EUAN McCOLM: in Praise Of JK Rowling

For several years, now, ladies have been losing tasks after daring to express the view that biology is real and important.

Companies and public bodies, captured by the needs of extremist trans activists, have actually exacted terrible penalties on those revealing completely mainstream – and legal – views on sex and gender.

Inevitably, tribunals have actually followed a variety of these cases. During these, we have actually heard terrible details of ladies treated abominably by employers in thrall to campaigners who urged and imposed the unlawful adoption of self-ID policies when it came to single-sex spaces.

We have actually become aware of women bullied and shunned for questioning the right of those born male to self-identify into women’s spaces, from changing spaces to domestic violence sanctuaries.

Equally undoubtedly, those ladies efficient in resisting have been winning legal actions.

But even a rock solid case does not make it easy to retaliate. Good attorneys are costly and the process is draining, both physically and emotionally.

For every lady who has triumphed in court, there are much more for whom releasing a legal case appeared impossible.

The facility by the novelist and philanthropist JK Rowling of a fund to support females’s legal defense of their rights instantly eliminates any financial barriers to action for those with feasible cases.

Author JK Rowling has developed a fund to support females’s legal protection of their rights

The intervention of Ms Rowling should, right now, be focusing minds in personnels departments across the country.

Since the Supreme Court ruled, last month, that sex, in law, referred biology rather than documents, a number of organisations – in both the public and economic sectors – have actually released statements announcing their decisions to “think about” the implications for their policies.

This prevalent and stands to cost business – and taxpayer-funded bodies – dear. The facts are easy. If a service is used on a single sex basis that implies biological sex, not individuality.

The law is the law and no further consideration is needed in order for employers to fulfill their obligations under it.

A variety of previous legal actions after ladies were unfairly dismissed or bullied out of jobs for declining to agree with the mantra “trans women are women” were possible thanks to the assistance of online crowd-funding campaigns. Ms Rowling often promoted – and contributed to – such fundraising events.

Now, she’s a one-woman crowd-funder, all set to back the cases of every female mistreated at work for speaking the truth about sex.

The JK Rowling Women’s Fund will change the battlefield when it concerns women discriminated versus for their genuine, reality-based views.

At the heart of industrial tribunals there might be susceptible people betting high stakes however the human expense means absolutely nothing to the insurers financing employers’ costs. For them, it’s everything about the bottom line and the possibility that every female with a case now has access to the very best legal representatives in business will, I suspect, motivate lots of to urge settlement instead of the humiliation, and unavoidable expense, of more doomed defences.

If one needed proof that females’s rights require the fiercest defense, it came in the response to the launch of Ms Rowling’s fund.

With tasty pathos, one activist lawyer stated online that the Harry Potter developer had “emerged from the shadows” as the funder of what he described as the “anti feminist biology is destiny motion”.

Ms Rowling has never ever remained in the shadows when it pertains to her views on women’s rights, has she?

Other reactions were, naturally, more violent in tone.

The ongoing tribunal including nurse Sandie Peggie, declaring discrimination and harassment versus NHS Fife and trans-identifying medical professional Beth Upton, brought the problem of the way so called “gender vital” women had actually been treated at work to large attention. This is a case that “cut through” with the public and required some politicians to attend to an issue they chose to avoid.

Scottish Labour’s leader Anas Sarwar and his deputy, Jackie Baillie, announced their support for Ms Peggie and declared their belief in the importance of biological sex.

If they ‘d understood what they know now, they added, they would not have voted in favour of the SNP’s eventually doomed plan to permit anyone to self-identify into the legally-recognised sex of their picking.

But while the Peggie case and the subsequent ruling on the legal significance of sex by the Supreme Court may have forced a humiliating U-turn by the Labour management on the matter of biological reality, others remain stubbornly committed to defiance of the law.

Naturally, the Scottish Greens – an excellent Wodehousian satire of an advanced cell – remain dedicated to using single-sex areas by anyone who feels they belong to that sex.

There have been current statements of resistance from trade unions, too. Unison has permitted a trans lady 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 local authorities and health boards – is another pricey legal action in the making.

It must not have actually been needed for JK Rowling to guarantee to finance the legal expenses of women victimized for their views on sex and gender. Nobody should ever have lost a task, a promotion, or a contract on the basis of their view that sex is immutable and essential.

Nor ought to the novelist have actually felt it needed to establish, in 2022, Beira’s Place, a women-only support service for victims of sexual violence in the Lothian location.

Ms Rowling’s choices to fund Beira’s Place and to finance the legal costs of females victimized for believing 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 politicians.

I know that acknowledgment is the last thing on the writer’s mind but isn’t it downright unusual that, when he talks of the achievements of successful Scots, First Minister John Swinney never mentions the support Beira’s Place has provided to numerous women?

Money is not the only thing women acting to defend their rights need. Ask anyone who has been through the tribunal procedure and they’ll inform you that the psychological assistance of pals and allies is important.

This convenience will not remain in brief supply for those women who get backing for their cases from the JK Rowling Women’s Fund. The writer belongs to a worldwide network of campaigners, combating to protect ladies’s rights versus the needs of trans activists, and calls to action and assistance do not go unheeded.

Let the country’s personnels departments brace themselves. A most impressive plot twist has actually just been written.