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.
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.