JK AND THE WAR ON WOKE
She faced a firestorm of hate from extremists after she launched a passionate defence of her views on sex and gender. So how DID our best-loved author become the target of terrifying death threats ...just for saying what it means to be a woman?
THE words are cold and menacing, the threat made even more chilling given that it comes from an anonymous account. ‘I wish you a very nice pipe bomb in mailbox’, the tweet reads.
A warning to a politician perhaps, or one of England’s beleaguered footballers? Not this time. For this charming tweet was directed at JK Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter series and an author beloved by millions of children the world over.
And yet according to Rowling, it is just one of hundreds of threats she has received recently to ‘beat, rape, assassinate and bomb me’.
Former fans have burned her books, she has been subjected to a sustained and hysterical campaign of harassment and abuse on social media, accused of hate speech and repeatedly ‘cancelled’ by the woke brigade.
Why? Because she has the temerity, or so some believe, to talk about what it means to be a woman.
Certainly, in a world where the Scottish Government is currently attempting to push through legislation which would allow anyone to refer to themselves as a woman despite their biological circumstances, and men who identify as women can freely use female toilets, speaking about womanhood has become an increasingly radical act.
Scottish politicians Joanna Cherry and Joan McAlpine have both been viciously abused for daring to question whether plans to make it easier to change gender might endanger women, while one campaigner, Maya Forstater, lost her job for saying that people cannot change their biological sex.
All this against the backdrop of a movement that appears determined to deem any women questioning their own rights as transphobic.
YET Rowling’s outspoken views on the transgender community – she has argued that trans activists are pushing to erode the legal definition of sex, and that dangerous numbers of young people are being allowed to transition – are an unlikely chapter in the career of an author so rich she need never write another word ever again, never mind tweet her views on controversial topics.
But in June last year she waded into the debate, provoking a shrieking volley of attacks and calls of ‘Terf’ (the term stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, and is used as a particularly unpleasant slur amongst the trans community against women who do not wholly swallow their rhetoric) when she took issue with an article that referred to women as ‘people who menstruate’.
‘I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,’ she wrote.
‘Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?’
For her detractors, nononsense comments such as this have turned her into a real-life Voldemort, the evil villain of her Harry Potter series. Some even going so far as to accuse her of ‘literally killing trans people’ with her words.
Over the top? Not in the militant world of the trans movement and its supporters, where there is rarely room for nuance or discussion and the mantra ‘trans women are women’ is repeated ad nauseam.
One activist, model Munroe Bergdorf, wrote: ‘JK Rowling is not a scientist. She is not a doctor. She is not an expert on gender. She is not a supporter of our community.
‘She is a billionaire, cisgender, heterosexual, white woman who has decided that she knows what is best for us and our bodies. This is not her fight.’
Even Harry Potter actors Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Eddie Redmayne, stars who once upon a time would have fallen over themselves to praise her talent, have lined up to criticise her.
And yet Rowling’s perspective has also won her many supporters.
In September last year more than 50 leading literary figures, including playwright Sir Tom Stoppard and novelist Ian McEwan, signed a letter supporting her after she was subjected to what they described as an ‘insidious, authoritarian and misogynistic trend’.
Recently Rowling’s representatives told the Mail she did not wish to comment further on the threats she has received.
She does, after all, usually prefer to express herself on social media, and clarified that she would be getting back to her Robert Galbraith crime series, writing that ‘Strike and
Robin are at a tricky stage of their investigation, so I need to drop a few clues’.
But given Rowling’s vocal stance on gender issues, she has already dropped several clues that she is unlikely to walk away from this particular argument – despite the threats – any time soon.
Writing last year, she said: ‘Endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode “woman” as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.’
So how did this beloved children’s author become one of the world’s most outspoken voices on the thorny issue of transgenderism?
According to Rowling herself, it was around 2017 that she first became interested in the topic, immersing herself in literature which explored the subject partly because, she explained, she wanted to understand what it was like to be a young woman today
in order to relate to one of her female characters.
In 2019 she voiced her support for magdalen Berns, a feminist who spoke openly about the importance of biological sex, and Forstater, a tax specialist who lost her job for what were deemed to be ‘transphobic’ tweets.
But there is also a much deeperseated, personal issue at the heart of her passionate defence of the rights of the woman: her own experience of domestic abuse and sexual assault.
Having escaped a violent first marriage ‘with some difficulty’, she said she felt she needed to speak up ‘out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces’.
