JK Rowling Slams Scotland's New Gender Law Saying It Will 'Harm The Most Vulnerable Women'

Harry Potter author JK Rowling has hit out at Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, claiming it will ‘harm the most vulnerable women’

Rowling said that the bill would hurt “those seeking help after male violence.”

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The Bill plans to make a series of amendments to the Gender Recognition Act, which has been in place since 2004.

Should the legislation be passed, the need for those wishing to change gender to show medical and psychiatric reports, will be dropped.

The Mail Online reports: t will also slash the time someone has to live in their new gender from two years to six months.

Miss Rowling, 56, criticised Social Justice Secretary Shona Robison, who spoke in Holyrood last week about the Bill – but she praised author and journalist Susan Dalgety for her ‘most searing, heartfelt and courageous response yet’ to Miss Robison’s ‘astounding claim’.

Miss Robison told MSPs there was no evidence that ‘predatory and abusive men have ever had to pretend to be anything else to carry out abusive and predatory behaviour’.

Miss Dalgety, who was sexually assaulted as a child, branded the statement ‘crass’.

Miss Rowling tweeted: ‘The law @NicolaSturgeon’s trying to pass in Scotland will harm the most vulnerable women in society: those seeking help after male violence/rape and incarcerated women.

‘Statistics show that imprisoned women are already far more likely to have been previously abused.’

Changes to the Bill have been proposed in a bid to ‘streamline’ the process.

If passed, it will also include the lowering of the age at which people can apply to change their gender from 18 to 16.

Miss Rowling has faced a continued onslaught of accusations of transphobia since publishing an essay on her website in July 2020 in which she argued that biological sex is real.

The Harry Potter author also revealed that she was ‘a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor’.

She was labelled a Terf – trans-exclusionary radical feminist – after taking issue with the term ‘people who menstruate’.

In December Miss Rowling was once again forced to deny that she is transphobic as she argued for sex, not gender identity, to be the ‘basis of decisions on safeguarding’.