J.K. Rowling won’t play nice

When I wrote this profile of J.K. Rowling every institution in the UK had seemingly agreed to the demands of a trans movement that wanted it all.

There was no public debate or attempt to answer the doubts of critics. Sometime around 2017, and almost from nowhere, all political parties, state bodies, and corporations agreed as if in unison that biological men could compete in women’s sports and use women-only spaces and institutions.

The National Health Service would block puberty and in effect sterilise children and deny them the possibility of experiencing orgasm. There would be no constraints on targeting children on the autistic spectrum or those suffering from mental health disorders.

To even question the new settlement was to reveal a deep prejudice.

Rowling was a brave or bigoted voice (delete according to taste) crying out futile protests.

Since then, I think it is fair to say that there has been something of a turnaround.

Dr Hilary Cass's review of gender medicine found that it rested on "shaky foundations”. Meanwhile Rowling might as well have written the UK government’s official policy that “there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty suppressing hormones for the treatment of gender dysphoria or incongruence, which is why the NHS decided that they would no longer be routinely offered”.

In Rowling’s Scotland her old enemy Nicola Sturgeon signed up to the full trans package.

With the support of Scottish Labour and the Greens, she asserted that men could declare that they were women. Sturgeon did not see the dangers, even though they were glaringly obvious to outsiders. The Scottish prison service duly remanded Adam Graham, an alleged double rapist, to a women’s prison.

Why not? If trans women are indeed women, and Graham had decided that he was now a woman called Isla Bryson, where else should they put him?

The anger provoked by that decision helped destroy Sturgeon.

She was hardly the last progressive politician to suffer. Conservatives across the world know liberal overreach when they see it. They have used the trans issue to pummel progressives.

Donald Trump’s campaign dedicated the largest spending on a single ad to propaganda showing that his rival had endorsed using taxpayers’ money to fund sex-change operations for prisoners. An insult to voters on multiple levels.

It ended with the devastating message.

"Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you"

The world’s centre-leftists would have done better to have listened to Rowling and women like her, or at least not dismissed their concerns so easily and contemptuously. But then, as I say in this piece, she never wanted their approval.

I have added a note to say that if Rowling and other gender-critical feminists have a fault it is that they cannot say how society should treat the tiny numbers of people with a genuine gender dysphoria.

That aside, the argument stands, and so does J.K. Rowling: fierce, funny and independent. In a world of yes men, she remains her own woman.

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Rowling takes the hard road

In Troubled Blood, J.K. Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith) shows why, for all her fame, she will never be a celebrity.

The hero Cormoran Strike is in a pub listening to his friend Polworth explain the advantages of matrimony.

“There I am trying to get my hole on a Thursday night, heading home alone again, poorer, bored shitless; I thought of the money I’ve spent chasing gash, and the hassle, and whether I want to be watching porn alone at forty, and I thought, this is the whole point. What marriage is for. Am I going to do better than Penny? Am I enjoying talking shit to women in bars? Penny and me get on all right. I could do a hell of a lot worse. She’s not bad looking. I’d have my hole already at home waiting for me, wouldn’t I?”

We are enduring a new era of Victorian respectability. The nineteenth century policed what subjects writers could discuss. The twenty-first century allows them to discuss what they want, then polices how they discuss it.

In 99 novels or TV scripts out of 100, a man admitting to “chasing gash” and seeing his wife as a reliable supplier of “hole” would be a carrier of “toxic masculinity”. His revolting words would lead to the inevitable revelation that he was a revolting man who would behave badly and end worse.

Rowling is Victorian only in her Dickensian exuberance. She has produced dozens of characters for her Strike novels, as she did for the Harry Potter stories, and even when the characters are caricatures, they ring true. Her powers of imagination and observation, and her remarkable sense of place — when she describes streets I have walked for years, I see them afresh — make the Strike series as much state-of-the-nation novels as detective stories.

If you want to describe your country as it is, rather than as the priesthood of the arts want it to be, you must be authentic. To go back to Polworth wagging his finger by the bar: blokes in pubs are more often drunk than toxic. Later in the book, Rowling shows him as a generous man, although, for understandable reasons, his wife gives him a hell of a hard time.

The refusal to play the game, to behave as propriety insists that she must, provokes an unease about Rowling that has turned into outright hatred in some quarters.

To start to understand why, imagine what she could have become when she finished the Harry Potter series in 2007. She was the most famous writer on earth. In all likelihood, she was going to stay that way.