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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.
The Harry Potter author, who lives in Edinburgh, described several transgender women as men, including convicted prisoners, trans activists and other public figures.
She said “freedom of speech and belief” was at an end if accurate description of biological sex was outlawed.
Earlier, Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf said the new law would deal with a “rising tide of hatred”.
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.
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Ms Rowling, who has long been a critic of some trans activism, posted on X on the day the new legislation came into force.
Her opinion on trans folks is shit, but people should not go to jail for shit opinions. Broken clock and stuff.
It’s more complicated than that. Like saying there is a fire in a theatre when there is none, saying transgender are undercover perverts and a danger to society when it’s not supported by evidence will get people killed. Freedom of speech is great and all but when your lie and put people in danger there should be consequences.
And just for the record, this is not a theory. People HAVE been murdered.
Okay, it’s nth time I see the undercover pervs/rapists about trans folk. The hell happened?
Have as many opinions as you want, but if you spread shit like “we should exterminate the lesser races” and “trans people are rapists” you earn a vacation at the greybar hotel for abusing your right of free speech to infringe on other people’s rights.
And she won’t. This is the same performative bullshit Jordan Peterson pulled in Canada.
People shouldn’t go to jail for shit opinions, I agree. That changes when their opinions become more than opinions.
That’s cryptic.
Trans people have literally been murdered as a direct, traceable result of her “free speech”. Several more people have been victims of harassment campaigns. She has actively engaged in Holocaust denial.
It’s only cryptic because it’s something that requires nuance, and to be addressed on a case by case basis. It’s safe to say that we have crossed the line and then some
Is there a crime for nebulous comments?
lol well at least I thought it was a good joke
She grossly misinterprets what the law is meant to achieve. It’s not for somebody who dead names a trans person or calls a trans woman he or him. It’s when someone Tweets out “Who will rid me of this troublesome trans person?” and then their one or more of their followers goes out and beats or murders that person.
I swear every single person arguing against this bill hasn’t read it.
The gist of it is consolidating existing hate crime laws, adding sexual orientation and gender to the protected classes, repealing the law of blasphemy, and then the main one people are on about, outlawing “inciting hate” and spending several entire pages defining exactly what that means and how its still covered by freedom of expression.
As you said, you can use the slurs. You can be a shit person.
What this seems to be addressing is the fact that ANYBODY can have a platform nowadays and some of those people use their platform to harm other people, whether indirectly or not.
You can weaponize an opinion, that is what is getting punished.
Hateful ideas can be dangerous things. This is why insulting people in Germany can turn into a criminal offense. They know where that goes if left unchecked.
Also, remember, not every country is the USA where breaking the law = going to jail. It can just be a fine the first few times and jail only when you show no intent on ceasing what you’re doing.
JKR is being hyperbolic with this “arrest me” thing. She’s playing the victim for her TERF followers.
If you’re poor and black, sure.
Notice how many times Trump has flagrantly broken the law.
I’m from Germany, the only way insulting someone is going to be a criminal case is if you insult police. Otherwise it gets almost always dropped.
So you want the government to decide which ideas are ok and which should be banned? How could this ever go wrong.
The government deciding what ideas should be banned is pretty typical in Germany lol
What could ever go wrong? Germany, there was something…
Ok, so which is it? I’m arguing it’s fine to ban ideas if they’re bad enough, like holocaust denial in Germany.
And I’m arguing that it’s a bad idea. Germany is a good example, banning holocaust denial did not stop AFD from raising and getting political power. We were not even able to forbid the damn NDP.
That’s not a great argument, there is no evidence those things are somehow connected or not. For all you know it would have been straight back to fascism 60 years earlier if it wasn’t banned. The reason AfD has power is that the courts and government support them and let them get away with crime. If the law was actually applied it would have banned that party.
So it’s about how a law is applied. And you still don’t see the potential danger of a law regulating speech? Guess we won’t agree on this one.
I don’t really see a benefit in people being forced to phrase their hateful opinions in a way to circumvent laws. In the end, Rowling won’t stop spreading her bigoted hateful bullshit - in best case she will just phrase it a bit different, which actually might get some stupid moderates on her side.
I’m pretty sure denying the holocaust can also get you jail time in Germany.
Lots of people just don’t know what freedom is speech actually means. Speech isn’t a crime, but crimes can be committed by speaking.
If you kill someone with a hammer, you aren’t charged with possession of hammer - you’re charged with murder. If you hire a hitman to do the killing instead, you aren’t charged with “using speech.”
When that theoretical person is arrested for “shouting fire in a crowded theatre” they aren’t actually being arrested for their speech or their words, but for a separate crime that uses speech as a mechanism.
Speech is a marvelous thing that should be protected, but freedom of speech is not freedom from the consequences of using speech to commit other crimes.
I, for one, get angry at big gubment limiting my free spech to call people slurs at home depot just like how I get angry at big government for limiting my god given right to come and go as I please when I break into people’s houses and watch them sleep.
Can you explain to me then, what exactly is freedom of speech? Yelling fire in a crowded theater isn’t using speech then, it’s assault on other persons by threatening harm. Criticize the government? That’s not freedom of speech, that’s just unlicensed protest. Sing a song protesting a war? You go to jail for treason.
Freedom of speech absolutely means being free from the government imposing consequences for speech. Yelling fire in a crowded theater comes from Schenck v United States which found that speech must pose a clear and present danger to be able to be held criminally liable for it. And Brandenburg v Ohio narrowed the definition even further, that speech must be “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”.
Despite our views on JK’s abhorrent rhetoric, you cannot say that mis-gendering trans people is inciting imminent lawlessness.
Your comment demonstrates a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of free speech.
You quoted cases that literally demonstrate my point.
It’s not the word “fire” that is the crime. It’s speech as a mechanism by which lawlessness or panic is incited.
Hate-speech is more nuanced, but can follow a similar pattern.
Take the sentance: “It’s time to cut down the tall trees.” The words themselves are fairly innocuous. But that was the trigger phrase for the Rwandan Genocide. Saying those words on the air was a call to murder all the Tutsi people. Speaking those words on the radio was not an act of free expression by the Interhamwe, but the start of a barbaric hate crime that killed nearly a million people.
Well, ironically your example here demonstrates just how difficult policing or regulating speech can be, and how it will likely never, ever work.
How, exactly, would you write a law that captures “it’s time to cut down the tall trees” as an act of hate speech (or a crime in general) while not simultaneously massively infringing on any potential innocent uses of such a phrase?
If you’ve spent any time on social media, you’ll likely have noticed that if admins simply ban certain words or phrases, the people who want to communicate these words will simply come up with some code using words so innocuous that you cannot ban them without frustrating everyone else and thus tipping them off to the conspiracy, and basically giving it even more exposure thanks to the Streisand effect.
It absolutely is the word fire that is the crime and you really need to go back to middle school and take some sort of US legal class. The state of American education system these days…
This is peak Reddit, now peak lemmy
If speech has a price, it’s not free
Speech used to commit a crime isn’t illegal. The crime being facilitated through that speech is.
If I assault you with a hammer, it’s not the hammer that’s the issue. Arresting me for it has nothing to do with the legality of hammers.
What does the broken clock analogy have to do with Joanne being a bigot?
That’s starting to be an unusual stance
What she’s saying here probably doesn’t rise to the level of criminality under their law. She’s just doing performative nonsense while proving yet again that she doesn’t understand the difference between sex and gender.