JK Rowling: Why I decided to stand up for women

In exclusive extracts from a new book The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, the
Harry Potter author, a broken-hearted mother and a former prison governor tell
the inside story of their fight for rights
By the standards of my world, I was a heretic. I’d come to believe that the socio-political
movement insisting “trans women are women” was neither kind nor tolerant, but in fact
profoundly misogynistic, regressive, dangerous in some of its objectives and nakedly
authoritarian in its tactics. However, I kept my thoughts to myself in public, because
people around me, including some I love, were begging me not to speak. So I watched
from the sidelines as women with everything to lose rallied, in Scotland and across the
UK, to defend their rights. My guilt that I wasn’t standing with them was with me daily,
like a chronic pain.
What ultimately drove me to break cover were two separate legal events, both of which
were happening in the UK.
In 2019, a researcher in England called Maya Forstater, who worked at a think tank,
took her bosses to an employment tribunal. Forstater alleged that she’d been
discriminated against for her belief that human beings cannot literally change sex. On
the one hand, it seemed inconceivable that the tribunal would rule against Maya for
holding and expressing a rational and factual belief, yet I had a dark, persistent feeling
that she was going to lose, in which case the implications of such a loss for freedom
of speech and belief in the UK, especially for women, would be far-reaching.
On the day in December 2019 that Maya lost her discrimination case (she’d go on to
win on appeal, and gain substantial damages) I tweeted: “Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live
your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that
sex is real? #IStandWithMaya.”
I then posted an essay on my website, elaborating on my concerns about gender
identity ideology. I’ve been struck, since, by how many of the people who claim to
know what I believe on this issue freely admit to never reading that essay. They don’t
need to, they say, because their favourite trans influencers have already explained
what I really meant. This peculiar stance seems to me to sum up the lack of critical
thinking surrounding this issue, and the aversion of gender activists to exposing
themselves to ideas that might shake their faith in their beloved slogans.
The following summer, in Scotland, where I’ve lived for three decades, the SNP
government, led by the first minister Nicola Sturgeon, was gearing up to pass the
Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would remove all medical safeguarding from
the transition process. A person would be able to change their legal gender as long as
they’d lived in their “acquired gender” for three months, and made a statutory
declaration that they intended to keep doing so. There was no definition of what “living
in an acquired gender” meant and no requirement for psychological assessment,
surgery or hormones. If the bill passed, it would mean that more male-bodied
individuals could assert more strongly their right to enter spaces previously reserved
for women, including abuse shelters, rape crisis centres, public changing rooms and
prison cells.
Polling showed that the public strongly disagreed with what Sturgeon’s government
was planning to do. I was so angry that the Scottish parliament looked set to push
through the Gender Recognition Reform Bill over public opposition that on October 6,
2022, the day of a women’s protest outside Holyrood, I posted a picture of myself
online wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan: Nicola Sturgeon, Destroyer of Women’s
Rights.
The bill passed in December 2022. Incredibly, an amendment to prevent those
previously convicted of sexual crimes such as rape from obtaining a gender
recognition certificate was voted down, a stain on the Scottish parliament that will take
a very long time to fade. (The bill was subsequently blocked by the UK government
because it was in conflict with the Equality Act.)
Sturgeon, who has described herself as “feminist to my fingertips”, spoke out in 2023
about the “real” motivations of those who had objections to the ideology: “There are
some people that I think have decided to use women’s rights as a sort of cloak of
acceptability to cover up what is transphobia … just as they’re transphobic you’ll also
find they are deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as
well.”
Many were outraged by Sturgeon’s words — a friend of mine ripped up her SNP
membership card because of them — but I wasn’t surprised. In the run up to the
Gender Recognition Reform Bill vote the first minister had argued exclusively along
standard trans activist lines, and one of the gender ideologues’ favourite talking points
is that unless you buy into their philosophy, you’re a homophobic white supremacist.
The backlash towards me for speaking out about Maya, about gender ideology in
general and about the situation in Scotland has been vicious. Nobody who’s been
through an online monstering or a tsunami of death and rape threats will claim it’s fun,
and I’m not going to pretend it’s anything other than disturbing and frightening, but I
had a good idea of what was coming because I’d seen the same thing happen to other
women, many of whom were risking careers and, sometimes, their physical safety.
