It was no April Fool’s joke.

Harry Potter author-turned culture warrior J.K. Rowling kicked off the month with an 11-tweet social media thread in which she argued 10 transgender women were men — and dared Scottish police to arrest her.

Rowling’s intervention came as a controversial new Scottish government law, aimed at protecting minority groups from hate crimes, took effect. And it landed amid a fierce debate over both the legal status of transgender people in Scotland and over what actually constitutes a hate crime.

Already the law has generated far more international buzz than is normal for legislation passed by a small nation’s devolved parliament.

  • @mindbleach
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    13 months ago

    The in-this-context hypothetical Nazis, as an illustration of why “disagreement” is a meaningless dodge. Your attitude is reductionist nonsense that could be applied equally to the literal no-shit Nazi party, when they were all talk and not yet openly violent toward the minorities they constantly condemned.

    As in: ‘Oh you want those fascists stopped? Wow, how dare people disagree with you! Imagine how you’d feel if someone shut down your preferred political ideas.’

    Meanwhile. In reality. Some opinions are fucking awful. Some ideas cannot be excused as mere politics. Violent bigotry is pretty fucking obviously past the line, here, and these three asshats are - at the very least - promoting, encouraging, and happily coexisting with that intolerable rhetoric.