Stating the bleeding obvious

By using the phrase ‘people who menstruate’ instead of ‘women’, JK Rowling committed a crime that only by some oversight hasn’t yet been made an imprisonable offence.

Yet prison isn’t the only form of punishment. Abuse in the social media, ostracism and now a strike at her publisher’s office can be punitive enough.

If you still think free speech is intact, witness the refusal by employees of Hachette UK to work on Miss Rowling’s new book. They simply can’t bring themselves to proofread any text produced by someone who claims that women are women and men are men.

Miss Rowling deserves respect for proving yet again that perverse is the new normal, even more so than for her books, none of which I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Just think of it: virulent attacks are levelled at a celebrated author for saying something that should go without saying – that women’s lavatories should be reserved for women.

This is what Miss Rowling actually wrote: “… I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.”

If that’s not self-evident, I don’t know what is. Those who have problems with Miss Rowling’s statement ought to look at what’s going on in women’s prisons. Burly thugs are put there because they ‘identify’ as women. Predictably, they then rape everyone there, including some female screws.

Yet the sheer volume of venom splashed on Miss Rowling was such that she felt called upon to offer 3,700 words of superfluous mock-Freudian explanation for her newly unorthodox views. In doing so, she undid some of her good work, though not all.

Apparently, she suffered sexual assault in her younger days, which explains her quest for “women-only spaces”. And because her Daddy really wanted a son, “if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition.”

In other words, if a very feminine Miss Rowling hadn’t been assaulted sexually, she’d have nothing against men walking into women’s lavatories at will. And, belying her crass insensitivity, she feels empathy for gender-benders – why, she could be one herself if she were younger.

Miss Rowling hasn’t quite been forced by the fascistic woke crowd to renounce her sane statement. But she has been forced to claim that, but for that unfortunate blip, she’s like them. And if she’s not entirely like them, she certainly has nothing against them.

I would have simply said that the issue bears no discussion: if your chromosomes are XY, you are a man; if they are XX, you are a woman. Full stop. End of conversation. And if, being a man, you wish to gain access to women’s lavatories, you’re a voyeur at best, rapist at worst. But then of course I have less to lose than Miss Rowling.

Hermaphrodites exist, and they’ve always existed. Yet their numbers are so small that they fall into the same category as Siamese twins and babies born with two heads.

Most unfortunate, that, but hermaphrodites merit no more special dispensation than do Siamese twins or bicephals. One doesn’t read too many demands that all clothing shops carry a line of two-in-one jackets and hats.

Nor does transsexuality merit elevation to a political issue. Yet everything can be made political these days, because our voting masses have been brainwashed to accept woke drivel as reality.

Perhaps ‘brainwashed’ is a wrong word here. Brains have to exist before they are washed, yet the woke brigade doesn’t satisfy this requirement in any other than the purely anatomical sense.

Those people don’t rely on reason to form their convictions. They respond to outside stimuli by reflexes only, like dogs or skunks. That negates the advantage of being human, throwing God’s most sublime creation back into his face.

To their credit, Hachette UK’s managers showed they still possess residual humanity by telling their employees they can’t refuse to work on Miss Rowling’s latest cash cow. “Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of publishing,” they said most commendably if, these days, less than truthfully.

But then, just like their prime client, they had to add a clarification that destroyed the good impression they had made:

“We will never make our employees work on a book whose content they find upsetting for personal reasons, but we draw a distinction between that and refusing to work on a book because they disagree with an author’s views outside their writing, which runs contrary to our belief in free speech.”

In other words, they can’t boycott those writers who express objectionable views in private. However, refusing to work on a book that says something brainless youths don’t like is perfectly all right. Those champions of free speech do draw the line in fine places.

Is it any wonder then that there exists a groundswell of opinion that we should redact from history great warriors, statesmen and philanthropists? Those who are guilty only of having failed to anticipate that at some time in the future an anomic chaos would arrive, turning all certitudes upside down and enforcing compliance with perverse and absurd notions.

This leaves only one question unanswered. If all our beliefs must spring from personal trauma to be valid, was Miss Rowling sexually assaulted in a public lavatory? Her faithful readers want to know.