Very few high-profile women — with honourable exceptions, especially in sport,
Martina Navratilova and Sharron Davies foremost among them — seemed prepared
to stand up and give these women cover and support. I felt it was well past time that I
stepped up too.
In what might be loosely described as my professional community, there was
bewilderment that I’d abandoned the safe, generally approved position to support
Maya and campaign against the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill. What was
I playing at?
People who’d worked with me rushed to distance themselves from me or to add their
public condemnation of my blasphemous views (though I should add that many former
and current colleagues have been staunchly supportive). In truth, the condemnation
of certain individuals was far less surprising to me than the fact that some of them then
emailed me, or sent messages through third parties, to check that we were still friends.
The thing is, those appalled by my position often fail to grasp how truly despicable I
find theirs. I’ve watched “no debate” become the slogan of those who once posed as
defenders of free speech. I’ve witnessed supposedly progressive men arguing that
women don’t exist as an observable biological class and don’t deserve biology-based
rights. I’ve listened as certain female celebrities insist that there isn’t the slightest risk
to women and girls in allowing any man who self-identifies as a woman to enter single-
sex spaces reserved for women, including changing rooms, bathrooms or rape
shelters.
I’ve asked people who consider themselves socialists and egalitarians what might be
the practical consequences of erasing easily understood words like “woman” and
“mother”, and replacing them with “cervix-haver”, “menstruator” and “birthing parent”,
especially for those for whom English is a second language, or women whose
understanding of their own bodies is limited. They seem confused and irritated by this
question. Better that a hundred women who aren’t up to speed with the latest gender
jargon miss public health information than that one trans-identified individual feels
invalidated, seems to be the view.
When I’ve asked what the lack of female-only spaces would mean for women of certain
faith groups, or survivors of sexual violence, the response is an almighty shrug. Over
and again I’ve heard “no trans person has ever harmed a woman or a girl in a female
space”, the speakers’ consciences apparently untroubled by the fact that they are
parroting an easily disprovable lie, because there’s ample evidence that men claiming
a female identity have committed sexual offences, acts of violence and voyeurism,
both inside women’s spaces and without. Indeed, the Ministry of Justice’s own figures
show that there are proportionately more trans-identified males in jail in the UK for
sexual offences than among male prisoners as a whole. When this inconvenient fact
is raised, I’m sometimes told trans-identified sex offenders “aren’t really trans, they’re
just gaming the system”. Well, yes. That’s the point. If a system relies on an
unfalsifiable sense of self rather than sex, it’s impossible to keep bad faith actors out.
One of the things that has most shocked me throughout this debacle has been the
determined deafness of so many opinion-makers to whistleblowers at the UK’s now-
discredited Tavistock gender identity clinic. Medics who were resigning from the
service in unusually high numbers asserted that autistic and same sex-attracted young
people, and those who’d experienced abuse — groups that were over-represented
among those seeking to transition — were being fast-tracked towards irreversible
medical interventions of questionable benefit by activist groups and ideologue medics.
Those whistleblowers have since been completely vindicated: after an independent
investigation, it’s to be closed.
Looking back now, and notwithstanding how unpleasant it’s been at times, I see that
outing myself as gender-critical brought far more positives than negatives. The most
important benefit of speaking out was that I was free to act.
One of my favourite writers, Colette, wrote in her book My Apprenticeships, “among
all the forms of absurd courage, the courage of girls is outstanding.” For too long, I’d
watched in silence as girls and women with everything to lose had stood up in the face
of a modern-day witch hunt, braving threats and intimidation, not only from activists in
black balaclavas holding placards promising to beat and murder them, but from
institutions and employers telling them they must accept and espouse an ideology in
which they don’t believe, and surrender their rights. In a sense, of course, all courage
is absurd. Humans are hardwired to survive, to seek safety and comfort. Isn’t it more
sensible to keep your head down, to hope somebody else sorts it out, to serve our
self-interest, to court approval? Possibly.
