EUAN McCOLM: in Praise Of JK Rowling

For several years, now, women have been losing tasks after bold to reveal the view that biology is real and essential.
Companies and public bodies, caught by the needs of extremist trans activists, have actually exacted harsh punishments on those expressing completely mainstream – and legal – views on sex and gender.
Inevitably, tribunals have actually followed a variety of these cases. During these, we’ve heard terrible information of females treated abominably by companies in thrall to campaigners who advised and implemented the prohibited adoption of self-ID policies when it pertained to single-sex areas.
We’ve heard of ladies bullied and avoided for questioning the right of those born male to self-identify into ladies’s areas, from altering spaces to domestic violence sanctuaries.
Equally undoubtedly, those females efficient in resisting have been winning legal actions.
But even a rock strong case does not make it simple to strike back. Good legal representatives are expensive and the process is draining, both physically and mentally.
For every woman who has actually triumphed in court, there are lots of more for whom releasing a legal case seemed impossible.
The establishment by the novelist and philanthropist JK Rowling of a fund to support females’s legal security of their rights immediately eliminates any financial barriers to action for those with practical cases.
Author JK Rowling has actually developed a fund to support ladies’s legal security of their rights
The intervention of Ms Rowling should, right now, be focusing minds in human resources departments across the country.
Since the Supreme Court ruled, last month, that sex, in law, referred biology instead of documentation, a number of organisations – in both the public and economic sectors – have released declarations announcing their choices to “think about” the implications for their policies.
This prevalent and reckless complacency stands to cost companies – and – dear. The truths are basic. If a service is offered on a single sex basis that indicates biological sex, not individuality.
The law is the law and no additional consideration is required in order for employers to satisfy their obligations under it.
A variety of previous legal actions after females were unfairly dismissed or bullied out of jobs for refusing to concur with the mantra “trans women are women” were possible thanks to the assistance of online crowd-funding campaigns. Ms Rowling frequently promoted – and donated to – such charity events.
Now, she’s a one-woman crowd-funder, ready to back the cases of every female wronged at work for speaking the fact about sex.
The JK Rowling Women’s Fund will transform the battlefield when it comes to females discriminated against for their legitimate, reality-based views.
At the heart of commercial tribunals there might be vulnerable individuals playing for high stakes however the human cost indicates nothing to the insurance companies financing employers’ costs. For them, it’s all about the bottom line and the prospect that every female with a case now has access to the finest lawyers in business will, I believe, encourage many to urge settlement instead of the humiliation, and inescapable cost, of more doomed defences.
If one required proof that women’s rights need the fiercest protection, it came in the reaction to the launch of Ms Rowling’s fund.
With delicious pathos, one activist legal representative declared online that the Harry Potter developer had “emerged from the shadows” as the funder of what he referred to as the “anti feminist biology is fate motion”.
Ms Rowling has never ever remained in the shadows when it comes to her views on females’s rights, has she?
Other reactions were, naturally, more violent in tone.
The continuous tribunal including nurse Sandie Peggie, claiming discrimination and harassment against NHS Fife and trans-identifying physician Beth Upton, brought the concern of the way so called “gender critical” ladies had actually been treated at work to large attention. This is a case that “cut through” with the public and forced some political leaders to attend to a problem they preferred to prevent.
Scottish Labour’s leader Anas Sarwar and his deputy, Jackie Baillie, revealed their support for Ms Peggie and declared their belief in the significance of biological sex.
If they ‘d understood what they know now, they included, they would not have enacted favour of the SNP’s eventually doomed plan to enable anybody to self-identify into the legally-recognised sex of their choosing.
But while the Peggie case and the subsequent ruling on the legal meaning of sex by the Supreme Court may have forced an embarrassing U-turn by the Labour leadership on the matter of biological truth, others stay stubbornly committed to defiance of the law.
Naturally, the Scottish Greens – a great Wodehousian satire of an advanced cell – stay dedicated to making use of single-sex spaces by anyone who feels they belong to that sex.
There have been current statements of resistance from trade unions, too. Unison has actually allowed a trans female to run for a women-only position on its national executive council.
But every act of performative defiance by well-funded trade unions – or taxpayer-funded regional authorities and health boards – is another pricey legal action in the making.
It should not have been required for JK Rowling to guarantee to finance the legal expenses of ladies discriminated versus for their views on sex and gender. Nobody must ever have actually lost a task, a promotion, or an agreement on the basis of their view that sex is immutable and essential.
Nor must the author have actually felt it needed to develop, in 2022, Beira’s Place, a women-only assistance service for victims of sexual violence in the Lothian location.
Ms Rowling’s choices to fund Beira’s Place and to underwrite the legal expenses of ladies discriminated against for thinking in the reality of sex are acts of feminist philanthropy which, in a world not made batty by gender ideology, would have been hailed by our political leaders.
I know that recognition is the last thing on the writer’s mind however isn’t it downright strange that, when he broaches the accomplishments of effective Scots, First Minister John Swinney never mentions the support Beira’s Place has offered to hundreds of ladies?
Money is not the only thing ladies doing something about it to safeguard their rights need. Ask anybody who has been through the tribunal process and they’ll tell you that the psychological support of friends and allies is essential.
This convenience will not be in brief supply for those ladies who receive support for their cases from the JK Rowling Women’s Fund. The writer is part of a worldwide network of campaigners, battling to safeguard women’s rights against the demands of trans activists, and contacts us to action and support do not go unheeded.
Let the nation’s personnels departments brace themselves. A most amazing plot twist has actually just been composed.