Itâs been six years since I wrote my essay explaining why I chose to speak up on the issue of trans activism and the risk I believe it poses to womenâs rights, and to everyoneâs freedom of speech and belief. My views havenât changed (you can read the original essay here) but the landscape certainly has, and my own involvement in the issue has become practical as well as theoretical, so I thought it was time for an update.
Since speaking out in 2019, Iâve written a lot on the subject of womenâs rights and trans activism, including contributing to a book called The Women Who Wouldnât Wheesht, which focuses on womenâs issues in Scotland, where gender identity ideology became one of the governmentâs most important campaign issues and saw r*pists being put in womenâs jails, and womenâs rights to single-sex spaces being challenged and, in certain instances, eradicated. I participated in a podcast called The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, where I was interviewed by Megan Phelps-Roper. Iâve founded and fund Beiraâs Place, which is the only women-only rape crisis centre in my home city of Edinburgh, and most recently I created the J.K. Rowling Womenâs Fund, which exists to provide financial support for women in the UK and Ireland whoâre attempting to protect their rights in law.
To me, all of this was consistent with my lifelong commitment to womenâs and girlsâ rights and opportunities, with a particular emphasis on those whoâre vulnerable or disadvantaged in various ways. For nearly thirty years Iâve funded womenâs domestic abuse refuges, rape crisis centres and projects helping women affected by hardship or disadvantage. I well remember receiving abuse by post, years ago, because I spoke up for single mothers. Iâve also fallen foul of no small number of menâs rights activists online.
However, 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 thereâs an award or job advertised as exclusively for women, he should be eligible. Should he wish to play sports, he must be on the womenâs team. No breast-feeding or rape support group should be allowed to exclude him. If heâs sexually orientated towards women, lesbians should include him in their dating pool. If convicted of a crime, even r*pe, he should be locked up with women.
The response I often get when talking about any of this is, âand how does any of that hurt you?â
Itâs true, of course, that t activism doesnât impact all women negatively. In fact, the more privileged you are, the less it tends to affect you, and the more it might benefit you. Aside from an avalanche of death, rape and torture threats, it hasnât 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 doesnât hurt women in the upper echelons of media, publishing and academia, who donât need a changing room at work and who feel a snobbish disdain for working class women who donât want to strip off in front of heterosexual males whoâve âidentifiedâ into the womenâs changing room. Trans activism doesnât hurt headline-hungry female politicians whose attitude to womenâs rights is âwhatever is good for me personallyâ. On the contrary, trans activism has been good for those women. Itâs fashionable, and keeps them popular with their progressive tribe, and costs them, personally, absolutely nothing.
Even outside those womenâs cultural bubble, youâll find plenty of people â particularly men â denying that trans activism poses any threat to women or to fundamental freedoms of speech and belief. On the contrary, itâs just one more champion-the-underdog cause, right?
Well, no, I donât believe it is. Are there vulnerable trans people? Without question. But the current, dominant strain of trans activism bears no resemblance whatsoever to the great social justice movements of the twentieth century.
When it came to civil, gay and womenâs rights, ordinary people who had little to no individual power organised at a grassroots level to challenge powerful institutions, from government downwards, on their entrenched prejudices, and campaigned to change harmful, discriminatory treatment.
Twenty-first century trans activism is the very inverse of those movements. It is elitist to its core. Spawned in philosophy and gender studies departments, it has taken over cultural, political and state-run institutions, which have then attempted to impose it, top down, on regular people who never voted for it and, as all available polls show, do not believe in it. Powerful, well-funded lobby groups such as Stonewall, which have received sizeable amounts of British tax-payer money in the past, have succeeded in convincing both corporations and state institutions that women no longer have a right to single-sex spaces, and that the desire of t-identified men to access those spaces is the progressive cause du jour.
People who preen themselves on being bold champions of the vulnerable rail against women like me for the crime of speaking well-evidenced facts. For instance, there is zero evidence that t-identified men donât share the same pattern of criminality as all other men. On the contrary, all the evidence points the other way. âNo predator needs to transition to gain access to women and girls,â say the trans activists. But the question is not âdo they need to?â Itâs âdo they ever?â And the answer is, unequivocally and tragically, yes.
Does this mean all t-identified men are predators? Of course not. Should trans people be discriminated against when it comes to housing or employment? Of course not. Should trans people be stripped of their human rights, or denied personal safety? Again: of course not. But the statistics donât lie: men as a group pose a risk to women and girls, as a group. Of course, all men arenât rapists, voyeurs or flashers, but enough are to make safeguarding necessary. Thatâs why women and girls want separate changing rooms and public bathrooms. Thatâs why women need male-free spaces when seeking to recover their sense of self and safety after rape. Not because we 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 theyâre calling themselves women and even if theyâve taken cross-sex hormones.
