Years ago, in 2008, he donated a million pounds to Labour. Now it will be difficult to vote for the same party that is on its way to winning the July elections in the United Kingdom. JK Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, believes that the party led by Sir Keir Starmer puts the needs of transgender people ahead of those of women, risking jeopardizing centuries of feminist battles. “As long as Labor remains contemptuous and often abusive towards women fighting to maintain the rights their foremothers thought had been won forever, I will struggle to support it,” Rowling wrote in the Times.
Rowling accuses Starmer of a certain ambiguity on the topic, of not having sufficiently defended the former Labor MP Rosie Duffield, virulently attacked by the trans community for having said that “only women have cervixes”. Her words which in some way echo the positions of former prime minister and Labor leader Tony Blair: “Biologically, a woman has a vagina and a man has a penis.” Except that while Blair’s sentences were deemed acceptable, Duffield’s were defined as “toxic”. «For left-wing women like us – said Rowling – it is not, and has never been, about the fact that trans people enjoy the rights of all other citizens and are free to present themselves and identify as they wish. This is about the right of women and girls to assert their own boundaries. This is about free speech and observable truth.” Labor representatives recalled the many “very important laws that have improved women’s rights” passed by the party when it governed and specified that “sex and gender are different, as Labour’s Equality Act makes clear. This is why we have always said that we will not introduce self ID and that we will protect monosexual spaces for biological women.” Among the many battles waged by Rowling and by those who espouse the Gender Critical current of British feminism there is in fact the concern that allowing access to monosexual spaces, such as public bathrooms, hospital wards and rape prevention centres, even to those who are not woman biologically would make them less welcoming and more dangerous for women.
It is not the first time that the writer stands against the culture of self-ID, of gender self-identification. In 2019 Rowling openly supported Maya Forstater, a British researcher fired for having defined “biological sex as an objective fact”. The attacks Rowling received in 2020 were even stronger, even from her own fans when in some tweets she ironically lashed out against an advertising campaign that included trans and non-binary people with a uterus among the people who use tampons. «People who have their period. I’m sure there was a word to describe these people. Someone help me”, wrote Rowling, pretending not to remember the word “woman”.
The controversy is cultural and virulent, as well as
very delicate. Sensitivity and rights are at stake. People are at stake. It is unlikely that a mediation will be found in a few weeks. Otherwise not even a spell from the “wizard” will be able to push Rowling to vote for Starmer
