HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JK ROWLING!

Women standing up for women who stand up for themselves

So, just as Kellie-Jay (Posie Parker) anticipated, trans activists managed to get the JK Rowling poster taken down at Edinburgh Waverley station and provided her with the kind of publicity you normally just can’t buy. As someone on Spinster pointed out, funny how the Most Oppressed Minority Ever can achieve stuff like this in a matter of hours while women have had to endure direct physical threats for years without anyone even noticing, let alone doing anything about it.

Luckily, there is something we all can do, which is to write to Andrew Haines of Network Rail and complain. The removal of the poster is an insulting insinuation that there is something hateful about standing up for women who stand up for themselves. There is a chain leading from JK Rowling to every woman who has defended herself against erasure and abuse, and with that in mind, here is my friend’s (excellent) letter to Haines, which I hope you might use as a spur or guide to composing one of your own.

Dear Andrew,

I was dismayed to see a poster with a simple, iconic message of appreciation of a much-loved children’s author and philanthropist, JK Rowling, removed as ‘political’.

Have you lost all sense of proportion?

I am aware that she is being demonised in the most appalling terms by what boils down to a flat-earth cult that demands no one mention biological sex, but why on Earth a national rail operator should heed anti-scientific, bizarre nonsense is beyond me.

JK Rowling is a Scotswoman and a national treasure, a person of great integrity with so many charitable activities and popular love behind her. She may have stated the obvious, inserting some much-needed common sense into the public debate, but every demographic in the general public agree with her, according to the latest YouGov poll.

It is her detractors, and your organisation’s decision, that is deeply, and controversially political.

I urge you to rethink and reinstate the message of support. In these troubled times, JK Rowling does so much more for the UK’s image abroad than our own government does. She really doesn’t deserve this appalling treatment.

yours etc