A trans British TV news anchor reported “Harry Potter” author JK Rowling to the police over “misgendering” on social media, according to UK news outlet BylineTV.
India Willoughby, 58, who is considered Britain’s first trans news anchor, said she called the Northumbria Police about a series of posts on X by Rowling in the latest turn in an ongoing feud with Rowling over trans rights.
The offense was apparently posts on X in which Rowling referred to Willoughby as a “man.”
Willoughby maintains the world’s highest-paid author committed a “hate crime” in her posts on Sunday and that it was a “cut-and-dry offense,” Byline TV reported.
The offending posts started with a comment on a news story that reported a man entered a woman’s restroom to spy on its users and claimed to be trans when police confronted him. There was no evidence he ever claimed to be trans before the encounter with the cops, according to a news report Rowling shared on Saturday.
On Sunday, the author — whose strident stands on trans issues have drawn rebukes from many fans and others, including Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who portrayed Harry Potter in the movies, and his co-star Emma Watson, who portrayed Hermione Granger — posted a lengthy rant about allowing trans women to use women’s bathrooms.
“When men – all men, however they identify – are banned from women’s spaces, those who disregard the ban can be challenged, inside the space and out,” she wrote. “They mark themselves out as suspicious by breaking a rule decent men respect. Nobody claims the rule has successfully kept out every single man who wants to commit voyeurism or sexual assault. What we’re saying is that allowing males into female only spaces on the basis of their claim to be a women removes an obstacle that has hitherto been *proven* to increase women and girls’ safety.”
When an X user responded to the post with a video of Willoughby asking “So you are saying this lady should use the men’s locker room then?!” Rowling, also 58, responded, stating that the video did not show a lady but “just a man reveling in his misogynistic performance of what he thinks ‘woman’ means: narcissistic, shallow and exhibitionist.”
Willoughby, also known as a short-lived contestant on the British version of “Celebrity Big Brother,” told Byline TV her response was to report Rowling to police.
But Rowling slapped back, posting a comment above the video of Willoughby’s interview with BylineTV that stated, “Some time ago, lawyers advised me that not only did I have a clearly winnable case against India Willoughby for defamation, but that India’s obsessive targeting of me over the past few years may meet the legal threshold for harassment.”
“I ignored this advice because I couldn’t be bothered giving India the publicity he so clearly craves,” Rowling continued, sharing a series of posts from Willoughby that she characterized as homophobic, racist and anti-immigration. She also dug up a post with comments from Willoughby degengrating a trans woman that in part says in part, “Debbie is a man who campaigns against trans rights.”
“Surprisingly for such an eminent legal authority, he appears to have forgotten that the [legal] ruling established that gender critical views can be protected in law as a philosophical belief,” posted Rowling, who last year said she’d “happily” do two years in prison over her views.
“No law compels anyone to pretend to believe that India is a woman,” the post continued.
“Aware as I am that it’s an offense to lie to law enforcement, I’ll simply have to explain to the police that, in my view, India is a classic example of the male narcissist who lives in a state of perpetual rage that he can’t compel women to take him at his own valuation,” she added.