Massie on Rowling - silence

Deafening silence on hounding of JK Rowlinghttps://t.co/7FzRepL6b3

— alexmassie (@alexmassie) November 28, 2021

The purpose of this demonstration was, quite obviously, twofold. First, it was a means by which the performers could show off. Hark at their audacity! Salute their bravery! Secondly, and rather more grimly, their protest was designed to encourage others to protest against Rowling. If it were not so, there would have been no advantage in purposefully revealing Rowling’s address. The message of doing so was clear: here is the witch, come make her life uncomfortable. Enjoy her pain.

I suspect most people take the view that whatever arguments may rage in public, a person’s family home is not a suitable venue for protest of this, or indeed any other, sort. There is, it seems to me, a rather significant difference between Harry Potter fans mooning about in their Hogwarts scarves taking selfies outside Rowling’s house and this kind of protest. One is mildly odd but the other is calculatingly threatening. If it were not, if it were not a kind of performance, there would be no need for it.

Performance is all, however, and performance makes its own reality. Thus the comedian Eddie Izzard may announce that henceforth he is living on “girl mode” and expect to be taken seriously. Well, good luck to him. Live your loveliest life. At some point, though, womanhood must be something more than a costume into which a person may slip in and out. Self-realisation may often be a beautiful thing but even this must have some limits and saying something does not, in fact, make that something so. Truth is a tough cookie too.

Rowling is tough enough to look out for herself. But many others are not. She named some of the women — Allison Bailey, Marion Miller, Rosie Duffield, Joanna Cherry, Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock — who have, as she put it, “been subject to campaigns of intimidation which range from being hounded on social media, the targeting of their employers, all the way up to doxxing and direct threats of violence, including rape”. And all for insisting that biological sex is real and no amount of performative theorising can alter that.

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Rowling would accept she is lucky; many of those without a public profile are not. She speaks because others cannot.

But even the rich and the famous have rights too. And once again, the silence of some of those who might ordinarily be expected to defend a writer from this harassment was as overwhelming as it is shameful. Scottish PEN, an organisation notionally devoted to promoting freedom of expression and the interests of writers, has maintained its unbroken record of silence on the harassment of Scotland’s most famous author. Perhaps it is Rowling’s misfortune to be too successful.

The first minister, an active Tweeter and, as she often reminds us, a proper book lover, has strangely been unable to find the time to comment either. Perhaps this is because Rowling is a witch twice over. It is bad enough that she is unpersuaded by the Scottish government’s proposals to allow trans-identifying people to self-ID but it is unforgivable that she also donated a substantial sum to the Better Together campaign in 2014. Hell mend her for she is One of Them, not One of Us.

The point at issue here is not Rowling’s views — hideous as a majority of Holyrood parliamentarians may think them — but her right to express them without occasioning this kind of treatment. And on this, naturally, our parliamentarians are — with a Joanna Cherry-sized exception — silent. That is as revealing as it is dispiriting. Far too few of our public figures are interested in — or worse, capable of — arguing for or against a given position on its merits. First principles are the first things to be ignored.

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As it happens there was last week an illuminating example of the kind of madness to which Rowling, like many others, takes exception. The local paper in Middlesbrough reported a case of indecent exposure beneath the headline “Teeside woman accused of exposing penis, using sex toy, and masturbating in public”.

Now gender is fluid but sex is binary and it ought not to be controversial to recognise this reality. Be whomever you wish to be and live however you like but, no matter how much you squint at it, there is no way of making sense of a sentence such as “she is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window”.

Nor is this simply a lurid story of individual indecency. It matters how data is collected and catalogued. The overwhelming majority of sex crimes are committed by men. If biologically male sex offenders who identify as women are classified as women for the purposes of crime statistics then, in swift order, a wholly misleading picture of criminal behaviour will be created.

We shall very suddenly be wondering why there are so many more female sex offenders than used to be the case.

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So accuracy matters. As ever, though, we should note that much of this argument largely bypasses trans people. Their voices are more various than is sometimes claimed and many of the most sweeping claims of transphobia and bigotry are not made by trans people themselves but by their notional allies in the trans rights movement. Many of these activists seem inordinately upset by women who dare to disagree with them.

In this way, a movement notionally predicated on love and diversity and being on “the right side of history” reveals itself, instead, utterly incapable of observing the principle “live and let live”. On the contrary, dissenters must be considered heretics and heretics must be cleansed by fire. It is a stunningly illiberal way of thinking; a movement high on its own supply of self-righteous fantasy.

There is a “right side of history” here, right enough, and it is very clear which side it is.