The cost of speaking your mind

JK Rowling is probably the only woman in the world who can say “I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class,” without losing her job. These words draw to a close her passionate self-published attack on the self-gathered army of Twitter activists who condemn her because of her concerns about the rise in young people seeking irreversible gender reassignment treatment.

The online hate-fest against Rowling has been going on for years now, yet she manages to keep her sense of humour: “You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand”.

As a self-employed billionaire, she can afford a sense of humour. She can also afford to speak her mind, because she can’t be sacked, in the usual sense — she is the Great Unsackable. Ordinary mortals like Maya Forstater, the woman in whose defence Rowling spoke up last December, unleashing the demons of Twitter, are less fortunate. Forstater lost her job and an employment tribunal.

Yes, there will be calls for her books to be banned, for the vastly profitable empire on top of which she sits to be demolished, regardless of the disastrous fallout for several very large media and publishing concerns, and all their staff. An obscure school in West Sussex has decided not to name one of its houses after her because she “may no longer be an appropriate role model” and the young Harry Potter stars are ganging up on their mentor in a frenzy of virtue-signalling.

Reading their words it is impossible to believe they have actually read Rowlings’ essay on her website.

It should be very clear that Rowling does not share Maya Forstater’s views. Forstater declared that men could not become women, or vice versa. Rowling accepts transexuals, and transsexuality, wholeheartedly — what she doesn’t like is the way its campaigners have begun eroding the concept of womanhood, and the eagerness with which, as many see it, very young people are being urged into transition.

In a small way I know what it’s like to put your head above the parapet on an ideological matter. Years ago, I was children’s books editor of the Times. My ecstatic review of the first Harry Potter book is still on display in a theme park in Watford dedicated to the books, as far as I know, and to thank me for it a mercurial, jumpy and delightful red-head called Jo Rowling came round for lunch, and smoked a crafty ciggie in my garden when her little daughter wasn’t looking. Back then, I made the mistake of criticising her fellow super-hero author Philip Pullman.

This was when “The New Atheism” was at its height and I felt that Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy pushed a particular kind of propaganda — a specifically anti-Catholic and atheist worldview — onto children: a worldview with its own set of prejudices, its own entrenched bigotry, and its own intolerance; I felt Pullman was encouraging the young not only to mock Christianity but to fear it and drive it from the public square. And having written two books about faith-based parenting, it dismayed me to think of a whole generation growing up despising religion, especially my own, as harshly as Pullman clearly did.

Unfortunately for me, my boss had recently spent a very pleasant lunch in Oxford with Pullman himself and few months later, while cooking lunch for my four young children, I got the call: I was sacked.

My children ate a lot of budget kitchen suppers that summer, but Rowling won’t suffer financially, at least not in a way that will hurt her lifestyle. The measured, empathetic essay she’s published on her website is not illegal — yet — so she can’t be put in prison.

Even so, to make her point, Rowling alludes to her nasty, brutal and mercifully short first marriage, and mentions “a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties”. She doesn’t explicitly link her first husband to this claim but it has been well known for decades that he was violent, and that his violence ended their relationship.

Why does Rowling have to bring up her past? Because she needs to explain why she felt “triggered” by the news that “The Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one.” It was this news, with its implications for the erosion of safe single-sex spaces, that brought the “serious sexual assault” back into her head, recurring “on a loop” all day.

In other words, even one of the wealthiest, most successful women who has ever lived feels she has to dig out her old victim-card in order to state a perfectly reasonable and logical point of view. Very, very few women dare take her position, in all walks of life. The vast majority of women are treading carefully, watching their language, dreading saying the wrong thing. Only the super-rich can be truly outspoken.