J.K. Rowling’s Rebuttal Here Makes a Key Point

J.K. Rowling and I disagree on many points, at least as far as I know about her politics. 

But I have admired her clear-sightedness and courage, taking on the alphabet crowd and, just as importantly, their enablers in the entertainment and political worlds. 

Extremists and people with nutty ideas always exist; they only become an important societal problem on a large scale when they are coddled, catered to, and their tantrums turn into a powerful force in society. 

It happens regularly enough. The BLM madness, for instance, led to the entire establishment embracing insane policies, endorsing violence, and a whole-of-society upending of employment practices, college admissions, and curricula in schools and universities. The damage done in the name of “kindness” and “empathy” has been incalculable. 

The same was true during the COVID madness, and famously, again, in the alphabet madness that swamped all reason for years. 

Children were mutilated, and they still are in many states. Our schools still groom children to change genders and destroy their future. Predators are allowed in locker rooms, changing rooms, and women’s prisons. Drag queens expose their genitals to children. Laws have been loosened on pedophiles and prostitution. Entire states are subsidizing gender “transitions.” 

It’s been insane, and in many places the insanity rolls on. 

But it’s clear that the tide has turned for society as a whole, and now there are many people who are formulating their excuses for why they participated in the madness, even though they knew the critics were right. Rowling has a message for the people who insist that they couldn’t join the critics because we were too mean:

‘He has a point, but he’s too blunt.’

From the start, a key tactic of the gender identitarians has been linguistic prescription, and it’s proved shockingly successful. Trans activists’ shibboleths and euphemisms have been allowed to penetrate the upper echelons of our culture… https://t.co/DuV4iGkVrl

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 1, 2025

‘He has a point, but he’s too blunt.’

From the start, a key tactic of the gender identitarians has been linguistic prescription, and it’s proved shockingly successful. Trans activists’ shibboleths and euphemisms have been allowed to penetrate the upper echelons of our culture with devastating consequences to freedom of speech and belief. Huge swathes of liberal media, the arts, academia and publishing have thrown themselves with gusto into the defence of a quasi-religious belief causing provable real world harm, and in their arrogance they’ve been outraged when people they assumed were part of their In Group have refused to march meekly along in lock step.

Time and again, I’ve seen and heard well-educated people who consider themselves critical thinkers and bold truth-tellers squirm when put on the spot. ‘Well, yes, maybe there’s something in what you’re saying, but it’s hateful/provocative/rude not to use the approved language/pretend people can literally change sex/keep drawing attention to medical malpractice or opportunistic sexual predators. Why can’t you be nice? Why won’t you pretend? We thought you were one of us! Don’t you realise we have sophisticated new words and phrases these days that obviate the necessity of thinking any of this through?’

As the vibe shifts, and a lot of people in the elite professions start trying to reposition themselves, the obvious place to start is, ‘it’s not that I couldn’t see your point, but did you have to say it that way?’ We dissenters were supposed to find a way of questioning the chemical castration of children while calling it ‘gender affirming care.’ We were meant to defend the rights of vulnerable women while also using female pronouns for male rapists. We should have found a way to discuss fairness for women and girls in sport, while pretending that the ineradicable physical advantage men have over women doesn’t exist.

Either a man can be a woman, or he can’t. Either women deserve rights, or they don’t. Either there’s a provable medical benefit to transitioning children, or there isn’t. Either you’re on the side of a totalitarian ideology that seeks to impose falsehoods on society through the threat of ostracisation, shaming and violence, or you’re not. The alternative to being ‘blunt’ –  using accurate, factual language to describe what was going on – was to surrender freedom of speech and espouse ideological jargon that obfuscated the issues and the harms caused. We’ve always needed blunt people, but we need them most of all when being asked to bow down to a naked emperor.

Yes, that’s about right. 

Rowling was responding to a post about Graham Linehan, the comic and writer who was arrested upon returning home to the UK. His crime was telling the truth about gender ideology, which the State had determined to be too mean. He was arrested and prosecuted for his tweets from the United States, which were deemed hate speech and incitement. 

The case was absurd. Linehan incited no violence. He caused mental distress to people who advocated for sterilizing and mutilating children, which, one would think, is far more distressing to its victims than being told that they were born male or female. Getting body parts chopped off, your brain development stunted, your fertility destroyed, all because puberty is a difficult time and the adults suggested that destroying your body was the solution. 

Rowling’s answer was spot on: telling lies to children is wrong. Torturing women by humiliating them in locker rooms is wrong. Exposing people to the gaze or physical abuse of sex predators is wrong. 

It’s not the people telling the truth who are being mean; it’s the people who endorse evil who are. 

So much damage is done by the people who insist that the truth is too painful to be spoken, so instead they affirm the delusions of the loudest and least sane among us. The damage that is done by the crazy people can be significant, but it is contained to small circles if the opinion makers in society place boundaries around the craziness. 

But so often, the opposite is the case. The opinion makers become enforcers out of a misplaced sense of empathy. Not toward the victims of the madness, but toward those who spread it like a social contagion. When a child suffers from a delusion, confusion, or distress, the appropriate response is to help them back to reality and help them become comfortable with who they are. 

It’s not to hand them over to the butchers. 

All the supposed “cruelty” of the gender critical advocates was not directed at the victims of the butchers, but at the butchers and groomers themselves, and we have had to do it while bearing not just the social opprobrium inflicted by the activists, but of all the elites who sided with them in the name of “kindness.”

We still face this today, though we are no longer ostracized for speaking the truth as we once were. 

Alphabet madness would have been a minor social phenomenon that came and went—an oddity, really—but for the whole of the elite movement to destroy its critics. 

Marcie Bowers, the WPATH folks, the hospital administrators, and doctors chasing the buck were all villains, of course. But the people who have done the most damage are the media producers, reporters, teachers, university professors, and all the rest of the elites who spread these foul ideas and attacked any of the sane critics who tried to stop this madness. 

And, frankly, the mushy middle who didn’t want to stick their heads up to be chopped off. 

So many people knew that this was evil. But they were afraid to appear “mean.” They didn’t want to face the social opprobrium, so they turned on the people who were doing their best to affirm reality and save children. 

As with the people who refused to stand up during the COVID madness, they bear much of the responsibility. When you see evil and refuse to stand up, or even tut-tut at those who do, as being too blunt and confrontational, you are backing evil. 

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