This is how cancel culture ends. Thank you, JK Rowling

This is how cancel culture ends. All it takes is one person.

JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has defied a hate speech law introduced by the Scottish government. The law, introduced on Monday, makes it an offence to “stir up hatred” based on disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or the fact of a person being intersex. Critics of the law believe the omission of biological sex means that women born female are not protected if their rights come into conflict with the claims of trans women.

“I look forward to being arrested …“. JK Rowling’s challenge to Scotland’s authorities.Credit: Getty

Since Scotland introduced self-identification laws in 2022, rapists, who had committed their crimes as men, have used the law to identify as women and be transferred to women’s prisons. One of these is Isla Bryson, who had raped two women and began identifying as a woman a year after being charged. Another is Tiffany Scott, who stalked a 13-year-old girl, before identifying as a woman after being caught.

People who oppose the latest law believe its formulation will mean that it will be potentially criminal to publicly object to people such as Bryson and Scott being accommodated in female-only spaces, by virtue of their self-identification.

The irony is, women are generally very accepting of trans women. However, a bullying minority in this minority-identification group, including the likes of Bryson and Scott, is determined that coexistence is only acceptable on their own intractable terms.

On the day the law was introduced, JK Rowling tweeted a thread noting that biological women gained no extra protections, but that a number of sex offenders who were identifying as trans women were now protected, along with a number of trans women who have used their identity to hurt or marginalise biological women.

And Rowling threw down the gauntlet to the government, with the challenge: “I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”

Rowling wasn’t arrested on her return. How could she have been? The Scottish government would’ve looked like fools.

Her public defiance was an important milestone in what has been called “cancel culture”. This is a glimpse of how it will end.

Cancel culture, in its modern incarnation, emerged in lockstep with social media. It describes a co-ordinated attack on the reputation of an individual for an attitude or action that the attackers consider unacceptable, with the aim of ostracising the person from society. Justine Sacco is a nobody whose name became internationally associated with “cancellation” when, in 2013, the young PR executive pressed send on a sardonic tweet about AIDS and white privilege. The tweet became the subject of a Twitter furore and Sacco lost her job as a direct result of the pile-on.

Since then, cancel mobs have hunted down the high-profile and the low-profile with equal enthusiasm, revelling in their ability to punish people for crimes real and perceived and to silence discussion on any topic the mob considers taboo. Taboos are often identified by appending the suffix “phobia” to a word.

In recent years, cancelling has chiefly affected people without a great deal of power, who can lose their jobs or livelihoods as a result. In 2018, a graphic designer showed up to a party with an ill-conceived costume including “blackface” (darkening her skin in a way that echoes an offensive American form of cabaret) to mock TV presenter Megyn Kelly. She was subsequently outed in The Washington Post and “cancelled”, losing her job.

In Australia, Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming was the subject of cancel culture when neo-Nazis attended her women’s rights march (uninvited). The state Liberal leader suspended her from the party for nine months.

The fear of cancel culture was also pervasive during the Voice referendum, with many people who had misgivings about the constitutional amendment preferring not to say so in public. Even some senior lawyers refused to be quoted on negative analysis of the amendment out of fear that they would be discriminated against by pro-Voice judges and clients. That obviously didn’t change the result: the secret ballot was invented before the term “cancel culture” was coined, but the (Australian) inventors of that anonymous voting system knew all about bullies who use intimidation and ostracisation to get their way.

Cancel culture works by creating a state of “pluralistic ignorance” in the community. That happens when we all hold different views and perspectives (as is normal) but – because it is only safe to utter one view – most people think they are alone in their dissent. That illusion can only be shattered when brave people begin to say what they think, regardless of the consequences to themselves. It then becomes clear that there is no social consensus, after all.

Alexei Navalny shattered the illusion of support for Russia’s permanent president. By the time he was very literally cancelled (murdered in a Siberian prison), a “noon against Putin” protest had become possible, where Russians showed up to vote in an undemocratic election at the agreed time as a gesture of support for the dead opposition leader.

JK Rowling has had the same liberating effect. She has given voice to people who are concerned that some of the noisiest trans activists are not trying in good faith to find new space for a minority, but instead intent on usurping the identity and spaces of biological women. She has made that last sentence sayable by virtue of it being more frequently said.

Cancel culture was not cancelled, but this is how it will eventually end. When our pluralistic ignorance is destroyed by courageous people, overcoming the fearful silence that benefits bullies.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director strategy and policy at award-winning campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.