But I believe that what is being done to troubled young people in the name of gender
identity ideology is, indeed, a terrible medical scandal. I believe we’re witnessing the
greatest assault of my lifetime on the rights our foremothers thought they’d guaranteed
for all women. Ultimately, I spoke up because I’d have felt ashamed for the rest of my
days if I hadn’t. If I feel any regret at all, it’s that I didn’t speak far sooner.
One mother reveals her family’s dystopian nightmare after her young daughter found
a new ‘tribe’ at school. By Susan Dalgety
Esther is a broken-hearted parent. The mother of three girls, her family’s life has been
dominated by gender identity for nearly five years. Her eldest, Lily, now 17, believes
she is a man trapped in a woman’s body, having gone through a period of being non-
binary. Her younger sister, Rachel, is 15. She has tried binding her breasts and taking
testosterone supplements bought online, believing she can change her sex. Both have
been affirmed by teachers at their secondary school, against their parents’ wishes, but
in accordance with the Scottish government’s guidance issued to schools in 2021.
Esther, frustrated by years of trying to support her children as they struggle with their
mental health, has a simple message for Nicola Sturgeon and her ministers who
promoted gender identity in schools. “What were you thinking? Why would you impose
an adult agenda on children? Don’t you realise what you have done?”
Esther and her husband, Chris, are exhausted by their family’s ordeal. In her cosy
sitting room she recalls how pleased she and Chris had been when Lily first made
friends. “She is on the autism spectrum and finds making friends difficult. She didn’t
have any when she started secondary school. She spotted the rainbow flag at an open
day at school — it was the flag that attracted her, she didn’t know what it meant. It was
the Pride club and she was quickly signed up. She had found a ‘tribe’.”
Esther describes how Lily became obsessed by gender identity. “It was a non-stop
discussion about gender and sexuality. At one point she talked about 96 different
genders. She was looking for a reaction. We talked about it endlessly, at every family
meal. And her younger sister became interested too. We tried to be as supportive as
you can be as parents. They wanted flags, badges, all the paraphernalia, and we
supported them. After all, what’s a badge? It is just a badge.”
Then came Covid and, like almost every teenager, Lily and her sister Rachel
disappeared online. “At the start of lockdown, we did lots of things together as a family,
like going for walks together. But it wasn’t a normal society and the girls started
spending most of their time on their computers. We didn’t know that gender identity
ideology was all over TikTok and YouTube, and of course the algorithms sucked them
in deeper and deeper.”
Esther and Chris agreed to the school’s advice that the girls be known by their new
names at school, having previously changed their pronouns at school without their
parents’ knowledge. Esther explains: “The transgender guidance promotes the
affirmation model, so we reluctantly went along with it.” Desperate, they sought help
from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), only to find themselves
reported to social workers for “unintentional emotional abuse” because they refused
to affirm their daughter’s change of identity by using her chosen pronouns at home.
After a seven-month wait, social workers decided Esther and Chris had no case to
answer, and suggested that the family be referred to CAMHS for support. “I laughed,”
says Esther.
Five years after their oldest daughter started exploring her gender identity, Esther says
she and her husband are now taking a “watchful waiting” approach. “We have spent
time trying to reconnect with them to get our family unit back together … It is important
to stay close. But they are thoroughly entrenched in the ideology they see online,
which only presents a positive picture and none of the reality or risk.
“They are an idealistic generation; they don’t want to have a male–female divide.
Anyone can be anything.As JK Rowling said in her tweet, ‘dress however you please
…’ But this is different. By telling kids it is possible to change sex, it has confused
everyone, and it is damaging. I see the whole world affirming my children — school,
doctors, opticians, everywhere they go, all in the guise of ‘be kind’. It’s a dystopian
nightmare. And if we speak out, as parents, we get lambasted or sent to social
services. But everyone is affirming a delusion.”
Esther says her only hope now is time. “If we can keep them as far away as possible
from testosterone and surgery as their brain matures, we hope by the time they reach
the ‘magical’ age of 25, they will be comfortable in their bodies.”
