The Moral Courage of JK Rowling
How the author stood against trans ideology and refused to bow to the mob.
It takes courage to defend an unfashionable truth, especially when silence would cost you nothing and speaking would cost you everything. It’s rare in public life, but one person has consistently demonstrated this quality over the past five years while facing campaigns of vilification and intimidation that would break most of us. Despite efforts often led by influential members of the cultural elite, these campaigns have failed. The reason is simple: JK Rowling is right, and increasingly everyone knows it.
The issue isn’t complicated in itself, although activists work overtime to make it seem so. Some people experience genuine, persistent gender dysphoria – a recognised psychiatric condition causing real suffering. Other people are caught up in the social contagion – especially teenagers, who are fed trans propaganda on TikTok as an answer to ordinary adolescent angst. There’s a world of difference between the two. The first group, tiny in number, deserves compassion and careful, evidence-based treatment. The second needs patience, proper psychological support, and adults willing to speak a simple truth: feelings, however intense, aren’t reliable guides to irreversible medical decisions. There’s also a third group of people who are rarely discussed alongside the others. These are autogynephiles – men who experience sexual arousal from the thought or image of themselves as women.
Rowling has always acknowledged this distinction between the first two groups. Her position has never been “trans people don’t exist” or “trans people don’t deserve support.” It’s been that women’s rights matter, children need protection, and the systematic dismantling of safeguarding protocols in the name of inclusion has gone catastrophically wrong. These aren’t fringe concerns but expressions of common sense shared by the vast majority of people. They just happen to collide with an activist movement that has captured major institutions.
The luxury of performance
Emma Watson embodies everything Rowling doesn’t: moral certainty without consequence, compassion without cost, activism as personal branding. Watson can proclaim “trans women are women” because she’ll never share a prison cell with a male sex offender who has discovered gender identity as a ticket to the women’s estate. She’ll never compete against biological males. She’ll never work in a rape crisis centre where she’s forced to accept counsellors with penises, because excluding them would be “discriminatory”.
This is a prime example of what Rob Henderson calls luxury beliefs: strongly held opinions that confer status on the believer while imposing costs on others. The people most influential in championing unrestricted gender self-identification are insulated from its consequences. They don’t work in women’s prisons or compete in women’s sports. They don’t use public changing rooms; their daughters aren’t forced to share school bathrooms with boys.
Watson and her kind trade in the currency of fashionable opinion. Declaring support for trans rights costs nothing in her social world – if anything, silence might provoke suspicion. This is how it works: drop a slogan into any media interview – “Nonbinary people are valid”, say – and effortlessly win the approval of all the right people while demonstrating sensitivity to “marginalised communities”. That the marginalised in question might include male sex offenders gaming the system is irrelevant. What matters is the performance, not the outcome.
