Mick Hartley

In the Times today, an extract from JK Rowling's essay in The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, due out tomorrow:

Looking back now, and notwithstanding how unpleasant it’s been at times, I see that outing myself as gender-critical brought far more positives than negatives. The most important benefit of speaking out was that I was free to act.

One of my favourite writers, Colette, wrote in her book My Apprenticeships, “among all the forms of absurd courage, the courage of girls is outstanding.” For too long, I’d watched in silence as girls and women with everything to lose had stood up in the face of a modern-day witch hunt, braving threats and intimidation, not only from activists in black balaclavas holding placards promising to beat and murder them, but from institutions and employers telling them they must accept and espouse an ideology in which they don’t believe, and surrender their rights. In a sense, of course, all courage is absurd. Humans are hardwired to survive, to seek safety and comfort. Isn’t it more sensible to keep your head down, to hope somebody else sorts it out, to serve our self-interest, to court approval? Possibly.

But I believe that what is being done to troubled young people in the name of gender identity ideology is, indeed, a terrible medical scandal. I believe we’re witnessing the greatest assault of my lifetime on the rights our foremothers thought they’d guaranteed for all women. Ultimately, I spoke up because I’d have felt ashamed for the rest of my days if I hadn’t. If I feel any regret at all, it’s that I didn’t speak far sooner.

And this, from former prison governor Rhona Hotchkiss, on why trans-identified males have no place in all-women prisons:

In 2014, I fulfilled what had been an ambition since joining the prison service five years previously and moved to HMP Cornton Vale — Scotland’s only all-women prison — as governor in charge.

In my two years there, I encountered several trans-identified male prisoners and became implacably convinced that they should not be in a women’s jail. I listened to all the arguments: they are women; they live as women; they are particularly vulnerable. But not one of those claims stood up to close examination. Trans-identified males pose the same challenges to women as all men — everyone knows what those are and that’s why men as a group are not permitted unfettered access to women’s spaces, services and sports. Trans-identified males are not excluded from these spaces because they are trans but because they are male, and that should hold as true for prisons.

I wish people would remember that women in jails have no choice: they cannot get away. They cannot avoid sharing intimate spaces. They cannot “reframe their trauma”, as one prominent Scottish activist outrageously suggested to rape survivors uncomfortable with males in single-sex spaces.

Women prisoners must live in close, sometimes very close, proximity to whoever the prison service decides. They must say nothing while a man with an erection, visible through his tight leggings, enjoys their obvious discomfort. They must say nothing while an aggressive man punches walls, triggering adrenaline rushes of fear as women relive the male violence and abuse that they have suffered in the past. They must say nothing while a man, masquerading as a woman, describes in detail what he plans to do to his girlfriend with his penis when he gets out. And they must remain silent when a “trans woman” tells them he has no intention of living as a woman in the community.

These all too common incidents, all ones I have witnessed or had reported to me, are compounded by the fact that in the UK, but not only the UK, a disproportionately high number of trans-identified males in prison are convicted sex offenders….

Update: amended, as The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht is not just a Rowling book – it's a collection of essays, with JKR being one of the contributors.