JK Rowling has challenged Scotland’s new hate crime law in a series of social media posts - inviting police to arrest her if they believe she has committed an offence.

The Harry Potter author, who lives in Edinburgh, described several transgender women as men, including convicted prisoners, trans activists and other public figures.

She said “freedom of speech and belief” was at an end if accurate description of biological sex was outlawed.

Earlier, Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf said the new law would deal with a “rising tide of hatred”.

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.

Ms Rowling, who has long been a critic of some trans activism, posted on X on the day the new legislation came into force.

  • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    I possess the books and movies, and never interact with the fandom or the author. There is zero need to. Let the art exist in isolation.

    NEXT POINT: the stories have their own issues regarding certain portrayals but that is aside from the context of “new developments” a la the author’s modern opinions on things outside the plot of the books.

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Yeah, like, I don’t know what Frank Herbert or J.R.R.Tolkein’s stances on trans rights would have been either, and it doesn’t impact me reading their work at all.

      On the other hand, I do not want to give this person any money, so there’s that. I won’t be spending money on her stuff.

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      I miss when my biggest problem with JK Rowling was her desire to keep writing new material for Harry Potter, but instead of ya know… making spinoff books, maybe do a TV Show, maybe get in touch with Archie at some point for an expanded universe comic: I mean God knows they need the money after Sonic went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back… oh right Warner Bros. owns the franchise… so I guess DC could have done the Expanded Universe comic?

      No instead of doing any of that she just randomly dripped out plotpoints from the internet, and always stuff that made no fucking sense… like

      “Dumbledore was gay the whole time, despite the fact that I NEVER HINTED AT THIS! Also Wizards don’t have toilets! They shit themselves and magic away the poop! By the way, Hermonie was always black despite the fact I always described her as being pale skinned!”

      The “Dumbledore was gay” was especially infuriating because she wrote the “Fantastic Breasts” movies, and instead of expanding upon the Dumbledore’s gay thing at all, they just use the “They’re just really good friends!” cover, ya know, the one that’s an amazing progressive way to imply that without running afoul of the “Moral Majority”… in 1992…

      But the medal ultimately goes to “Hermonie is black!”, because the only reason she came up with it was to try to better canonize the “Cursed Child” play… which wound up having a black actress play Hermonie.

      Instead of doing the adult thing and admitting that most writers accepted by the mainstream are white, and therefore an overwhelming majority of characters in fiction are white, and that’s… kind of not good as it shows the bias we’ve given in favor of one specific group over all others, and that maybe in the future we’ll have more racially diverse character casts… but until then, because we have more white characters than white actors, sometimes white characters are going to be played by non-white actors, and even if that’s not how we typically envision the character… Get over it.

      No instead of doing that, she just felt the need to make another fucking retcon and claimed she intended to have Hermonie be black the whole fucking time! I hope they fired the moron who cast Emma Watson for the role in the movie then… that talentless hack who knew nothing of the books… checks notes Joanne Kathleen Rowling

      I’m sorry but it takes a special kind of narcissim to attempt to retcon, not just a fictional work, but reality itself!

      • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        That’s squarely in the realm of “doesn’t matter”.

        The works are done, anything said after never happened