JK Rowling has challenged Scotland’s new hate crime law in a series of social media posts - inviting police to arrest her if they believe she has committed an offence.
The Harry Potter author, who lives in Edinburgh, described several transgender women as men, including convicted prisoners, trans activists and other public figures.
She said “freedom of speech and belief” was at an end if accurate description of biological sex was outlawed.
Earlier, Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf said the new law would deal with a “rising tide of hatred”.
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.
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Ms Rowling, who has long been a critic of some trans activism, posted on X on the day the new legislation came into force.
I don’t think this is an accurate description of the debate.
My understanding of the “TERF” position is that they say that if it is excessively easy to declare oneself as trans, this can be misused by men wanting to get access to spaces reserved for women. Whether one agrees with that point or not, I do not think it is completely illegitimate.
I usually don’t say anything about this topic at all on the Internet and I am right now reminded of why. I am already starting to regret stating even my relative neutrality on it.
None of JK’s posts on the subject has suggested that she is only concerned with how easy it is to declare oneself trans. She has openly posted numerous times about how all tranwomen are predators who are just trying to gain access to changing rooms and bathrooms to prey on women and children. I don’t see how there’s any validity in that debate.
Apart from there being virtually no examples.
Unless you take the bigots at their word when they make that claim about someone, obviously.
Without the context of your understanding of the debate as you’ve outlined here we can only guess what you meant by “the debate” in your previous comment so thanks for taking the time to describe it. I absolutely agree that there needs be great care around the legitimacy of when someone declaring their gender should be taken seriously or not in some limited and extreme circumstances (prisons spring to mind). I think your characterisation of the terf argument if you speak to normal people is about accurate from my limited experience. The media and some outspoken terfs like JK are on the more extreme side of that where they say that it is already “too easy” to legitimately change their gender. Which is where I fundamentally disagree with them since I know the hoops some of my friends have had to jump through to even get the smallest amount of help from health providers.
(I’m using “legitimate” above as a sort of catch all for legal or what the person genuinely feels. I don’t think legal and legitimate are the same thing in this context, hence the distinction.)
you can have my neutrality upvote for all its worth