“Arrest me!”: J.K. Rowling posts anti-trans rant, responding to Scottish hate crime law

J.K. Rowling has taken on Scotland’s new legislation against hate speech in a lengthy anti-transgender Twitter thread posted Monday. 

Per ABC, Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act makes it unlawful to incite hatred via threatening or abusive language on the basis age, disability, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity. The “Harry Potter” series creator known for her transphobia posted a thread about the new law by sharing information about several transgender women, including convicted criminals, trans-activists and other public figures. “April Fools!” Rowling wrote. “Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.

“In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act,” Rowling claimed, “Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls. . . . For several years now, Scottish women have been pressured by their government and members of the police force to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, repudiate biological facts and embrace a neo-religious concept of gender that is unprovable and untestable . . . Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.”

Rowling concluded she’s currently not in Scotland, “But if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” she said. She added the hashtag #ArrestMe