Women in jails have no choice — they simply cannot get away
Former governor Rhona Hotchkiss on why trans-identified males have no place in all-
women prisons
In 2014, I fulfilled what had been an ambition since joining the prison service five years
previously and moved to HMP Cornton Vale — Scotland’s only all-women prison —
as governor in charge.
In my two years there, I encountered several trans-identified male prisoners and
became implacably convinced that they should not be in a women’s jail. I listened to
all the arguments: they are women; they live as women; they are particularly
vulnerable. But not one of those claims stood up to close examination. Trans-identified
males pose the same challenges to women as all men — everyone knows what those
are and that’s why men as a group are not permitted unfettered access to women’s
spaces, services and sports. Trans-identified males are not excluded from these
spaces because they are trans but because they are male, and that should hold as
true for prisons.
I wish people would remember that women in jails have no choice: they cannot get
away. They cannot avoid sharing intimate spaces. They cannot “reframe their trauma”,
as one prominent Scottish activist outrageously suggested to rape survivors
uncomfortable with males in single-sex spaces.
Women prisoners must live in close, sometimes very close, proximity to whoever the
prison service decides. They must say nothing while a man with an erection, visible
through his tight leggings, enjoys their obvious discomfort. They must say nothing
while an aggressive man punches walls, triggering adrenaline rushes of fear as
women relive the male violence and abuse that they have suffered in the past. They
must say nothing while a man, masquerading as a woman, describes in detail what
he plans to do to his girlfriend with his penis when he gets out. And they must remain
silent when a “trans woman” tells them he has no intention of living as a woman in the
community.
These all too common incidents, all ones I have witnessed or had reported to me, are
compounded by the fact that in the UK, but not only the UK, a disproportionately high
number of trans-identified males in prison are convicted sex offenders. Knowing all
this, no one should pretend it is ever acceptable to subject women prisoners to this
level of discomfort and threat day in, day out. I can think of no other vulnerable group
whose safeguarding is ignored in favour of another group — trans-identified males
held in the prison system — whose self-expressed and largely unexamined demands
pose such an obvious risk.
Of course, not every trans-identified male I met in prison posed an overt physical threat
to women. However, I came to realise that less obvious emotional and psychological
threats matter just as much, and that prisons have no effective way of assessing or
eliminating such risk. It is not about nice men versus dastardly men, it is about men.
Not all men, by a long way, but just as in every other place where it matters, women
in prison must be protected from those men whose presence may harm them.
The final element of my growing discomfort came from knowing that there was
absolutely no need to hold men, even those most at risk, with women. The Scottish
Prison Service (SPS) has an excellent track record in protecting vulnerable men: gay
men; former politicians; former police and prison officers; informers; and, yes, child
killers and rapists. They are held, in considerable numbers, routinely and generally in
safety. No one has ever suggested that the only safe place for these vulnerable males
is in a women’s prison. Yet in my last few months in charge of Cornton Vale, it was
mooted that a man — one of the most notorious, violent, manipulative and dangerous
prisoners of the 8,500 held in Scotland — might be transferred to the women’s prison,
as he had started identifying as female. “Not on my watch,” I remember telling my
deputy. Any plans were dropped.
In the summer of 2017, I became governor in charge of HMP Greenock — a majority
male prison, but with a women’s unit making up around one fifth of the population. It
was the behaviour of trans-identified males there that finally prompted me to raise the
issue internally, wherever I could, bolstered by the experience of my staff, many of
whom told me that they did not agree with the policy. Not one ever said that they did.
I retired from the prison service, aged 57, in 2019. From the moment I felt at last able
to speak out, invitations to talk about the plight of women in prison rolled in. It reached
a frenzied zenith in the first few weeks of 2023 with the jailing of a violent male sex
offender, Adam Graham (also known as Isla Bryson). After being found guilty of raping
two women he was sent to Cornton Vale to await sentencing. It later emerged that the
prison service had overruled an initial decision by the court service to take
Graham/Bryson to Barlinnie, a men’s prison.
For three or four days, it seemed I was the only voice the media wanted to hear. Nicola
Sturgeon’s normally composed manner seemed to desert her. Thousands of Scottish
women screamed “we warned you”. Her stance about the impact of her gender
recognition reforms failed in the face of this most rigorous of tests: reality.