people quietly trying to live their lives. And here the fault lies not with Rowling but in an ill-considered, incoherent law.
Even now the police won’t say what becomes of these growing thousands of complaints. They promised to investigate every single one but officer recruitment is low, police stations are closing, burglaries go uninvestigated, campaigners are aghast that aggravated incidents against society’s most vulnerable, the learning disabled, will be swamped by silly or mischievous reports.
Scotland is fast becoming Europe’s crazy policy test lab and this ludicrous law is surely busted along with Yousaf, who as justice minister pushed it through. But every Scottish party, bar the Tories, supported this act. A chorus of interest groups and quangos had convinced them hate was everywhere. So they abandoned the gruelling business of governing and chose to believe in witches instead.
This may be a disaster of the SNP's own making, but it's worth remembering that all the other parties save the Tories – Labour, the Greens, the Lib-Dems – voted for it.
And, in praise of Rowling, Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:
Rowling deliberately defied the new woolly hate crime laws with a series of tweets calling well-known trans women, men.
Humza Yousaf had been warned that this legislation was unworkable by numerous women’s groups. Men who identified as women were protected but women weren’t. How on earth were the police going to deal with this?
Who would blink first? Rowling or the police? When what she said was not deemed a hate crime, everything began to fall apart. “Oh, it’s OK for her with her wealth” some said and there she was again, asserting that if any other woman was arrested, she would repeat those words and be arrested alongside them.
Here was a lesson in solidarity, in sisterhood and the simple but incendiary power of saying no.
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