Could anyone?

Written by

April 21, 2026

Whatever you think about her books, what J.K. Rowling is doing right now matters more.

She’s one of the most successful authors alive. She could have stayed quiet, protected her empire, and avoided the mob.

Instead, she chose to speak up for women for sex-based rights, for single-sex spaces, for safeguarding.

It gave me pause. I had to think about it. Could she have?

I’m not so sure. I don’t say that to challenge her courage, but to look more closely at the nature of the situation. I’m not sure she could have put up with it forever, for the simple reason that it’s intolerable. Sitting back and staying silent while purported adults talk the most ridiculous destructive nonsense adults have talked since about the 11th century is no picnic, let me tell you. It’s itchy. You want to scratch it. Trying to ignore it gets more difficult every day.

I think she would probably say the same. It’s keeping shtum that would have been the torture, not slapping the challenge onto the table and refusing to budge.

Comments

10 responses to “Could anyone?”

Bjarte Foshaug

Apr 21, 2026 9:44 PM

I’m not comparing myself to JKR, but on the topic of “could anyone?”, I have pre-written a kind of public statement in case my heretical writings here blow up in my face. It ends like this:

Bottom line, I didn’t seek out this fight. It was brought to me. What happened was not that people like me became “radicalized”, “drunk the kool-aid”, adopted some crazy new “ideology” etc. It’s just that sometime during the last decade, so many of the things we all used to know became heresy. By continuing to know and not pretending otherwise, by not adopting the new orthodoxy, by staying in place rather than following the rest of society over the cliff, we suddenly found ourselves beyond the pale.

So before you join the mob demanding my head on a plate, my question to you is – to quote Judy Dench from her last major appearance as “M” in the James Bond movie Skyfall:

How safe do you feel?

Considering how many of the things we all used to know are already deemed thoughtcrime, considering how many former “friends” and “allies” of the woke crowd have already been thrown under the bus, how safe do you feel? If the biological differences between males and females could go from “obvious” to “thoughtcrime” in less than ten years, what other obvious ideas may be considered thoughtcrime in another ten years? Why should your current “friends” and “allies” be expected to treat you any better when you suddenly find yourself on the wrong side of the next toxic craze or fad? How do you expect to be able to hold your attackers up to any standards of intellectual honesty, charity, and good faith when it’s your name being dragged through the mud all over the internet for, say, once having said something that could be taken to imply that the Earth might not be entirely flat?
Ophelia Benson

Apr 22, 2026 3:58 AM

Yep.
Mostly Cloudy

Apr 22, 2026 5:29 AM

Bjarte Foshaug:

It’s just that sometime during the last decade, so many of the things we all used to know became heresy. By continuing to know and not pretending otherwise, by not adopting the new orthodoxy, by staying in place rather than following the rest of society over the cliff, we suddenly found ourselves beyond the pale.

I don’t know how many people here used to support what I will call “gender ideology”. I certainly did.

It wasn’t until I learned about gender ideology’s insistence on giving life-altering chemicals to children and teenagers, that I began to express some mild doubts. The fury and nastiness with which some of my former online friends turned on me, shocked me. Surely, I thought, even if my friends disagree with me, this belligerent response was unmerited.

That’s when I started looking at gender-critical websites, and being amazing to learn that despised figures like Jesse Singal and Jane Clare Jones were making reasonable arguments.
Your Name’s not Bruce?

Apr 22, 2026 5:48 AM

Considering how many of the things we all used to know are already deemed thoughtcrime, considering how many former “friends” and “allies” of the woke crowd have already been thrown under the bus, how safe do you feel? If the biological differences between males and females could go from “obvious” to “thoughtcrime” in less than ten years, what other obvious ideas may be considered thoughtcrime in another ten years?

