It was no April Fool’s joke.
Harry Potter author-turned culture warrior J.K. Rowling kicked off the month with an 11-tweet social media thread in which she argued 10 transgender women were men — and dared Scottish police to arrest her.
Rowling’s intervention came as a controversial new Scottish government law, aimed at protecting minority groups from hate crimes, took effect. And it landed amid a fierce debate over both the legal status of transgender people in Scotland and over what actually constitutes a hate crime.
Already the law has generated far more international buzz than is normal for legislation passed by a small nation’s devolved parliament.
Transphobia, more than any other bigotry, seems to rot the mind. It’s not obvious to me why it’s that way, but there are several cases where you can watch someone start at some vaguely terfy position, and end by losing their work and nobody wanting to hire them and getting divorced because they just will not shut up about how trans people, a subset of humanity roughly on par with genetic redheads in the general population, are destroying society and making everything awful and ruining their bodies and on and on and on.