Young women must stop treating J.K. Rowling as the anti-Christ

“Can’t believe you’ve written a whole article defending JK Rowling!” said my Gen Z daughter in a text to her father, referring to his Telegraph comment that day on Scotland’s new Hate Crime Act.

He had, I thought, argued a good case for the Edinburgh-based writer’s successful attempt to make a mockery of Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf’s muddled legislation.

Rowling is in the vanguard of those who believe that making it a potential crime to call a transgender woman a man, punishable by up to seven years in prison, is a dangerous threat to free speech as well as to women’s rights.

This week, she threw down a gauntlet to Police Scotland by “misgendering” ten high-profile trans people on Twitter, including a convicted rapist, a butcher who abducted and sexually assaulted an 11-year-old girl and a number of other sexual offenders.

The new law is fuzzy, the police are confused and so, it seems, are the politicians driving it. Even the minister in charge, Siobhian Brown, couldn’t decide whether what Rowling said was a criminal offence or not.

In the end, the author was not arrested and remains at liberty to carry on her crusade against what another writer has called the “social mania” of transgender politics.

But while she is a heroine to much of my generation of women, to my daughter’s age group she is the anti-Christ. Nothing is so guaranteed to provoke an inter-generational meltdown as the mention of Rowling’s name in the presence of young women and teenage girls.

The very cohort nourished on Harry Potter as children have turned against the woman who, more than any, introduced them to reading and who now, more than any, stands up for their rights.

And yet this is also the generation of women that leans increasingly to the left, with recent research showing those aged 18 to 29 becoming ever more progressive while their male counterparts drift to the right.

The polarisation – as much as 27 per cent according to a report in the Economist – is partly attributed to a more feminised culture as more young women embrace feminism.

In another study this year, two-thirds (68 per cent) of women aged 16 to 29 said it was harder to be a woman than a man and nearly half (46 per cent) thought feminism had done more good to society than harm.

The young women I know would certainly identify with these findings. Even those who are not particularly politicised disdain the right, would not be seen dead watching GB News and would never knowingly date a Tory boy.

From my Baby Boomer perspective, it follows that they should therefore hail Rowling, the ultimate feminist, as their cheerleader.

A woman undoubtedly of the left – she has donated millions to the Labour Party – and a bleeding-heart philanthropist if ever there was one, she ticks all the boxes for moral leadership of young women. And still she is rejected.

Rowling is the wrong sort of feminist for youngsters reared in a world where highly controversial trans theory is accepted as fact and embedded in schools, universities and many workplaces.

Her mission – to warn of the risks of trans activism to safeguard single-sex spaces and to prevent harm to women and children – is regarded by those who would most benefit from such protections as transphobic.

Rowling has two daughters and sees clearly what is at stake when women’s rights are trashed in favour of the rights of men wishing to be women.

In Scotland’s Hate Crime Act, women are notably missing among the groups protected from hatred and prejudice. 

“Lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls,” said Rowling.

She pleads on behalf of women having to compete with males in female sports, of the “nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes”, and of the unfairness of women’s “jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men”.

Today’s young women put a high premium on being nice. They would give their last tenner to a beggar, are hyper-attuned to mental fragility among their friends, and are loyal beyond the call of duty.

Championing difference, including gender difference, is part of this mindset and, in that, they are not such poles apart from their ultra-liberal feminist forebears.

But how did they end up so diametrically opposed to us (I’m sure I speak for the majority of middle-aged women) on the JK question?

To try to understand, I bravely broached the issue with my daughter. Female rights impact her directly whereas trans rights do not, she agreed, but much of what irks about Rowling boils down to terminology – calling a trans woman a man.

There was also agreement that a man who believes he was born in the wrong body and undergoes gender reassignment surgery is far removed from the man who would be a woman for the day. There are, she conceded, different levels of tolerance for the one, with a psychological disorder, and the other, with his/her lifestyle choices.

But on Rowling, our generations continue to come to blows. One of my daughter’s young male friends, though, had messaged her about her dad’s Telegraph column. He loved it.

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