I’m seeing quite a bit of comment about this, so I want to make a couple of points.

I’m not owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created. The idea is as ludicrous as me checking with the boss I had when I was twenty-one for what opinions I should hold these days.

Emma Watson and her co-stars have every right to embrace gender identity ideology. Such beliefs are legally protected, and I wouldn’t want to see any of them threatened with loss of work, or violence, or death, because of them.

However, Emma and Dan in particular have both made it clear over the last few years that they think our former professional association gives them a particular right – nay, obligation – to critique me and my views in public. Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created.

When you’ve known people since they were ten years old it’s hard to shake a certain protectiveness. Until quite recently, I hadn’t managed to throw off the memory of children who needed to be gently coaxed through their dialogue in a big scary film studio. For the past few years, I’ve repeatedly declined invitations from journalists to comment on Emma specifically, most notably on the Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Ironically, I told the producers that I didn’t want her to be hounded as the result of anything I said.

The television presenter in the attached clip highlights Emma’s ‘all witches’ speech, and in truth, that was a turning point for me, but it had a postscript that hurt far more than the speech itself. Emma asked someone to pass on a handwritten note from her to me, which contained the single sentence ‘I’m so sorry for what you’re going through’ (she has my phone number). This was back when the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak, at a time when my personal security measures had had to be tightened considerably and I was constantly worried for my family’s safety. Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames, yet thought a one line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness.

Like other people who’ve never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is. She’ll never need a homeless shelter. She’s never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I’d be astounded if she’s been in a high street changing room since childhood. Her ‘public bathroom’ is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door. Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who’s identified into the women’s prison?

I wasn’t a multimillionaire at fourteen. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women’s rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges.

The greatest irony here is that, had Emma not decided in her most recent interview to declare that she loves and treasures me – a change of tack I suspect she’s adopted because she’s noticed full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it was – I might never have been this honest.

Adults can’t expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend’s assassination, then assert their right to the former friend’s love, as though the friend was in fact their mother. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public – but I have the same right, and I’ve finally decided to exercise it.

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Gladwell’s career wouldn’t have been destroyed if he’d spoken out against the glaring unfairness, not to mention dangers, of allowing men to compete in women’s sport. He’d have faced loss of approval from the cultural elite and received activist blowback, and even that wouldn’t have come with the tsunami of death and rape threats women face when they speak.

Non-famous people, mostly women, girls and gay people, have genuinely had their careers and indeed lives destroyed for saying what Gladwell was too pusillanimous to say, and Gladwell didn’t lift a finger in their defence. Like many well-known liberals, he was happy to watch members of the great unwashed bullied, traduced and defamed, fine with the erosion of freedom of speech, comfortable with young women being robbed of sporting honours and facing serious injury, because he valued his own standing and security more highly than acting on the feeble promptings of his conscience.

A rash of condescending men will swarm my mentions when I post this to tell me I should be pleased about Gladwell’s cautious backtracking. No. He hasn’t changed. He’s merely sensed a shift in what it’s acceptable to say and feels safe to align himself with the new consensus, excuses for his previous behaviour to the fore. He isn’t an ally, he’s a weathervane.

Changing sides years late, and only after you’ve realised the non-elite opposition is winning, isn’t a mark of integrity but of arse-covering. Those whose overriding focus is remaining in good odour with the in crowd can never be trusted. Gender identity ideology has been the modern arts world’s McCarthyism, and all Gladwell’s done is reveal himself as a man who’d have named names, but felt a bit uncomfortable about it afterwards.

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As another man who once worked with me declares himself saddened by my beliefs on gender and sex, I thought it might be useful to compile a list for handy reference. Which of the following do you imagine makes actors and directors who aren’t involved with the HBO reboot of Harry Potter so miserable?

Is it my belief that women and girls should have their own public changing rooms and bathrooms?

That women should retain female-only rape crisis centres?

That men don’t belong in women’s sport?

That female prisoners shouldn’t be incarcerated with violent men and male sex offenders?

That women should remain a protected class in law, because they have sex-specific needs and issues?

That language should reflect reality rather than ideological jargon, especially in a medical context?

That women shouldn’t be harassed, persecuted or fired for refusing to pretend humans can change sex?

That women should not be threatened with violence and rape when they assert their rights?

That freedom of speech and belief are essential to a pluralistic democratic society?

That troubled minors, especially those who are gay, autistic and trauma-experienced, should be given mental health support instead of irreversible surgeries and drug treatments on non-existent evidence of benefit?

