‘The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman': Is JK Rowling right calling out Scottish policy?

Jimmy (No)

JK Rowling referenced George Orwell's 1984 with her tweet condemning Scottish Police for allowing those accused of rape to choose their gender upon their jailing. Rowling's tweet is misguided and wrong, as it not only disregards the rights of the accused but creates a false equivalency between government overreach and personal freedoms.

The tweet is not the first time Rowling has publicly made anti-trans comments. The author has become notorious for her vocal support of Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists, going so far as to work these sentiments into her latest novel. While Rowling positions herself as someone concerned with sex losing its meaning, she often falls prey to confusing matters of gender with matters of sex. She also fails to recognize the growing body of evidence suggesting that sex is not binary.

Rowling's anti-trans comments point to prejudice rather than an ideology and only add to the hate and discrimination experienced by the trans community. Reports show the transgender community faces disproportionate attacks online and in real life, leading to 44% of trans teens contemplating suicide. Rowling's sentiments, part of a growing anti-trans movement in the UK, serve to refocus conversations regarding the trans community from discrimination to the very right for the trans community to exist at all.

Conflating trans issues with her own agenda, Rowling bolsters dangerous sentiments that lead to discrimination and death through doxing and harassment. Her stances on trans issues use feminism as a smokescreen to perpetuate harmful stereotypes that are out of step with our modern understanding of sex and gender.

Curtice (Yes)

Scottland has a rape crisis, resulting in their “This is not an invitation to rape me” campaign. Knowing this, Scottish police are acting irresponsibly by allowing men who have committed rape to claim they are women while possessing no female biological, genetic, or reproductive markers. This not only subverts truth, but erases sex-based rights and protections rightfully belonging to women. 

This is JK Rowling's, as well as other UK feminists like Maya Forstater and Kathleen Stock's, chief concern with modern gender theory; it is dangerous ideology that’s infecting all institutions, including Scottish law enforcement. This concern over defending the empirical reality of sex brands these feminists as 'transphobic' TERFs—a bullying tactic used by opponents who cannot defend their position with sound logic or science, therefore resorting to name-calling. 

Society’s shift from accepting people who wish to live according to their innermost feelings to redefining reality everywhere for everyone is how current gender activism can assert nonsense like saying a trans woman's penis 'is a biologically female penis.' It's time society returns to reality to follow real science. Men can't be women and vice versa. Women, by definition, cannot include both females and not females. If ‘women’ includes anyone who 'identifies as female' (ie: males), then womanhood means nothing. 

This policy has real-life ramifications that harm women. If aggressive males who commit rape are given access to female-only spaces, like jails, this puts biological women in obvious danger. It further distorts data from accurately recording which gender commited the rape. It is neither transphobic nor hatred to state objective, biological truth. Few with name recognition, like Rowling, are willing to admit the obvious truth without fear of being ostracized by the woke mob. She deserves recognition for standing for what matters most: truth.