Things came to a head in June last year when she wrote a passionate essay on her own website sparked, she said, by the Scottish Government’s determination to proceed with its controversial Gender Recognition Act, which would give any person the right to call themselves a woman without the need of a certificate. The announcement, she said, took her to a very dark place.
‘memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop,’ she wrote.
‘That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity.
‘I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with women’s and girls’ safety.’ Rowling – who became something of a heroine of the gay rights movement a few years ago when she revealed that her Harry Potter character Dumbledore, the wise and kindly headmaster of her fictional school Hogwarts, was gay – has always been very clear that she is not anti-trans, expressing her sympathy for trans women who have been assaulted. ‘I believe the majority of transidentified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable,’ she wrote. ‘I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe.’ Her frustration comes with what she perceives as the trans movement’s demands to shut down any debate – particularly when it comes to the mantra of ‘trans women are women’. ‘It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies,’ she said. ‘Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.’
AND this, for Rowling and many other women – the vast majority of whom harbour their views in silence for fear of being attacked by the woke brigade – is the nub of the matter: that in its hysterical clamouring, the trans movement is determined to eradicate women altogether.
Nationalist mP Joanna Cherry says she was sacked from her front bench role in February of this year after a small but vocal minority within the party ‘engaged in performative histrionics redolent of the Salem witch trials’.
‘The question – do you believe or have you ever believed that women are adult human females? – is one I must answer in the affirmative, but it’s not a response that is popular with some who have the ear of the leadership,’ she wrote in an article shortly afterwards.
‘It’s frustrating because advocating for women’s sex-based rights under the equality Act, expressing concerns about self-identification of gender and opposing curtailment of free speech, are not evidence of transphobia.’
meanwhile, the SNP’s pledge remains to simplify the process of changing legal gender ‘at the earliest opportunity’, an issue which has split the party and provoked an internal war of words.
The Gender Recognition Act has twice been put out to consultation before being kicked into the long grass when the pandemic hit.
many observers believe it will not be long before it returns to the table and the debate will once again rip through Holyrood.
meanwhile, the abuse that women such as Cherry and Rowling have received for speaking up is horrific.
Death and rape threats are common. many young people who grew up reading Rowling’s books now send her vile abuse, or have held book burnings documented on social media platform TikTok.
Some bookshops in Australia have even banned Rowling’s books altogether.
more moderate voices such as the actor Alan Cumming have suggested that critics of gender selfidentification are really just suffering ‘a fear of the unknown’ and say people on all sides need to ‘examine their phobias’.
Days after a host of prominent literary names signed a letter defending JK Rowling ‘against hate’, more than 200 writers, publishers and journalists including authors such as Jeanette Winterson, Joanne Harris and malorie Blackman put their names to another letter stating their support for transgender and nonbinary people.
It stated that ‘non-binary terms are valid, trans women are women, trans men are men, trans rights are human rights’.
Yet despite being condemned for her views by a number of her peers, Rowling’s continued narrative on the situation – she recently tweeted ‘we will win’ – suggests that she has no plans to retreat.
Indeed, she has also been at pains to explain that her stance comes, ultimately, from a fear about the future of women, and their role in the world.
‘We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced,’ she wrote in her 2020 essay.
‘Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls.
‘Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now.’
When Rowling revealed the recent pipe bomb threat she had been sent, she wrote a response.
‘To be fair, when you can’t get a woman sacked, arrested or dropped by her publisher, and cancelling her only made her book sales go up, there’s really only one place to go.’
In Glasgow Green recently a protest took place against the erasure of women from the modern landscape and in solidarity with marion millar, an accountant working with a gender-critical feminist group who was recently charged in relation to allegedly homophobic and transphobic tweets.
Women held placards reading ‘we love JK Rowling’, and used the hashtag ‘women won’t wheesht’ on social media.
Graham Linehan, the comedy writer and co-creator of the TV show Father Ted, who was recently banned from Twitter for his views on transgenderism, addressed the crowd.
It was a brave move, given that just weeks before a Twitter user, who was identified as a PhD student in Coventry, published a picture of a machine-gun and tweeted: ‘making a nice list of terfs tweeting @WomenWontWheesht because she needs target practice.’
Yet later that day, before returning to her writing desk, Rowling herself used the same hashtag. Clearly, no matter the threats, this is one woman who has no plans to wheesht any time soon.