JK Rowling in ‘arrest me’ challenge over Scottish hate crime law
JK Rowling has challenged Scotland's new hate crime law in a series of social media posts - inviting police to arrest her if they believe she has committed an offence.
The Harry Potter author, who lives in Edinburgh, described several transgender women as men, including convicted prisoners, trans activists and other public figures.
She said "freedom of speech and belief" was at an end if accurate description of biological sex was outlawed.
Earlier, Scotland's first minister Humza Yousaf said the new law would deal with a "rising tide of hatred".
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 creates a new crime of "stirring up hatred" relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.
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Ms Rowling, who has long been a critic of some trans activism, posted on X on the day the new legislation came into force.
If someone's body has the typical properties for males or females, it's generally considered as such. If someone was born with properties of both, they maybe considered intersex. Trans people often don't fit very well into this system. A trans woman for example may have XY genes (a typically male trait) but estrogen and a vagina (typically female traits).
Male and female work well for most people, but there are some people whose bodies aren't strictly male or female. For those people, medicine generally has to individually consider the relevant traits.
It's really fascinating stuff, and way more complex than they teach us in school. Hopefully, this is changing though. With how important survival is to evolution and how prevalent this stuff seems to be, I can't imagine that there isn't some reason that a species would have so many variations. I wonder how common it is for other species to have variations that aren't simply the xx and xy equivalent in nature. I wonder if it is possible for there to be a 3rd chromosome type in any other species. It's so cool that this is all something that is getting more and more awareness.