolutely upholding the positions that I took in ‘Potter,’” Rowling said. “My position is that this activist movement in the form that it’s currently taking, echoes the very thing that I was warning against in ‘Harry Potter.’”

“I am fighting what I see as a powerful, insidious misogynistic movement that I think has gained huge purchase in very influential areas of society. I do not see this particular movement as either benign or powerless,” she continued.

In the summer of 2020, J.K. Rowling said that transgender ideology could lead to the erasure of womanhood as we know it by denying the basic biological functions that differentiate women from men.

“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth,” she tweeted….

Read more.

AUTHOR

CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS

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Harry Potter and the Islamophobic Author

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J.K. Rowling, the famed author of the Harry Potter series, has fallen victim to the cancel culture. Laurie Charles, a British writer who equals Rowling neither in accomplishment nor in renown, has accused Rowling of “transphobia” for a book she wrote under a pseudonym in 2014, The Silkworm. The UK’s appalling Daily Mail, noticing that the “transphobic” passage involves a burqa, claims that Rowling “has been accused of playing into both Islamophobic and transphobic prejudices.”

Here is the offending passage. If you can’t spot the “transphobia” and “Islamophobia,” you just aren’t woke enough:

A young woman wearing a hijab was watching them talk from an opposite seat. She had large, sweet, liquidbrown eyes.

‘Assuming somebody really did enter the house on the fourth, I’ve got to say a burqa’s a bloody good way of getting in and out without being recognised. Can you think of another way of totally concealing your face and body that wouldn’t make people challenge you?’

‘And they were carrying a halal takeaway?’

‘Allegedly. Was his last meal halal? Is that why the killer removed the guts?’

‘And this woman—’

‘Could’ve been a man…’ ‘—was seen leaving the house an hour later?’

This enraged Laurie Charles, who took to Twitter to call attention to this passage, about which she fumed: “JK Rowling made her f**ked up attacks against trans people and threatened to sue anyone who called her transphobic because she’d already sent her manuscript off to the publisher and wanted to preempt the inevitable criticism of this.”

And just to make sure everyone knew the depth of her moral indignation, Charles added: “It’s like she’s sipping human blood and viscera from a skull through a curly straw with one hand and typing with the other.”

Charles may have been on the lookout for new evidence of Rowling’s “transphobia,” for she has been in hot water for it before, when she dared to note that using the term “people who menstruate” instead of “women” is absurd. And even that wasn’t the end of Rowling’s villainy, according to the Daily Mail: “The row worsened after her new book Troubled Blood was released on Tuesday, which tells the tale of a man who dresses as a woman to kill his victims – a trope in literature that’s been criticised by activists for perpetuating negative stereotypes about transgender people.”

So now, in the Left’s moral universe, making the common-sense observation that “a burqa’s a bloody good way of getting in and out without being recognized” is somehow prejudicial to men who dress in women’s clothing, and men who like to think they’re really women, and that will just not do. And the burqa! You know what that means. “Not just transphobic but Islamophobic too… I regret ever spending money on Harry Potter,” commented one former Rowling fan on Charles’ tweet.

Another added: “So apparently Rowling is just racist as well. What a surprise, transphobes tend to be obsessive bigots, huh.” And a third: “Ewwwww how does she manage to be racist and transphobic in one paragraph?”

Of course Rowling must be racist, because Rowling is bad, and everything bad is racism, and so there you are. Islam is not a race and women of all races wear burqas and niqabs, but no matter: in Britain and the U.S. today, you’re a racist for imagining someone committing a crime while wearing a burqa. Because that never, ever happens, right?

Well, let’s see. Back in February, a burqa-clad man in New York City stole nearly $1 million in jewelry. In October 2018, France’s most-wanted fugitive evaded police by wearing a burqa. And in Cameroon in July 2015, burqa-wearing Muslims murdered at least twelve people in jihad-martyrdom suicide attacks.

There are many, many other such incidents. In January 2014, the Syrian army arrested a jihadist who was trying to evade capture by dressing as a woman. Four French soldiers in Afghanistan were killed in June 2012 by jihad suicide bombers who were wearing burqas. Two months before that, a man who was accused of participating in the July 7, 2005 jihad bombings in London was caught fleeing in a burqa. In June 2011, a Taliban burqa-brigade attempted a prison break in northwestern Pakistan.

In April 2010 in Pakistan, jihadists dressed in burqas murdered 41 people in double jihad suicide bombings. The year before that, jihad suicide bombers in burqas killed six in Afghanistan.

