The Harry Potter author described several transgender women as men in a series of social media posts.

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.

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

  • zerog_bandit@lemmy.world
    52·
    8 months ago

    Can you explain to me then, what exactly is freedom of speech? Yelling fire in a crowded theater isn’t using speech then, it’s assault on other persons by threatening harm. Criticize the government? That’s not freedom of speech, that’s just unlicensed protest. Sing a song protesting a war? You go to jail for treason.

    Freedom of speech absolutely means being free from the government imposing consequences for speech. Yelling fire in a crowded theater comes from Schenck v United States which found that speech must pose a clear and present danger to be able to be held criminally liable for it. And Brandenburg v Ohio narrowed the definition even further, that speech must be “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”.

    Despite our views on JK’s abhorrent rhetoric, you cannot say that mis-gendering trans people is inciting imminent lawlessness.

    Your comment demonstrates a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of free speech.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
      91·
      8 months ago

      You quoted cases that literally demonstrate my point.

      It’s not the word “fire” that is the crime. It’s speech as a mechanism by which lawlessness or panic is incited.

      Hate-speech is more nuanced, but can follow a similar pattern.

      Take the sentance: “It’s time to cut down the tall trees.” The words themselves are fairly innocuous. But that was the trigger phrase for the Rwandan Genocide. Saying those words on the air was a call to murder all the Tutsi people. Speaking those words on the radio was not an act of free expression by the Interhamwe, but the start of a barbaric hate crime that killed nearly a million people.

      • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.todayEnglish
        11·
        8 months ago

        Well, ironically your example here demonstrates just how difficult policing or regulating speech can be, and how it will likely never, ever work.

        How, exactly, would you write a law that captures “it’s time to cut down the tall trees” as an act of hate speech (or a crime in general) while not simultaneously massively infringing on any potential innocent uses of such a phrase?

        If you’ve spent any time on social media, you’ll likely have noticed that if admins simply ban certain words or phrases, the people who want to communicate these words will simply come up with some code using words so innocuous that you cannot ban them without frustrating everyone else and thus tipping them off to the conspiracy, and basically giving it even more exposure thanks to the Streisand effect.

      • zerog_bandit@lemmy.world
        12·
        8 months ago

        It absolutely is the word fire that is the crime and you really need to go back to middle school and take some sort of US legal class. The state of American education system these days…

        • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
          1·
          8 months ago

          No. It isn’t. There’s nothing illegal about the word fire, or even saying it in a theater.

          Go. Find that law and report back if I’m wrong. Give me a citation.

          You know what - fuck it. I’ll do the leg work here and go into the most specific law I can find on the subject. It’s within the Municipal Code of Ordinances Ordinances of the city of Reading, Ohio.

          It sounds promising for you at first because it specifically mentions:

          Initiating or circulating a report or warning of an alleged or impending fire, explosion, crime, or other catastrophe, knowing that the report or warning is false.

          But that line §648.07(A)(1) only applies as a subsection of §648.07(A), which is:

          (A)   No person shall cause the evacuation of any public place, or otherwise cause serious public inconvenience or alarm, by doing any of the following:

          (1)   Initiating or circulating a report or warning of an alleged or impending fire, explosion, crime, or other catastrophe, knowing that the report or warning is false.

          (2)   Threatening to commit any offense of violence.

          (3)   Committing any offense, with reckless disregard of the likelihood that its commission will cause serious public inconvenience or alarm.

          And to further clarify that the crime isn’t the words, §648.07© specifically states:

          Whoever violates this section is guilty of inducing panic.

          Subsection B is about allowing fire drills as an exception.

          So, according to the most-specific law I could find, the crime is inciting panic, not any specific word or phrase. And even if you did shout fire it isn’t a crime unless it actually causes a real panic.

          Also - I highly doubt you’ve taken more law classes than me. Just a hunch though: maybe you’re just a bad lawyer.