That gay people shouldn’t be pressured to include the opposite sex in their dating pools, nor should they be smeared as ‘genital fetishists’ when they don’t?

That cross-dressing heterosexual male fetishists aren’t actually oppressed, but having the time of their lives piggybacking off gender identity ideology?

That said ideology, and the privileged, blinkered fools pushing it because they suffer zero consequences themselves, have done more damage to the political left’s credibility than Trump and Farage could have achieved in a century?

Let me have your thoughts.

Previous writing: « Nicola Sturgeon is once again complaining

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I see Nicola Sturgeon is once again complaining that I posted a picture of myself wearing a T-shirt with her name on it and the legend ‘Destroyer of Women’s Rights.’ Apparently this didn’t ‘elevate the debate.’

Is there a clinical term for an individual who has extreme thinness of skin when it comes to their own perceived hurts, coupled with a rhino-hide when it comes to the fear and suffering of others?

I’m thinking in particular of the two women Isla Bryson raped, who had to watch their First Minister squirm and smirk on TV as she tried to avoid admitting he was a man; of the five survivors of male violence who were ready to give evidence to Sturgeon’s committee on gender self-ID, but were told to put their concerns in writing while seventeen trans-identified people appeared in person; of the mother of a young girl with a learning disability who campaigned against self-ID because she wanted her daughter to be guaranteed same sex intimate care, should she need it (the mother was presumably one of those female opponents Sturgeon calls ‘shrill’ and ‘hysterical’ in her memoir); of the ten-year-old girl sexually assaulted in a public bathroom by a 6’5″ paedophile who served his jail sentence in a women’s prison because he called himself ‘Katie’; of Sandie Peggie, forced to discuss her own menstrual history in public to justify not wanting to undress in view of a 6ft straight cross-dresser in the nurses’ changing room; of Marion Millar, dragged into court because she tweeted a picture of suffragette ribbons; of the Scottish rape crisis centres reliant on government funding who were pressured to admit trans-identified males into their services if they wanted funding to continue.

When Sturgeon refers to an ‘elevated debate’, she means a discussion that takes place within a tiny, smug bubble from which regular women suffering real life consequences of her policies are firmly excluded. These faceless ants are loftily dismissed as bigots, or, to be more precise: ‘transphobic, misogynistic, homophobic, maybe racist as well.’

Nicola, you hated the T-shirt picture because you couldn’t ignore it, as you’d ignored so many other women trying to make you understand their concerns. Appeals to your empathy, your intelligence and your compassion all failed. Apparently the only way to get through to you is through your vanity.

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Here’s the thing: I was always (and remain) open to persuasion on independence for Scotland. I have close pro-Indy friends who are good, clever, thoughtful people. I’m well aware there was a respectable argument to be made for independence and there still is.

I voted against it in 2014 because I believed the inevitable economic destabilisation and upheaval was being seriously underplayed by the SNP, and that the impact would be felt, as it always is, by the poorest and most vulnerable. I still think the SNP had no good answers to serious, good faith questions and Sturgeon offers none in her book. IMO, the SNP was asking us to simply cross our fingers and jump in the belief that myriad complexities would magically resolve themselves. As I said at the time, people like me weren’t the ones who were going to suffer serious injury if the landing turned out to be a lot harder than promised.

Did pro-union people behave badly, as well as nationalists? Yes, without a doubt. In any binary contest, you will look around and find a lot of people standing in your camp you don’t have a single thing in common with except on a single yes/no question.

There’s a reason, though, that far more nationalists than unionists look back fondly on the run up to the referendum time. Pro-independence politicians were happy to impugn remainers’ motives in very ugly ways, and plenty of elected MPs and MSPs contributed enthusiastically to online toxicity.

When people who call a country home and love it are called traitors and Quislings by their own elected representatives for having questions about currency unions and sterlingisation, their feelings about that country inevitably shift. I used to see the Saltire in such a positive way. I felt it belonged to everyone; it was a flag with no negative associations whatsoever. Then 2014 happened and I realised my naivety, because I was told (along with millions of others) that it didn’t belong to me, that I had no right to it, that I was insufficiently good and Scottish to be included beneath it.

I know very well those sentiments weren’t shared by everyone in the Yes camp, because, as stated above, I admire and indeed love certain Yessers. The fact remains that a lot of people on the No side came through that referendum with certain illusions about Scotland shredded.

