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  Reprinted from the National Post by Amy Hamm: Ms.Hamm writes a formidable polemic on the current war on women and their rights in Canadian society.

“J.K. Rowling saved western civilization. Yes, one woman alone.

Rowling, billionaire, famous author of Harry Potter, and outspoken critic of gender ideology, is arguably the largest single force behind a recent inflection point in the West’s culture wars.

Our culture has been pushed to the brink of an irreversible takeover by delusional despots of a radicalized and bastardized left and now — mercifully — appears to be trending in the direction of a relative normal. We are not there yet. And while some countries, Canada included, are lagging, there’s no denying that a seismic cultural shift was recently felt across the West. We certainly felt it with president-elect Donald Trump’s win in the U.S., in which the “trans issue” pushed swing voters en masse to the Republican Party. But the “trans issue” was at the forefront of voter’s minds not only because of Trump, but because J.K. Rowling spent several years instigating an international conversation on gender.
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Gender, or more specifically, gender ideology — which posits that gender is socially constructed, as if each of us has a unique, personalized “gender identity” existing as a soul-like essence contained within, but apart from, our physical bodies — has become a state religion across western countries over the last decade. So unique and special is one’s inner and metaphysical sense of gender, we are to believe, that there are potentially infinite variations; indeed, the British Broadcasting Corporation once proudly told children that more than 100 of them existed, including “bi-gender” and “queer-gender.” Their “educational” program has since been memory-holed. Good riddance.

Believe whatever you like about your identity. All of us deserve to be treated with dignity regardless of our beliefs. It is when women are told they must obey — both in action and within the privacy of their own minds — that things have gone too far.

The madness of gender ideology cannot be separated from the generalized madness of modern “progressivism,” which is, simply, a nouveau and left-wing identitarianism. It is a politicized and destructive obsession with gender, race, and sundry categories that may form the basis of one’s (often alleged and dubious) oppression. Gender appears to be the primary obsession of this new zealotry, with race coming in a close second. There is nothing this new identitarianism doesn’t touch — it falls like darkness at sunset. By way of example, we are told that climate change is, in fact, a race issue — via claims that it disproportionately affects racial minorities. Athletics, rather than being about, well, athletics, are now the “frontier of people who are trans,” according to astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson, who recently stuffed his clown-sized foot so deep into his craw on the issue of natal males competing in female sports that he — a scientist — was handily bested on biology by journalist Piers Morgan.

A belief in gender ideology makes one lose their senses entirely. And that’s the point: adherents are to denounce basic reality to demonstrate their faithfulness. To prove they are not evil heretics. Or else. During the period that most were too terrified of speaking up, gender ideology took over our institutions — cultural, government, and health care — our workplaces, and even our personal lives. Then J.K. Rowling came along and said: “To hell with that.”

Rowling did three things, when it came to gender, and she did them as the first of her (famous, fantastically wealthy) kind: she refused to repeat the institutionalized lies of gender ideology; she used her clout to intervene in the public abuse of un-famous women who did the same; and — crucially — she refused her own cancellation. In fairness, she didn’t just do these things, but she does them daily; on repeat, and to a chorus of her self-identified sworn enemies who can be found stomping, screaming, crying, calling for her assassination, and warming themselves by the pyre of 1,000 Harry Potter paperbacks. These fits are no matter to Rowling, whose sass is unparalleled: “I get the same royalties whether you read them or burn them. Enjoy your marshmallows!” she has quipped at one such book burner.

In a recent X post, Rowling made it clear she will never back down. “If there’s a better hill to die on than the rights and safety of women and children, I’ve never found it,” she wrote.

Detractors claim that Rowling adopted a “pet issue” in gender ideology’s impact on women and children — which couldn’t be further from the truth. The impact is enormous and terrible. Rowling is accused of being obsessed with transgender persons: their lives, their choices, and even their genitals. Such accusations are common refrains of gender activists. It is mere projection. It is a tactic of abusers — to turn their own fears, anger, and ugly emotions onto someone else: to accuse others of what they do best and constantly.

Is it Rowling, they say, who obsesses over what’s between someone’s legs; but it is the gender activists who’ll go on record referring to women by such grotesque names as a “person with a vagina.” That doozy was from Canada’s Supreme Court Justice Sheilah Martin, used in a sexual assault ruling in 2024. Last month, from an American courtroom, a newly-minted epithet: women might be known as “vaginally-presenting people.” Are you offended? Disgusted? Well, that’s only because you are flatly obsessed with genitals! Have you got a fetish or something?

How did we get here? As I mentioned, it appears that, over the last decade, peculiar and irrational ideas began to creep into the everyday thematics of western culture. What you might once have expected to hear while eavesdropping on first-year university students gathered for a heady anarcho-post-modernist-topple-the-patriarchy-anti-capitalist-save-the-planet-eat-the-rich-power-to-the-oppressed club became something you would hear in quotidian conversation.

