Rowling Stands Her Ground on “Elitist” Trans Agenda Despite “Avalanche” of Threats

Despite what she called “an avalanche of death, rape and torture threats,” author J.K. Rowling isn’t backing down from her opposition to the radical transgender agenda. In fact, in an essay published Wednesday, she not only stood her ground but lambasted the whole movement as “elitist to its core.”

Rowling’s essay is an update on her 2020 piece explaining why she was speaking out on the trans agenda. Well-reasoned, fact-filled, and compassionate toward both women and transgender persons, the essay made Rowling Public Enemy Number One to the unreasonable, fact-free, and often-vicious trans movement.

When Harry “Becomes” Hermione

Having been called every name in the book — not to mention some unfit to print — and subjected to various threats, Rowling nevertheless wrote Wednesday, “My views haven’t changed.” In fact, she stated that her opinions on women’s and girls’ rights, most especially the right to be safe from potentially abusive men, haven’t changed in decades.

“However,” she contended,

what to me represents no change at all in my political or ideological outlook has, in recent years, seen me and women like me subject not only to criticism but also to death threats. This is because we oppose the current, dominant strain of trans activism, which holds that a man who declares himself a woman is, literally, a woman, and is therefore entitled to be treated as a woman in all contexts. Where women go to undress, he, too, should go to undress. If there’s an award or job advertised as exclusively for women, he should be eligible. Should he wish to play sports, he must be on the women’s team. No breast-feeding or rape support group should be allowed to exclude him. If he’s sexually orientated towards women, lesbians should include him in their dating pool. If convicted of a crime, even rape, he should be locked up with women.

Rowling made clear that she has nothing against trans people per se. She opposes “housing or employment” discrimination against them, and she believes they should not be “stripped of their human rights, or denied personal safety.” What she does not believe is that a trans “woman” should be allowed to intrude on private spaces for actual women: “Not because we [women] hate trans people, not because we want them dead, not because we want them somehow eradicated from existence, but because women and girls have specific issues and needs that men do not, even if they’re calling themselves women and even if they’ve taken cross-sex hormones.”

Abusive Privilege

None of this, of course, matters to the trans activists. Thus, recounted Rowling, women have lost their jobs, been subjected to “campaigns of harassment and intimidation,” and even been visited by the police “for refusing to accept the fallacy that humans can literally change sex.”

“Through all of this,” she observed, “a good number of supposed left-wingers have not risen up to protest, but have demonized ordinary and, particularly, working-class women, for failing to do as they’re being bid by self-declared morally superior overlords.”

Those same left-wingers constantly criticize white people, especially men, for their supposed “privilege.” Yet trans activism is primarily the domain of the privileged, argued Rowling:

In fact, the more privileged you are, the less [trans activism] tends to affect you, and the more it might benefit you. Aside from an avalanche of death, rape and torture threats, it hasn’t noticeably affected my life. Nor does it hurt wealthy women who repost the vogueish mantras while sitting in dressing rooms guarded by private security guards. It doesn’t hurt women in the upper echelons of media, publishing and academia, who don’t need a changing room at work and who feel a snobbish disdain for working class women who don’t want to strip off in front of heterosexual males who’ve “identified” into the women’s changing room. Trans activism doesn’t hurt headline-hungry female politicians whose attitude to women’s rights is “whatever is good for me personally.” On the contrary, trans activism has been good for those women. It’s fashionable, and keeps them popular with their progressive tribe, and costs them, personally, absolutely nothing.

“Twenty-first century trans activism,” Rowling declared, “is elitist to its core,” imposed “top down, on regular people who never voted for it and, as all available polls show, do not believe in it.”

Rowling Keeps Rolling

Still, she noted, there are some bright spots amid the darkness. For Women Scotland, a group that Rowling supports, got the U.K.’s Supreme Court to rule last year that the words “man” and “woman” in the country’s Equality Act mean exactly what they say, not what trans activists want them to say. As a result, she claimed, the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, which bankrolls women’s legal battles for their rights, has seen a significant reduction in the number of cases it’s being asked to fund against private businesses. On the other hand, “state-run institutions, who have taxpayers’ money to spend,” aren’t giving up so easily.

With that in mind, Rowling wrote that she was going to keep right on doing what she’s been doing:

As George Orwell said, “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four. If that is granted, all else follows.” If a man can be a woman, there is no such thing as a woman. That might not matter to you personally, but it matters to millions of women who don’t have the luxury of pretending that their sex doesn’t matter. I remain on their side.