Rowling against the world. “The wave of death threats, rape and torture won’t stop me”

J.K. Rowling’s latest literary effort is not a new instalment in the Cormoran Strike series, but a follow-up to her famous 2020 essay on the transgender movement. Her ‘crime’ had been to believe that biological sex was real and that, on certain issues, ‘natural’ sex took precedence over ‘perceived’ sex.  Six years on from her first lengthy piece in which she explained her views on the subject – and which cost her a media witch-hunt, threats and a public trial (she had told the Scottish government, ‘come and get me’) – Rowling is standing her ground and taking the debate further. ‘Six years have passed and my views haven’t changed, though the landscape certainly has.’

The writer who has encouraged a generation of children to read reveals “a wave of death threats, rape and torture” and takes aim at “wealthy women who repost trendy mantras whilst sitting in dressing rooms guarded by private security guards, the women at the top of the media, publishing and academia who have no need for a changing room at work and who harbour a snobbish contempt for working-class women who do not want to undress in front of men”.

Gender, writes Rowling, is for them “a fad; it keeps them popular with their progressive tribe and costs them, personally, absolutely nothing”. Among the harshest passages in the new essay is the comparison between contemporary trans activism and the great civil rights movements of the past. According to Rowling, the battles for civil rights arose from grassroots organisation by people lacking institutional power. “21st-century trans activism is the exact opposite of those movements. It is elitist at its core.” It originated “in philosophy and gender studies departments, from where it took control of cultural, political and state institutions, which then sought to impose it, from the top down, on ordinary people who never voted for it”.

Rowling describes “a climate of fear and intimidation in which a single misplaced pronoun can lead to a woman being punished. Women are being investigated at work simply for questioning the approved gender mantras”. She also takes aim at the trade unions. “Higher-earning and better-educated workers are both more likely to be union members”. She also criticizes Amnesty International, which has blacklisted her and “which has wholeheartedly embraced gender ideology and now behaves like the very kind of authoritarian governments, censors of free speech and witch-hunters it once opposed (the irony is not lost on me; I used to work for them)”.

She will not be silenced. “I will continue to speak out and use my own money to help women who otherwise could not afford to go to court, and I will continue to ensure that women can still access support provided by women, centred on women, after a rape. As George Orwell said, ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, everything else follows’. If a man can be a woman, then women do not exist.’ If this goes through, everything goes.