Sturgeon sees everything through the prism of identity politics. She assumes all No voters must have been deeply attached to a British identity, but that simply isn’t the case. Lots of us were persuadable, but if the knee jerk response to common sense questions is ‘you’re a unionist traitor, a scaremonger and no true Scot’, don’t be surprised if the questioner becomes sceptical about the inclusive, egalitarian, welcoming utopia independence activists swore we’d be living in once they were in charge.

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This shift in attitudes shown below isn’t because of increased intolerance, but of an increase in understanding, and trans activists themselves bear the greatest responsibility for the change.

Five years ago, a lot of medical bodies (and trans activist organisations, lobby groups and virtue-signalling celebrities) were united in telling us that puberty blockers were completely reversible and harmless. As more and more evidence accrues showing actual and potential harm, public opinion, unlike trans activism, has shifted in line with the data.

Five years ago, the sophisticated, fashionable line was that sex difference didn’t really matter in sport. Trans activists demanded that the women’s category be destroyed to accommodate men who claim to be female, but the public wasn’t willing to pretend they couldn’t see the injustice right in front of their faces.

Five years ago, trans activists and professional lanyard- wearers were chiding us all to use preferred pronouns, because that was kind. Now the public see convicted rapists described as ‘she’ and ‘her’ by news outlets and are rightly enraged that journalists are feeding us ideological fiction instead of facts.

Five years ago, a lot of people, especially older ones, were under the impression that trans-identified men had all had full sex reassignment surgery and were sexually orientated towards other men. They didn’t know that cross-dressing straight men were now asserting the right to enter all women’s reserved spaces. They didn’t know how few trans women have had ‘bottom surgery.’ They know now.

Trans activists are to blame for the hounding and persecution of non-believers, which has spilled into British courts. Women have had to fight all over again for rights they thought they’d have forever. The Cass Review brought shame on all who lobbied to continue a broadly unresearched and unevidenced medical experiment on minors. Trust in institutions, in academia, the media and the medical profession has been severely undermined. Politicians have beclowned themselves, willing to parrot self-contradictory slogans and outright absurdities rather than defend truth and freedom of speech.

The stark change in attitudes over the past five years is the direct consequence of the way trans activists set out to ‘educate’ us all. Giddy with the power they’d been handed by people in authority, they’ve tried to impose a quasi-religious, elitist, minority belief upon the whole of society. They can’t complain (although, of course, they will) that the public has decided it doesn’t want to buy what they’re selling.

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A large number of people (mostly men, in my experience) who’re sympathetic to some of women’s opposition to gender identity ideology, nevertheless think it’s cruel to point out that a trans-identified man looks like a man, and unkind not to ‘respect’ his pronouns. They think these are ‘compromises’ women should be prepared to make. ‘What does it matter?’ they say. ‘How does it hurt you?’

The psychological effects of being coerced, manipulated or pressured into doing something that is against a person’s own beliefs or values are well known. ‘Moral injury’ occurs when a person is forced to betray deep-held convictions, or stand in silence while those convictions are being betrayed. The individual feels transgressed at a core level. The inevitable consequences are stress, anxiety and anger.

Workplaces across the west have imposed a Kafkaesque situation on women. A belief system most people consider nonsensical, but which, in elite circles, has become almost a religion, has been imposed from on high. Women are being persecuted and punished for not pretending they think men can change sex. The policing of pronouns, and the harassment and shaming of women who won’t pretend they can’t recognise a man when they see one, is merely the tip of genderism’s gigantic, threatening iceberg.

Any man who seeks to force women to play along with the fantasy that he’s female is engaging in a typically male power play. At worst, he will suffer narcissistic injury from her non-compliance, but that doesn’t make him objectively vulnerable. The non-compliant woman, though, suffers lasting moral injury by being forced to participate daily in a lie – a lie, moreover, that constitutes a fundamental threat to her own rights to privacy, dignity and safety.

It has been profoundly illuminating to see how many people – possibly because their own values spring, not from a place of rationality or true conviction, but from fashion and self-interest – see male narcissistic injury as so very much more worthy of compassion than the moral injuries suffered by women.

Previous writing: « Another day of lunacy in the Scottish courts

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Just another day of lunacy in the Scottish courts. Dr Kate Searle, a consultant in emergency medicine, says she knows she’s female because it says so on her birth certificate, but she personally isn’t an expert on recognising a baby’s sex.

‘I don’t think you can prove it’ is one hell of a way to deny withholding information from a tribunal.

However, Dr Searle’s a doctor, which makes her automatically trustworthy, the same way her male colleague, Dr Upton, became automatically trustworthy in the female changing rooms the moment he said he was a woman. #IStandWithSadiePeggie

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