JK Rowling has said she will “fight to support” the Labor Party if Sir Keir Starmer maintains his current stance on gender recognition.
The author of Harry Potter wrote a 2,000-word essay in The Times in which she describes her dissatisfaction with the Labor Partycurrent position.
In the play, she criticizes Mr Keiras well as shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, shadow equalities secretary Anneliese Dodds, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy and shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry.
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Rowling has been outspoken in her belief that biological women should be able to have separate spaces and that trans women – who were born male – should not have access.
She has been criticized for her stance, being widely condemned in recent years for her views on transgender rights, claiming, for example, that she would rather go to prison than refer to a trans person by their preferred pronouns.
Transgender newsreader India Willoughby recently responded to Rowling’s comments as “genuinely disgusted”.
She added: “Grotesque transphobia, which is disturbing. I’m as much a woman as JK Rowling.”
Daniel Radcliffe, who became a global star after playing school wizard Harry in the highly successful adaptations of the novels, has also criticized her views and said in an interview last month that the fallout with Rowling “makes me very sad“.
JK Rowling and Daniel Radcliffe at the UK premiere of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 2004. Photo: PA
In the article, the author talks about how she thought she “misheard” Sir Keir in 2021 when he criticized Labor candidate Rosie Duffield saying that only women have a cervix.
Sir Keir was asked about this statement in a recent leaders’ debate, when he said he agreed with Sir Tony Blair that women have vaginas and men have penises.
Rowling says she felt the Labor leader gave “the impression that until Tony Blair sat him down for a chat, he had never understood how he and his wife had produced children”.
She added that she “really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
In her article, Rowling claims “to have been a Labor voter, member (not anymore), donor (not recently) and activist (ditto) all my adult life” – and she wants to see the end of the Conservative government.
According to Electoral Commission records, she donated £1 million to the party in 2008 and £8,000 in 2015.
See more information:
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In the article, the author highlighted Dodds for saying that what a woman is “depends on what the context is”.
Ms. Cooper is criticized for saying she “wasn’t going to go down rabbit holes about this.”
Rowling points to Thornberry for saying, “some women will have penises. Frankly, I’m not looking up your skirts, I don’t care.”
And Lammy draws ire by saying that women like Rowling are “dinosaurs hoarding rights”.
David Lammy is among those Rowling has criticized
The Harry Potter author also claims that Lammy said a cervix is “something you can have after various procedures and hormonal treatments.”
Rowling wrote: “It is very difficult not to suspect that some of these men do not know what the cervix is, but consider it unimportant to Google.”
The NHS definition of the cervix is the opening between the vagina and the uterus.
Rowling says the debate for “left-leaning” women like herself “is not, and has never been, about trans people enjoying the rights of all other citizens and being free to present and identify as they wish.”
Instead, she says it’s “about the right of women and girls to set their limits.”
She adds: “It’s about freedom of expression and observable truth.
“It’s a matter of waiting, with dwindling hope, for the left to wake up to the fact that its lazy adoption of a quasi-religious ideology is having calamitous consequences.”
The author says she met the mother of a girl with learning difficulties who was “called bigoted and transphobic for wanting female-only intimate care” for her.
“I can’t vote for any politician who disagrees with that mother’s words,” adds Rowling.
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She concludes: “An independent candidate is running in my constituency and campaigning to clarify the Equality Act.
“Maybe that’s where my X will have to go on July 4th.
“As long as the Labor Party remains dismissive and often offensive towards women fighting to maintain the rights their ancestors thought were won forever, I will fight to support them.
“The women who didn’t want to didn’t leave Labor. Labor abandoned them.”
Earlier in the day, Sir Keir ruled out lifting the blockade on the Scottish Government’s controversial gender reforms.
Sky News has approached the Labor Party for comment.
This story originally appeared on News.sky.com read the full story
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