Suddenly, your peers, friends, and colleagues were began obnoxiously vomiting the language of the indignant and nouveau activism, all doggedly obsessed with intersectionality and hierarchies of oppression. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be known as a social justice activist. Everything nuanced became black and white. Good and evil. Things we used to say, thoughtlessly, became verboten. The definition of “hate” grew exponentially and by the day. Included in the new definition of “hate” was any rejection — no matter how considerate and moderate — of the mantra: “Trans women are women.”

You can’t say that, we were told, certainly not as a “cis” woman, or — even worse — a white woman, or a “colonizer.” Check that privilege, girl. We started to fret before we even opened our mouths to speak: Is this speech permitted under the new world order? Best to stay quiet, than to risk saying something wrong. Words, we were told, were now literal violence.

We women dared not speak about our experiences without first consulting with a “woman” who was “assigned male at birth” — lest we utter the phrase that would not just offend, but erase the very existence of, a transwoman. There are endless variations of this powerful and annihilating expression, the simplest of them being: He is a male. How ironic, that at the same time as we women lost our sex-based rights, we gained the lethal skill of obliterating others using only our words.

We lost friends and entire social circles, for refusing to bend the knee.

Countries began to enshrine the metaphysical concept of “gender identity” into law. Canada’s Bill C-16, passed in 2017, did just that, adding the concept as a protected class under human rights legislation. It paved the way for self-identification policies that now allow natal males to identify their way into our bathrooms, rape shelters, prisons, sports — or any other space where women and children once had the right to segregation for our own safety or dignity.

Across the West, we all fell into four broad categories regarding the “trans issue”: those unaware; those terrified or otherwise unwilling to speak out; those who’d gleefully punish you if you did; and those who spoke out anyways.

Then came Rowling. It began with a December 2019 tweet: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill.”

The tweet referred to Maya Forstater, a British woman whose online posts about gender ideology cost her a job. Ultimately — and on appeal — she won the case against her employer and was awarded hefty costs for their ugly and wrongful dismissal. The Employment Tribunal ruled that Forstater’s beliefs — centred upon the bald fact that men can never become women — are protected under the country’s 2010 Equality Act. Indeed, Forstater’s “beliefs” in observable and testable reality, often referred to as “gender critical,” were deemed “worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

Rowling used her fame and clout to stand up for an everyday woman. She has done this many times. This story is close to me. Like she did with Forstater, Rowling also stood up for me, by showing public support during my four-year (and counting) legal battle with the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives. Like Forstater, I have refused to lie and say that males can declare themselves females. (Full disclosure: Rowling recently surprised me by generously gifting a $5,000 Gucci purse for Christmas. I was writing this piece before this happened.)

Politicians or celebrities would be so lucky to be accused of representing the “everyman.” But representing the “everyman” or “everywoman” is generally theoretical; it’s a set of promises, a way of speaking, and one’s broad appeal to the average person. It is hauling “regular Joe” on the stage for a political rally, flaunting his everyday-ness to the crowd, and then never speaking to him again. It does not require meaningful action.

It’s not the same thing as finding the “everywoman,” taking on her struggle, and materially changing her life with your clout and backing. Rowling did this for Forstater. It was unprecedented. The world paid attention because of how unusual it was for a billionaire to go to bat for a stranger facing public cancellation after expressing her political views. On gender, no less.

In 2019, women’s growing opposition to the prevailing gender orthodoxy rarely made the news. Not only were “uppity” women like Forstater being silenced and fired for speaking out, but our stories, too, were kept quiet, our work and actions to raise awareness of gender ideology conveniently looked over by politicians and most media — lending credence to the false narrative that no significant opposition to gender ideology existed at all. Rowling elevated women’s opposition to the mainstream. We were no longer lone bigots with “transphobic” intentions. We were with Rowling, and she was with us. And gender ideology went from being widely perceived as a silly or niche concern to what it really was: a serious attack not just on women and children, but also on our freedoms, our culture, and reality itself.

And then, in June 2020, Rowling penned an essay that sparked a furor that kept us on track to change the very direction of western civilization.

In it, Rowling explained her interest in sex, gender, and trans. She also revealed she has survived sexual assault and domestic abuse. Not a word of it was remotely “transphobic”; the opposite, in fact — Rowling detailed her belief that “the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable… Trans people need and deserve protection,” she insisted.

“I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces,” wrote Rowling.

To the gender activists, the thoughtful and not-at-all-hateful essay was taken as heresy on top of apostasy. Rowling was a witch, and she needed to immediately burn atop a pile of her own books. A CNN headline quoted a trans activist calling the essay “devastating” in its “misinformation and transphobia.” The young actors Rowling made famous and wealthy with her Harry Potter movies, including Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe — the little brats — went on a tear by publicly denouncing the woman they owe their every success to. Rumours about how “transphobic” a screed Rowling’s essay was were as fantastical as a Hogwarts’ tale. And Rowling received countless threats of violence and death, which continue to this day.

