Cheats and Hate Laws
As the BBC reported in April, “JK Rowling has challenged Scotland’s new hate crime law in a series of social media posts — inviting police to arrest her if they believe she has committed an offence.” According to the law , “A person commits an offence if they communicate material, or behave in a manner, ‘that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive,’ with the intention of stirring up hatred based on the protected characteristics,” which include “transgender identity.” In response, Rowling posted a series of comments on April 1, all with pictures of men who identified as women, before explaining , Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them. In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the ri...