JK Rowling deserves gratitude not vilification

I sometimes think I’m living in a parallel universe where things that shouldn’t happen always do. So, let’s just remind ourselves why JK Rowling felt the need to fund a shelter in Edinburgh to provide female-only support exclusively for women who have experienced sexual violence at the hands of men when an established network of refuges and rape crisis centres already existed. 

In my world I listened for hours to the heartbroken mother of a teenage girl who had been the victim of a gang rape in our capital city and couldn’t source the help that her daughter so desperately required. Traumatised, self-harming, suicidal, this young woman was told by a rape crisis centre that she could not be guaranteed a female counsellor. Indeed, she was treated like a pariah for asking.

And in another world, the trans-identifying man that was Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre’s chief executive, Mridul Wadhwa, was telling female victims who didn’t want to be seen, counselled, or supported by a biological man, to educate themselves on trans issues and reframe their trauma.

That young woman subsequently suffered from PTSD and her mother, quite rightly, became a champion for so-called gender critical views, having witnessed first-hand the unspeakable damage done to her daughter entirely because sex is immutable and then seeing with her own eyes the immeasurable harms done by those that believe otherwise.

Meanwhile, Wadhwa was feted by politicians, selected as an election candidate by the Scottish Greens and, in a new UK-wide role, invited into Whitehall to advise the UK Government equality minister on trans issues, despite having been found by an employment tribunal to have carried out a witchhunt on gender critical staff at the ERCC.

Amid all of this, it was an act of extraordinary philanthropy by JK Rowling, who has already put her wealth, power and influence to good use across the world in areas like Afghanistan to help protect women from subjugation by men, that she should set up and fully fund Beira’s Place here in the democratic West where the upholding of women’s sex-based rights should be a given, not a request, and should act as an exemplar for the rest of the world. For this, Rowling should have only received our overwhelming gratitude and support, not been vilified, politically snubbed, and included in a badly misjudged hitlist published and then hastily removed amid a backlash by the once respected charity, Amnesty UK, that listed Beira’s Place as an “anti-rights organisation”. 

And for anti-rights you could be forgiven for reading, ‘far-right’ because that is the assumption that Amnesty wants you to draw. Far-right, anti-rights, bigots, transphobes, and haters. And if that sounds familiar then hark back to Nicola Sturgeon’s condemnation of those that criticised her gender recognition reforms and you get the gist. 

Rowling, along with the other remarkable women at For Women Scotland and the policy collective Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, make up the seven Scottish women who have changed the debate around sex-based rights to fully recognise the importance of biology as a determinant of women’s persecution and to get the law reinstated. It is worth repeating over and over again just how normal, committed and selfless they all are. The kind of people you would want on your side fighting for a more equitable world.

And yet, Amnesty, ironically a body set up to fight injustice, awards them all a place on a rollcall of hate where the one common thread among the other organisations listed alongside them is that they are all committed to fighting for women. Funny that.

Why do we need to keep rehearsing the same old arguments about why women need single-sex spaces where sex is based on biology and not on how some would like it to be defined? We all agree that men are the problem which is why when you put up a barrier to that well-identified risk, you don’t then create a loophole that allows some of them to wriggle through. 

And I get why it was such a genius campaign concept for trans lobby groups to assert with real conviction that “trans women are women” to get round that clear obstacle of birth, but it was a myth, albeit one that so many of our politicians were willing to buy into, led by the former first minister who could never concede that she got any of this wrong. 

So, I was heartened to hear the UK health secretary James Murray describe with some humility, how he had changed his position on describing trans women as women. He said he had listened and recognised that not to be true. Similarly, Andy Burnham has done something of a mea culpa. 

That clear-eyed view of biological reality does nothing to diminish the existence of trans-identifying men and women, but it does make a clear distinction between categories of people with different needs and recognises that rights don’t always comfortably fit. 

But I am ashamed that Scotland became the epicentre of all this. That in a quest to be ‘the first’, our government pursued policies that became the lightning rod for a battle over the erosion of women’s rights. I am embarrassed for our political leaders and our senior civil servants who so willingly allowed themselves to be captured by a blatant falsehood and doggedly pursued the notion of gender self-identification that ultimately led to men being held in women’s prisons when that very proposition is so utterly preposterous to those that fully appreciate the vulnerability of the women that make up our female prison population that it should never have made it off some activist’s wish list.

And I remain horrified that we have legislators who are still rallying for people to break the law when it comes to single-sex spaces and who vehemently argue from a position of ignorance that the EHRC code of practice should be scrapped.

I am so fed up with the idiocy of the debate and I will never, for the life of me, understand how a Scottish Government that is so expressly committed to tackling violence against women and girls has managed to get itself on the wrong side of both the argument and of history, and into a position of being unable to celebrate the remarkable achievements of a handful of Scottish women who moved the dial on what women’s equality really should look like and for that they were labelled ‘anti-rights’.