In a disturbing escalation of her anti-trans rhetoric, billionaire author J.K. Rowling is now encouraging the public in the U.K. to photograph people in women’s restrooms — potentially targeting anyone who doesn’t fit narrow beauty norms, including transgender women and gender-nonconforming cisgender women. Her comments came in a post on Twitter, where Rowling responded to a question about how public restrooms would be policed after a recent U.K. Supreme Court ruling defined “man” and “woman” in legal terms as biological sex.
Following the ruling, the U.K.’s Equality and Human Rights Commission said trans people should not be permitted to use bathrooms aligning with their gender.
Rowling replied, “Quite easily, really. Decent men will stay out, as they always have, so we can assume all who don’t are a threat, given their disregard for women’s and girls’ safety, privacy, and dignity. Photographing, reporting, and disseminating such men’s images online will be a piece of cake.”
But photographing people in restrooms is illegal in the U.K. — and dangerous in practice. And harassment has already happened. In March, Phoenix police burst into a restroom to remove a butch lesbian, wrongly identified as male. That same month, a 6’4″ cisgender Walmart employee was harassed in a restroom because someone thought she was trans. In January, Rep.
Lauren Boebert mistook a cis woman for being trans in a Capitol restroom and told her, “You shouldn’t be here.” The list goes on — and it’s a chilling preview of what Rowling’s “piece of cake” policy could unleash: a wave of vigilante harassment against anyone who doesn’t conform to rigid, outdated standards of womanhood. For LGBTQ Americans, many of whom have long viewed Rowling as a harmful figure, this latest move is more than just rhetoric. It’s a call to action that endangers real people, in the name of “protecting” them.
