OK, JK Rowling is not a criminal – but she is a disgrace

YOU report today that Police Scotland have determined that JK Rowling did not commit an offence in her tweets on Monday (“Police state JK Rowling’s tweets supporting biological sex ‘are not criminal’”, The Herald, April 3). Having looked in detail at what the hate crime law says, that is not a surprise. Misgendering people on social media, for example, is not in itself a crime: see equalitynetwork.org/hc for an explainer of this.

In her tweet thread, Ms Rowling posted photographs of blameless trans women, alongside those of a rapist and other sex offenders. That seems to suggest that they are all somehow similar, because they are all trans.

For perspective, that’s like tweeting photos of gay men like me, or perhaps Graham Norton and Ian Mckellen, alongside photos of murderers Stephen Port and Jeffrey Dahmer, suggesting that we are all similar because we are all gay.

JK Rowling’s tweets seemed to be designed to offend and to provoke anger and upset. They did not reach the criminal threshold, but they do not reflect well on her.

Tim Hopkins, Edinburgh.

SO, JK Rowling is not to face prosecution for her recent challenging tweets. You might almost think that the bona fide legal experts who described much of what was being said about the Hate Crime Act as alarmist nonsense were actually right. Can we now expect people to hold up their hands and concede that they might have been wrong?

Don’t hold your breath. They are probably now in the process of moving on to the next issue to throw into the frontline of their culture war. Watch this and many other spaces.

Robin Irvine,

Helensburgh.