Mick Hartley

As everyone knows by now, JK Rowling has tweeted about Police Scotland's absurd announcement that they'll record rapes as having been committed by women if the perpetrators ask them to. 

War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.https://t.co/SyxFnnboM1

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 12, 2021

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Though it doesn't say much for the mainstream media that Rowling's tweet made headlines while the original decision by Police Scotland was largely ignored. The Times yesterday reported that "JK Rowling has reopened a row over gender after she suggested that a new police policy for trans suspects was Orwellian", but it wasn't Rowling who reopened the debate: she's reopened the publicity on the debate, as she no doubt knew she would.

The Independent ran a piece by one Noah Berlatsky from New York – JK Rowling keeps tweeting and we keep wondering why:

Rowling seems to imagine a world in which trans women are privileged predators working with a compliant police force to assault innocent cis women. In fact, trans women are a small, marginalized, vulnerable minority, who face terrifying rates of sexual violence from the police who are supposed to help them.

There's absolutely no evidence for this, but still…

Rowling has an established history of tweeting “gender-critical” views which many view as transphobic. In particular, she has embraced longstanding stereotypes which frame trans women as perpetrators of violence and especially of sexual violence.

Um, no she hasn't.

Anyway, who is this Noah Berlatsky? Steerpike at the Spectator:

Berlatsky, it transpires, was recently (until they purged his page) communications director of the controversial not-for-profit Prostasia Foundation which has been accused of trying to normalise paedophilia through its work. The organisation calls pedophiles ‘minor attracted persons’ or MAPs, through tools like its 'MAP support club' for those aged 13 or up – 'a peer support chat for minor attracted people who are fundamentally against child sexual abuse and committed to never harm children, and is a safe space to have peer support in times of trouble.'

Berlatsky himself has previously written that 'Pedophiles are essentially a stigmatized group' and criticised even the definition of 'trafficking' saying it 'conflates underage people trading sex, consensual sex work, immigration, and all kinds of labor exploitation in all industries.' He claims that to use the word trafficking for child sex trafficking is a 'deliberately obfuscating term which is basically designed to target sex workers rather than labor exploitation.'

He's also tweeted that 'parents are tyrants. 'parent' is an oppressive class, like rich people or white people' and that 'there are things you can do to try to minimize the abuse that's endemic to the parent/child relationship but it's always there. One to remember the next time the Indy run another comment piece assailing someone else for 'normalising' or 'platforming' extremism or opining on sexual ethics.

Clearly Berlatsky is a far more superior sort than the dreadful type who give charities millions by writing popular books for children.