Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf blasted Harry Potter author and gender ideology critic J.K. Rowling for her scorching thread challenging the country’s new hate speech law.
Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act was activated on April 1. The text of the bill, originally introduced years before, warns against acts that “stir up hatred” against various groups based on various identities, such as being transgender. While what it means to “stir up hatred” is murky, the maximum penalty for violating this new law is a seven-year jail sentence.
Rowling, who lives in Scotland, began a social media thread Monday by criticizing the identity of many transgender people, some of whom were criminals. Rowling listed multiple biologically male criminals who claimed to be transgender just prior to being sentenced for various horrific crimes, expressing mock relief their avowed gender identities were being respected. She then revealed this to be an April Fool’s joke, declaring “people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men” and dared Scottish police to arrest her under the new law.
While Scotland’s police appear to have stood down and refused to prosecute, Yousaf condemned Rowling’s rhetoric as “offensive” and “upsetting.”
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“Those new offences that have been created by the act have a very high threshold for criminality,” he told BBC Scotland, “The behaviour has to be threatening or abusive and intends to stir up hatred,” later claiming the law “doesn’t deal with people just being offended or upset or insulted.”
He went on to say, “Anybody who read the act will not have been surprised at all that there’s no arrests made,” and that “JK Rowling’s tweets may well be offensive, upsetting and insulting to trans people. But it doesn’t mean that they meet a threshold of criminality of being threatening or abusive and intending to stir up hatred.”
Rowling responded to Yousaf’s comments by writing, “Most of Scotland is upset and offended by Yousaf’s bumbling incompetence and illiberal authoritarianism, but we aren’t lobbying to have him locked up for it.”
The BBC reported Scotland’s national police force has received 3,000 new hate crime reports since the law was enacted just a few days ago, a large number of which were ironically reporting Yousaf himself for a 2020 speech where he launched a tirade over too many of Scotland’s prominent politicians being White people. Yousaf derided these complaints for coming “from the far right.”
“I’m not going to let them stop me from continuing to speak out about racism or talk about that fact that we need more diversity in public life,” he said.
Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf is credited for having shepherded Scotland’s new hate speech law through parliament. ((Photo by Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images))
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Many have asked whether the police selectively refused to prosecute Rowling for her rhetoric because she is such a powerful and wealthy public figure.
Rowling responded to this by vowing. “If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both at once.”
Scottish conservative politician Murdo Fraser offered similar skepticism of whether Scottish authorities were choosing to selectively enforce their own law, arguing their refusal to prosecute certain cases “means Police Scotland have not only breached their own policy on recording non-crime hate incidents, but now appear to be making it up as they go along,” according to the BBC.
Fraser had threatened legal action last month after some of his own rhetoric had been logged by Scottish police as a “hate incident.”
One of the law’s proponents, a transgender news personality named India Willoughby, also argued that the new law was not being enforced as described. Willoughby expressed disappointment Rowling was not punished and argued to BBC Radio Scotland’s Drivetime program, “The hate crime bill says if you’re in one those groups and something causes you fear or upset then it’s a potential hate crime. I just don’t see how this doesn’t qualify.”
“I get the impression that Police Scotland are actually scared because it’s JK Rowling,” Willoughby suggested. “Obviously she has a lot of clout, it would probably be an expensive case.”
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Rishi Sunak, the prime minister of the UK, which Scotland is part of, commented directly on Rowling’s challenge to the Scottish Police, declaring, “We should not be criminalizing people saying common sense things about biological sex, clearly that isn’t right” and that “We have a proud tradition of free speech.”