22 October 2026 - 11:30am
Six years after her 2020 essay in which she explained why she entered the Terf wars, JK Rowling has sent a dispatch from the trenches. In a searing follow-up, she calls trans activism “elitist to its core”. She is, of course, correct: a small army of consultants and lobbyists write rules on sex and gender for the masses, while vacuous luvvies do the PR, giving the trans movement a showbiz gloss. They won’t have to live with the consequences of pretending men can really become women.
Unlike most of them, Rowling remembers when she “lived hand to mouth”. Her experience of poverty, domestic abuse and sexual violence is what the likes of Amnesty International might term “intersectional oppression”; the compounded disadvantage of being poor and female. But in her plain speaking, Rowling is more a woman of the people than the politicians and human rights groups who claim to speak for them.
A poll of 1,500 adults found that 86% preferred single-sex showers and changing rooms at work. Only around one in five thought trans-identifying people should be allowed to use whichever facilities they prefer. The preference for single-sex provision crossed age and political lines, including among Labour and Green voters.
But the trans activist class seems unable to understand these concerns, in part because it speaks a different language. In its lexicon of grievance, words like “cis”, “cervix-haver”, and “transmisogyny” separate the enlightened from the benighted, those au fait with university-curdled gender theory from the hoi polloi. When the Supreme Court ruling of April this year reaffirmed the ordinary meaning of sex in law, after years of grassroots feminist campaigning, it provoked outrage. It showed how detached and entitled many of the “good people” really are.
One group in Rowling’s sights is trade unions, whose leaders she accuses of abandoning their historic role as defenders of the working class in favour of “luxury beliefs”. The charge resonates this week, after Unison general secretary Andrea Egan criticised the NHS’s new single-sex policy, emphasising its impact on trans-identifying patients and pledging to campaign for legal change. She had no apparent thought for the NHS patients and staff vilified for wanting single-sex facilities.
Rowling fires another round at “headline-hungry female politicians” whose attitude to women’s rights is “whatever is good for me personally”. She could be swiping at anyone from former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, recently photographed in a T-shirt reading “Global Feminist”, to sex-toy champion Samantha Niblett MP, who delivered her disdain for single-sex guidance from a sunlounger in Italy. In a video, Niblett said it “protects nobody” and accused women who support it of hating trans people.
But, Rowling is unlike these career feminists and their luvvie enablers. For decades, she has funded services women can turn to in crisis. She founded Beira’s Place, Edinburgh’s women-only rape crisis centre, and has created a fund to help women in Britain and Ireland defend their rights in court. The abuse is familiar, too: once, men’s rights activists attacked her for speaking up for single mothers; today, their successors put on lippy and complain about misgendering.
Rowling’s essay is about more than elite hypocrisy. It asks who pays when powerful institutions impose a faddish ideology, how those at the bottom of the heap are crushed by the “#bekind” demands of trans activists. She may be a writer, but Rowling has proved her feminism in deeds as well as words.
