Harry Potter author JK Rowling is opening an abuse survivors’ centre for biological women only in Edinburgh, Scotland, amid fears of male-bodied transwomen encroaching on women’s spaces.
The prolific author, who has alienated some of her leftist fans by speaking out against “intact” transwomen — that is, biological males with penises — being able to self-identify and access hitherto women-only spaces, such as public lavatories and shelters, which she believes puts “natal” women in danger.
She is therefore funding a sexual violence support centre called Beira’s Place in Scotland, where the left-separatist devolved government is currently legislating to make it even easier for males to identify as women than elsewhere in the country, which will “provide support, advocacy, and information on all forms of sexual violence, sexual abuse, and sexual exploitation, to women aged 16 and over who live in any part of the Lothians” — and by “women” they do mean biological women, as determined by sex rather than gender identity.
“Beira’s Place has been set up in response to demand from female survivors for a women-only service, as one is currently not available in the area,” the centre explains on its website.
“If you’d have shown me when I was 18 what young girls would be dealing with now – what we’d all be dealing with, but particularly young girls – I would have been horrified,” Rowling said of her motivations for funding Beira’s Place in an interview with Suzanne Moore.
“Because when you’re 18, you assume this can only get better – like, we’ve got these rights and we’ve got all these amazing women doing feminist analysis, and it will change, it really will change. By the time I’m my mother’s age, I thought, my daughters will have it so much easier,” she continued.
“But now I think we’ve gone backwards. I think we’re living through a nightmare.”
The so-called “TERF” — or “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” — said that, in her view , a “safe space is not somewhere where I have to use only the ‘correct terms’ or where I am not allowed to talk about my own life experience. Or I am not allowed to profess a belief in biology. How is that a safe space for me? Of course not, nor is it a safe space for many, many women.”
Rowling was particularly perturbed by the policy of existing rape crisis centres to “challenge” women uncomfortable with sharing spaces with biological males on their views, saying they should not be expected to “reframe their trauma” at such a difficult time.
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