Just came across this by Jane Clare Jones on her Culture War Blues:

What this irony demonstrates is that the observation that authoritarian power will attempt to warp reality in its own interests is fundamentally correct, and it is immaterial, as Orwell knew, whether that authoritarian power is coming from the left or the right. It also demonstrates, unequivocally, how spectacularly dangerous it was when the identitarian left decided to go all in on some Foucauldian conflation of knowledge/power, forgot that the observation that power constructs reality is supposed to be a critique, and spent more than a decade telling us that obvious parts of the material world were artefacts of power and if we didn’t agree we were bigots. The point, and genius, of Orwell, is not only the detailed exploration of the way in which totalitarian power falsifies reality (and falsifies history in order to prop up a falsified present), but the clear understanding that facts, and material evidence of those facts, are our only defence against tyranny. Facts—and fact-based systems of moral adjudication, otherwise known as ‘the rule of law’—are all we have to defend ourselves against systems of unaccountable ex-nihilo power that function on the basis of nothing but the assertion—as the Sophist Thrasymachus has it at the beginning of The Republic—that ‘might makes right.’ When facts and law break down, truth and justice can only become a matter of violent struggle, and there is no guarantee that truth and justice will prevail.

https://culturewarblues.substack.com/p/feminism-as-other

Not to mention that what is regarded as “real” in visual terms, is being subverted and molded by AI. How long before the White House starts putting out “official” AI videos of events that are in dispute? ICE murders, for example, that are scripted by the official “lies” of self-defence against dangerous, violent, homicidal protesters? (I’m surprised they’re not doing that already, while there are probably some people who believe thay already are.)
Mostly Cloudy

Apr 22, 2026 5:49 AM

I’ve posted this piece before, but if people here are interested in the background behind the rise of “gender ideology”, this article by Jamie Paul, “Memory-Hole Archive: Sex and (Trans)Gender Wars” is a good starting point:

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/memory-hole-archive-sex-and-transgender
Bjarte Foshaug

Apr 22, 2026 1:52 PM

Mostly Cloudy

I wouldn’t say I ever believed in gender ideology exactly, but for short time (before I knew what gender ideology was) I did believe that the Trans Rights movement was a normal, benign “social justice” movement as I understood the term at the time. I also thought the goal of every social justice movement was to get away from boxes and labels, “ingroup vs. outgroup” / “us vs. them” thinking, and sweeping, essentialist generalizations about whole demographics of people, indeed to make things like sex, race, and sexual orientation largely irrelevant with respect to how people were treated. It’s been a steep learning curve…
Freemage

Apr 22, 2026 6:13 PM

I admit to having been a full-bore Gender Ideologue. Mostly a result of the forced-teaming strategy (which I sadly did not think to question), and kind of the inverse of it, as well–the bad bedfellows notion, from the idea that under no circumstances did I want to side with the religious nincompoops who were the most vocal and visible opponents to genderism. (I still don’t, which is why I insist so often that we have to push the ‘three sides’ aspect of this fight.)

It wasn’t gendercrit writers who first woke me up, though once I had doubts, they were there (especially Ophelia) to educate me. Rather, it was listening to the actual words coming out of the ideologues. I’m pretty sure my first crack in the wall was the notion of transwomen being allowed in women’s prisons, even without any medical interventions.

And as soon as I suggested that phalli have no place in a women’s prison, I too became an outcast. It distressed me greatly, because literally every other leftist position I’d adopted over the years was because of the bad arguments from the right (I used to be an ‘abortion moderate’ and a supporter of both gun rights and the death penalty; in every case, it was listening to the adherents of those positions that caused me to rethink my positions).
Steven

Apr 22, 2026 6:50 PM

Sitting back and staying silent while purported adults talk the most ridiculous destructive nonsense adults have talked since about the 11th century is no picnic, let me tell you. It’s itchy. You want to scratch it. Trying to ignore it gets more difficult every day.

In 1984, Orwell offers the incessant pain and itching of a varicose ulcer as a metaphor for having to live immersed in the lies and propaganda of the Party.
Ophelia Benson

Apr 22, 2026 8:05 PM

Huh. Interesting.
Mostly Cloudy

Apr 24, 2026 2:49 AM

Freemage:

You are right about the “bad badfellows” aspect. I am sure many of the people supporting the “phalli in women’s prisons” and other aspects haven’t thought about it, and are doing it solely because Donald Trump /Nigel Farage / Viktor Orban oppose it.

It’s the “Negative partisanship” phenomenon.