It was no April Fool’s joke.

Harry Potter author-turned culture warrior J.K. Rowling kicked off the month with an 11-tweet social media thread in which she argued 10 transgender women were men — and dared Scottish police to arrest her.

Rowling’s intervention came as a controversial new Scottish government law, aimed at protecting minority groups from hate crimes, took effect. And it landed amid a fierce debate over both the legal status of transgender people in Scotland and over what actually constitutes a hate crime.

Already the law has generated far more international buzz than is normal for legislation passed by a small nation’s devolved parliament.

  • @xanu
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    79 months ago

    She didn’t write the Harry Potter books under her pseudonym, but a lot of her mediocre crime dramas are written under the name Robert Galbraith. The conversion therapy psychiatrist I’m talking about was named Robert Galbraith Heath.