Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling posted her idea of an April Fool’s Day gag today, describing various criminals, a model, a TV presenter and others – all of whom identify as trans women – as women before writing, “Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.”
Rowling’s multiple posts on X/Twitter today were a response to a new hate crime law in Scotland that the country’s First Minister Humza Yousaf said is designed to stem a “rising tide of hatred.” Advocates of Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act say the measure provides greater protection against threatening or abusive behavior “intended to stir up hatred” on the grounds of age, disability, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity.
Rowling, whose opposition to recognizing the preferred pronouns of transgender people has been repeatedly denounced as transphobic, challenged the new Hate Crime law today, writing that if her April Fool’s posts qualify as an offense under the new act, “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.” (A resident of Edinburgh, Rowling said she is currently out of the country.)
Wrote Rowling, “The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women’s and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.”
Among those Rowling jokingly listed as women were convicted sex criminals Isla Bryson and Katie Dolatowski (in Rowling’s prank words, a “Lovely Scottish lass” and a “Fragile flower”); “Scottish woman and butcher” Amy George; athlete Giulia Valentino; Mridul Wadhwa, head of a Scottish rape crisis centre; Munroe Bergdorf, public campaigner for a children’s charity; Katie Neeves, UN Women UK delegate; and TV presenter India Willoughby.