JK blasts misogyny law that will protect trans women too
HARRY Potter author JK Rowling has hit out at Humza Yousaf after the First Minister confirmed trans women will be protected by a new misogyny law.
The Scottish Government had previously came under fire for leaving out the sex characteristic from its controversial hate crime legislation after a review by Baroness Helena Kennedy found that specific misogyny offences needed their own law.
Her report recommended the creation of a separate piece of legislation to tackle ‘the spectrum of misogynistic conduct’ rather than including it within the hate crime Act.
The Scottish Government claims the law, which it hopes to introduce in 2026, will ‘create a new focus on protecting women and girls to address criminal behaviour motivated purely by misogyny’.
However, when asked about the legislation yesterday, Mr Yousaf said trans women will be able to report crimes committed using it as well.
Ms Rowling responded by posting on social media: ‘Once again, [Mr Yousaf] makes his absolute contempt for women and their rights clear. Women were excluded from his nonsensical hate crime law, now he introduces a “misogyny law” designed to also protect men.’
She also said ‘trans-identified men have sent violent threats to women’ but claimed they would ‘now receive double protection from Yousaf: for his so-called gender identity, and for also being, in the eyes of the Scottish Government, a woman’.
Her criticism comes after she published a list of ten trans women on social media before declaring they were men. The posts were written to coincide with the introduction of the hate crime law.
Ms Rowling, a prominent genderidentity critic, included prominent trans campaigners in her tweets, referring to them as women.
But she ended the thread by saying: ‘April Fools! Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.’
Police Scotland has said it received complaints about her tweets but would not be taking any action as they were not criminal.
‘Absolute contempt for women’