The left-wing fight to stop people refuting woke orthodoxy with truth is nowhere more intense now than in Scotland, of all places. And there are encouraging signs for the forces of veracity.
Those seeking to suppress facts have been driven into retreat because the army of truth has acquired the most powerful conceivable champion in this battle over the freedom to say certain things. Their leader now is J.K. Rowling, the massively popular billionaire and global bestselling author of the Harry Potter stories of witchcraft and wizardry.
For years, Rowling has resisted the morally, psychologically, and physically destructive fad of treating gender as a personal choice rather than a fact of biology. Defying Scotland’s new hate crime law, she now promises to repeat the words of any woman in trouble with the police for saying a biological man cannot be a woman, and vice versa.
This dares prosecutors to test their strength against her big guns and has already weakened the Scottish law by revealing its dependence on the cynical hope that individual women will be too scared to take on the machinery of the state. Rowling is forcing Scottish officialdom to prosecute all women or no women who speak the truth, or else expose the tyranny of their Newspeak regime by using their new powers only against those who cannot bring money and millions of adoring fans to the fight.
The police say Rowling’s ironic, witty, and pointedly disparaging comments about several unpleasant men posing as women will not be treated as illegal. It will be argued the law was never intended to restrict free speech and that the police are adhering to its requirement that an offense is committed only by stirring up hatred on the basis of “transgender identity or being intersex,” among other categories.
Don’t believe this pretense. Remember the Left’s cry that both words and silence are violence. As soon as Scotland’s law went into effect, trans lobbyists complained of Rowling’s words and publicly discussed their hope for prosecution. It has been abundantly, even redundantly, obvious for years that seemingly reasonable and supposedly innocuous legal language can and will be used to intimidate and bludgeon people who express unapproved political, cultural, or moral opinions. Siobhian Brown, Scotland’s “community safety minister” — yes, it’s a job — has already told TV and radio broadcasters that “misgendering” someone on the internet might be enough to prompt a police investigation. All over the West, the mere act of disagreeing is excoriated routinely as abusive hate speech.
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Efforts to force ordinary people to say up is down, and men are women, are still advancing in many areas. But tides start to ebb in one place even while they continue to surge in others. It is likely that this will happen with free speech, both on the subject of gender ideology and other areas of ideological debate.
But the truth will still be there no matter how many lies are told and laws are passed to conceal it. It is good to have Rowling’s powerful voice raised defiantly on what, to borrow a phrase, might be called the right side of history.