All that and much more indicates that when J.K. Rowling imagined a criminal escaping by wearing a burqa, she wasn’t engaging in gratuitous “Islamophobia,” much less “transphobia,” but was simply reflecting reality. It is reality, however, that the Left is making war against. They’ll cancel everyone, no matter how famous, no matter how beloved, in order to push us all into accepting their fantasies about the world. Orwell neatly encapsulated this impulse in 1984 when he had Winston Smith’s torturer force him to say, and believe, that two plus two equals five. Now we’re being forced to affirm that again, on pain of being labeled “transphobic,” “Islamophobic,” and “racist.”

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J.K. Rowling and the Cursed Woman

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Breaking the transgender spell has cost the author a lot.

Did she impose the Unforgivable Curses? Did she condemn anyone to Azkaban? No; she claimed that a woman should not have forfeited her job for maintaining that men and women are different. And she followed that up by arguing that in fact they are different.

The position J.K. Rowling defended was one which, a few years ago, nearly everyone would have agreed with. In fact, I believe that today also nearly everyone would agree. But a violent and vocal minority not only believe otherwise but viciously attack anyone who disagrees with them. Ms Rowling has been the target of vicious verbal attacks and has even received death threats.

It is sad to see the three principal actors in the Harry Potter stories criticising the author without whom they would not be millionaires. Harry, Hermione and Ron would be ashamed of them.

It is an evident biological and psychological fact that men and women are different; a matter of science and of common sense: they complement each other. This is so obvious that no reasoned case can be made against it: which is why those who oppose it must resort to blind emotion and even physical threats.

Rowling’s statement in defence of her position is moderate and reasonable, yet it has provoked outrage. But the critics have not answered her arguments. Why? Because they can’t.

Through her personal experience and her study of the issues involved she has become deeply concerned about the detrimental effects the trans rights movement is having, and its push to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

She points out that there is an explosion of young women wishing to transition, and increasing numbers are taking steps that have permanently altered their bodies and taken away their fertility. In those transitioning “autistic girls are hugely over represented in the numbers”.

Rowling refers to researcher Lisa Littman, who wrote a paper expressing concern about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, and who “…had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans”.

Littman was “subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work”.

Rowling shows great sympathy for young people who want to transition, partly because of her own experience when young. She suffered severely with OCD, and her father said openly that he would have preferred a son. Had she been born 30 years later she might have tried to transition. “The lure of escaping womanhood would have been huge.”

Noting that we are living through the most misogynistic period she had experienced, she points out that it’s not considered enough for women to be trans allies. “Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.”

That statement expresses the essence of the problem: women are expected to annihilate themselves. Instead of there being two complementary ways of being human, male and female, the trans activists would blur the distinctions and cancel out the distinct qualities of each sex.

This program has dire consequences for both men and women, but holds special dangers for women, as in the insistence that biological men (there’s really no other kind!) be free to use women’s bathrooms and showers.

As Rowling observes: “When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he is a woman – and as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones –then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside”

It should really be no surprise that Rowling takes the stand that she does, for it is in accord with the healthy outlook on human nature implicit in the Harry Potter stories. Women there are portrayed as equal to men, but expressing their humanity in a feminine way. Large families are implicitly defended, as in the Weasley family: seven children with a loving father and mother: a rather poor family but happy.

And when Harry and Ron become romantically interested in girls, it is a healthy attraction.

An underlying theme is the power of a mother’s love, exemplified by Harry’s mother sacrificing her life to save him from the evil Lord Voldemort.

In fact, the theme of a mother’s unique love for her children is manifested when Molly Weasley hurls herself into battle against the formidable Bellatrix Lestrange, in order to defend her daughter Ginny. It is shown too when Narcissa Malfoy, in gratitude to Harry for telling her that her son is alive, lies to Voldemort, thereby risking her own life.

The Potter stories show a contrast between a healthy world and the world of Voldemort and his Death Eaters. And in this vendetta against Joanne Rowling we see something of a parallel. She defends a healthy view of Woman against a sick view that implicitly annihilates Woman.

J.K Rowling deserves support for her courageous stand. And it is good to read in her letter that the overwhelming majority of responses she received were positive, grateful, and supportive.

Professor Dumbledore warned the students at Hogwarts that a time may come “when you have to make a choice between what is right, and what is easy” (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, chapter 37) It is all too easy right now to buckle to a fashionable trend, against all reason.

COLUMN BY

John Young

John Young is a Melbourne based writer on theological, philosophical and social Issues. He is author of several hundred articles and three books: The Natural Economy, Catholic Thinking, and The Scope of… More by John Young

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.