Rowling’s essay was as much an explanation of her involvement in our increasingly venomous culture war as it was a declaration of a counterwar. It fired back at those who would destroy society with their censorship, repressive tolerance, and total disregard for the truth. It wasn’t just about “gender” any longer, it was about halting the accelerating decline of the West. It was a huge middle finger to the barbarians already past our gates.

After Rowling’s essay, when the mob again came to cancel her — with fresh vigour — her refusal to apologize provided a short answer: No. Ever since, the cancellation mob, no matter their target, has seen diminishing returns on their investments of outrage.

Later in June 2020, employees of Rowling’s publisher, Hachette, told the company they would henceforth refuse to work on the production of “The Ickabog,” a children’s story, because of Rowling’s views. Rather than capitulate, Hachette reminded their staff about the raison d’être of the industry they (apparently witlessly) found themselves employed in: “Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of publishing,” the company said in a statement.

Rowling would not be cancelled. She would not apologize. Cancel culture, she decided, was over. To hell with her legacy, invoked by critics wanting to bash the non-existent thing over her head to make her feel shame. It was nothing more than the lukewarm threats of would-be tyrants, whose cultural power was now starting to slip. “You know, what a pompous way to live your life walking around thinking, ‘What will my legacy be?’ Whatever, I’ll be dead,” Rowling said in the first episode of her podcast, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.

Though she clearly doesn’t care — and as the character of her enemies suggests — I am certain that Rowling’s legacy will be just fine.

People who lack vast sums of money (nearly all of us) will say: “If only I had the money and I could finally say what I really mean.” But we are forgetting one thing: there are many persons who have that type of money — f*ck you money, never-work-another-day money, where should I overwinter my yacht money — and nearly all of them fail to wake up every morning and stand up to a mob of self-righteous and deluded gender cultists. One does not need to be a psychic to understand that what is occurring in the minds of the wealthy who do not stand up is the same phenomenon occurring in the minds of the non-wealthy who do not stand up: a lack of courage.

A lack of courage, and, as Rowling posted recently, a desire for social accolades: “…there’s certainly a benefit to simpering that you’re completely fine with it, can’t see what the issue is and calling women who disagree fascists, or we wouldn’t be seeing so many wealthy, famous, protected women throwing vulnerable women under the bus.” It is a widely appealing method to collect praise by proclaiming one’s unremitting loyalty to a dominant ideology, no matter how harmful that ideology is to the fabric of our civilization. Given the opportunity, many willingly demonstrate that they are unimpressive henchmen.

And while those lacking in courage are busy grovelling for dopamine hits by publicly “supporting the current thing,” as the meme goes, Rowling can be found risking her safety and freedom to protect others.’ You cannot cancel Rowling, and she will not permit you to cancel others.

In April 2024, Rowling responded to the Scottish government’s passing of a new “hate speech” law by tempting her arrest and taunting the Scottish police to lock her up. At the end of a long X thread highlighting the crimes, scandals, and abuses of numerous transgender-identified males, Rowling wrote: “Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal. 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.”

Gender activists lodged thousands of public complaints in a single day. Rowling was not arrested. Police told the public they would take no action against her. The new law — antithetical to any western democracy — was effectively neutered by one woman’s courage.

That’s Rowling. She possesses a defiance that is both legendary and critical for our times. She did not need to do any of this. It would have been far easier had she not. In fact, in her essay on sex and gender, she admits that being hounded by gender extremists is “endlessly unpleasant.” She’s human, after all. “I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health,” wrote Rowling.

Her wealth and fame ensure that when she speaks, people listen — but they do nothing to insulate or make her immune from the vicious hatred she gets in return. And yet, she doesn’t let up.

A civilization that institutionalizes and enforces the telling of absurd lies — including the lie that humans can change their sex — is in decline. Likewise, for a civilization that not only does not protect women and children from male violence — but enables and excuses it to occur in the service of upholding the states’ mandated lies. Again, the same can be said of a western culture that normalizes the chemical — followed by surgical — castration of its own children, as we see with the medical scandal that is pediatric “gender affirming care.” The West is very sick right now.

We have been living under forced subservience to the foolish and dangerous notion that nothing is more important than “identity” — including self-declared and patently false ones — and that we must upend our culture, institutions, and even our safety and lives in a demonstration of fealty.

I do not wish to imagine where we would be, in 2024, had Rowling not done what she has done — for women and children, for freedom, and for the West. Do not mistake my praise for celebrity worship, either: this is about character, bravery, and virtue in the context of the power conferred by Rowling’s celebrity and reach. If any single person is to one day receive credit for saving western civilization, it is Rowling.

The fight is not over, but she has shown us the way.”