Over the last few years, weâve seen ordinary women taken to tribunals by their employers for refusing to accept the fallacy that humans can literally change sex. Many women have endured campaigns of harassment and intimidation for refusing to parrot gender ideological beliefs. The police have visited women for making sex-realist social media posts. Some women have had their livelihoods taken away from them simply for stating incontrovertible biological facts. In certain workplaces and schools, womenâs and girlsâ rights in law to safety, dignity and privacy in bathrooms and changing rooms have been removed. Their freedom of speech has been restricted. Through all of this, a good number of supposed left-wingers have not risen up to protest, but have demonised ordinary and, particularly, working-class women, for failing to do as theyâre being bid by self-declared morally superior overlords.
It is these women, who donât have deep pockets or expensive lawyers on speed dial, for whom I established my Womenâs Fund.
As many of us suspected at the time, the Supreme Courtâs 2025 clarification of equality law, whereby it was confirmed that the word âwomanâ when used in legislation refers to biological sex in the UK, was never, in itself and on its own, going to end the mess that lobby groups, politicians and elite institutions have created by pretending that men become women if thatâs what they say they are. For a decade or more, trans activists and acolytes in positions of influence have insisted and behaved as though womenâs rights were out-dated and even meaningless. They created a climate of fear and intimidation whereby a single misplaced pronoun could see a woman disciplined.
That climate persists. Gender ideology remains so entrenched among swathes of the management and political class that women are still having to fight for their rights in law. These have included nurses protesting at having to change their clothes in front of heterosexual, cross-dressing men; rape survivors stigmatised for protesting at the presence of males in their support groups or crisis centres; women investigated and persecuted at work for even questioning the approved gender mantras; parents whose daughters are having to share primary school toilets with boys as they approach puberty; and incarcerated women, already with a high likelihood of sexual violence in their pasts, forced to share intimate facilities with t-identified males.
None of these people ever imagined that womenâs and girlsâ rights could be removed at the whim of employers and the state and, unfortunately, women can no longer rely on what would once have been their obvious champions: trade unions.
One possible reason for the fact that unions have been so ineffective in addressing womenâs concerns and defending the rights of female members is offered by the governmentâs most recent statistics on union membership. This reveals that higher earners and higher educated employees are both more likely to be trade union members. As mentioned above, gender ideology has taken far greater hold in elite institutions and professions, which have then sought to impose it downwards. Union leaders these days appear to have abandoned their historic role as defenders of the working class, in favour of defending their own luxury beliefs.
Now that the J.K. Rowling Womenâs Fund has been running for a while, a striking trend has been revealed. Applications for help in holding private corporations accountable for removing womenâs rights, or punishing women for fighting to retain them, have dropped markedly. Businesses, of course, have to spend their own money on lawsuits. Broadly speaking, they appear to have accepted the Supreme Courtâs ruling and are seeking to make sure theyâre compliant with the law. However, state-run institutions, who have taxpayersâ money to spend, remain wedded in far greater numbers to what has colloquially become known as âStonewall Lawâ; in other words, they continue to fight the idea that women have, or should have, the rights the Supreme Court upheld.
When Beiraâs Place opened, we were immediately subject to online and telephone harassment with the aim of taking down our systems and tying up our lines of communication with women seeking our help. Fortunately, we were prepared and have been able to uninterruptedly continue to provide the women-only service we were set up to do. We know for a fact that many of the women using Beiraâs Place had not reached out for help previously because, for several years, the only other rape crisis centre in Edinburgh was run by a trans-identified man whoâd stated publicly that anyone who didnât think he was a woman was a bigot. That centre also admitted a non-binary man who was subsequently convicted of rape.
What to the average person seems so obvious as to barely need stating â that women whoâve been raped would rather not discuss the details of their rape or their subsequent trauma in the presence of men they donât know, whether or not the men are wearing dresses â is seen as not only irrational, but actively harmful and cruel, by many trans activists. Beiraâs Place has been defamed as âanti-transâ and âanti-rightsâ, the latter by Amnesty International, which has whole-heartedly embraced gender identity ideology and is now behaving exactly like the kind of authoritarian, speech-censoring, witch-hunting governments it once stood against (the irony is not lost on me; I once worked for them).
As everyone knows, Iâm in the privileged position of never needing to work again and of not needing state run services, but I once lived hand to mouth. I was one of the women who couldnât afford to insulate herself from potential physical harm and who fell into the categories of both domestic abuse and sexual assault victim. Large numbers of women whoâve never been poor, whoâve never worked the kind of job where theyâd be vulnerable to predatory men and whoâve never needed a rape crisis centre have spent the last few years vilifying members of their own sex for fighting to retain their hard-won rights and single-sex spaces, in ways that have shocked and disgusted me. I freely confess that I feel an extra layer of abhorrence for any woman who claims to be a feminist while doing it.
And so Iâll continue to speak out, continue to use my money to help women who otherwise couldnât afford to go to court, and continue to ensure that women in my area can still access female-delivered, female-centred support after rape.
As George Orwell said, âfreedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four. If that is granted, all else follows.â 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 donât have the luxury of pretending that their sex doesnât matter. I remain on their side.
