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.

Ms Rowling, who has long been a critic of some trans activism, posted on X on the day the new legislation came into force.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I don’t like Harry Potter to begin with, but I don’t really have a huge problem separating the artist from the art if the only thing they did was be hateful.

    Roald Dahl was a major antisemite, but I still think he wrote great children’s books and suspense/horror stories. H. P. Lovecraft was bigoted about pretty much anyone who wasn’t a white man. Again, a really good writer.

    Where is becomes hard to separate them is when they actually do something about their disgusting ideas. Roman Polanski and Woody Allen are pedophiles. I will never watch either of their movies. And I think both have made very good movies. I feel that I was wrong to watch the ones I did.

    So yeah, Rowling is an utterly contemptible piece of shit, but if you like Harry Potter, it’s okay.

    • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      There were always questionable elements from the books, like the depictions of goblins and elves. But knowing what we know now, these elements cannot be brushed off any more.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        The Elves were directly based off of “Brownies”

        It’s also highly unusual that elves were depicted this way, considering most fantasy stories hold them in high regard as being magical beings seeing themselves above humanity for reasons that are normally geniunely sound (Better moral compass, natural magical talents… Whereas in Harry Potter it’s the exact opposite, humanity seems to be the highest creature and Elves feel like to squabble before them…

        There’s no way the “Brownie” similarity is unintentional

        So what’s a Brownie? Well it was a way of explaining slaves to young children back in those days, to brush off the casual cruelty by lying to kids. Essentially the myth of the “Brownie” was to re contextualize the suffering of the black slave as a magical event, a beautiful mysterious thing to be observed not with horror, but with wonder. A big part of the myth claimed that you can’t give a Brownie anything nice like proper clothing, or else this “breaks the contract between Man and Fae” and they run back into the woods never to be seen again.

        “No it’s okay children, they’re magical forest people called Brownies! And they LIKE doing that work for us! Oh and we can’t give them anything nice, or they’ll disappear forever! And you wouldn’t want that to happen! No no, really, they’re faeries, and they like being whipped like that!”

        Feeling disgusted? Good, that sickness in your stomach is proof that you’re a better person than JK Rowling.

        tl;dr Harry Potter elves are a resurrection of Pro-Slavery Propaganda used to indoctrinate children into thinking it’s okay to treat people like shit. They had to GASLIGHT LITERAL CHILDREN into thinking that black people were magical elves, in order to stop them from feeling bad about slavery… and JK decided to bring that back for her kid’s book.

        As much fun as Hogwarts Legacy is, I hope she rots in hell and then is reborn as a transgender woman to learn basic empathy.

        • This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          It’s also highly unusual that elves were depicted this way, considering most fantasy stories hold them in high regard as being magical beings seeing themselves above humanity for reasons that are normally geniunely sound (Better moral compass, natural magical talents… Whereas in Harry Potter it’s the exact opposite, humanity seems to be the highest creature and Elves feel like to squabble before them…

          Have you never heard of Santa’s elves? Or Elves in Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’?

          • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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            8 months ago

            I’ve been meaning to read the latter, and we’re all aware of the former, but there’s a lot of conflicting legends of Santa’s Helpers