J.K. Rowling‘s days as the poster child of the trans-exclusionary movement could be over, if the Scottish government has anything to say about it.
Scotland rolled out a new law, initially passed in 2021, at the outset of April 2024, dubbed the Hate Crime and Public Order Act. It details new restrictions on hate speech, and plants a criminal label on “stirring up hatred” based on age, religion, disability, sexual orientation, transgender identity, or intersex identification, according to BBC.
The new law would almost certainly label Rowling’s dime-a-dozen Twitter rants as hate speech, and could see her face legal action. The Harry Potter author resides in Edinburgh, the capitol of Scotland, with her family, and her residence in the country could see the 58-year-old author face serious consequences for her disparagement of the trans community.
Could Scotland’s new law land J.K. Rowling in jail?
J.K. Rowling gleefully took to the hate speech platform of choice — X — to misgender a slew of transgender people and goad the Scottish police in the wake of the Hate Crime and Public Order Act’s rollout. She was quick to mount an attack on the new act, and the protections it extends for trans people, as somehow anti-woman.
In Rowling’s mind, of course, trans women don’t exist, and trans men are entirely invisible. She won’t attack trans men, because — in her twisted, inaccurate version of reality — they’re women. And she “supports” women. But she will attack trans women — who she sees as men — because they, in her mind, are men seeking to erase womanhood.
None of this is true, and a genuinely overwhelming amount of evidence contradicts Rowling’s viewpoint. Despite this fact, she has only doubled and tripled down on her transphobia, and even invited Scottish police to arrest her when she next steps foot in the country.
Unfortunately for the people Rowling makes a new career out of attacking, that’s probably not going to happen. While the 58-year-old author’s unceasing hatred for trans people certainly falls under specific umbrellas of the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, the inclusion of language revolving around “threatening and abusive” acts will likely see her once again freed from consequences.
While Rowling’s speech absolute does harm, and widespread harm at that, it is rarely specifically threatening or abusive toward a single individual. Toward all trans people, particularly trans women? Absolutely. But with the specificity included in the act’s language, it probably isn’t enough.
There’s a very good argument to be made for the absolutely abusive nature of Rowling’s discourse, which often singles out specific trans women to use in her attacks. The issue is that Rowling cherry picks the worst examples she can, in order to bolster her hateful point, and few people are stepping in to defend registered sex offenders.
That doesn’t change the damage Rowling’s position does to trans people around the globe, of course, but because she’s not specifically targeting them, she isn’t breaking the law. She’s absolutely engaging in abusive behavior, and behavior that contributes to the sky-high instances of trans suicide and self-harm in the modern age, but that may not be enough to see her punished.
In fact, Rowling’s most recent Twitter tantrum was already excused as a non-criminal action. Her diatribe, following the act’s official enactment, included attacks on several trans women, but Police Scotland said “no action would be taken” in regards to the Twitter activity. Due to Rowling’s hate speech falling under the protection of an umbrella of “offensive or shocking” language, she’s safe — at least for now — from Scotland’s attempts to protect trans people.
