Let’s hope BBC’s Rowling documentary is not just a witch hunt - Susan Dalgety
News that the BBC is to make a documentary charting the life of Edinburgh’s most famous citizen, JK Rowling, fills me with dread.
Not because I think the writer, philanthropist and women’s rights campaigner doesn’t deserve at least two hours of prime time, but because I fear it will be a hatchet job on a woman who deserves nothing but praise for her talent, courage and for creating the unforgettable Cormoran Strike.
The press release announcing the film describes her as “one of Britain’s most polarising figures” because of her views on sex and ‘gender identity.’
For those readers who may have missed the decade-long debate about the meaning of sex, Rowling is one of thousands of women who objected to the Scottish Government’s plans for self-ID, where a man could declare he was a woman simply by filling in a form.
In January 2024, the UK government rightly scuppered Nicola Sturgeon’s flawed gender reform bill because of its impact on the 2010 Equality Act. And last year, For Women Scotland’s landmark victory in the Supreme Court confirmed what Rowling had been saying all along: in law, ‘sex’ means biological sex.
Yet the BBC insists her “unflinching beliefs” sparked a “fraught and divisive dialogue that continues to this day”. Really? A woman, albeit one with a global reputation, who says what most people believe – that humans cannot change their sex, no matter how much they may desire it – is personally responsible for a deep division in society? Nonsense.
The people who created and continue to indulge in the culture war that has raged for ten years are self-obsessed politicians eager for cheap publicity and trans activists who insist that women and girls have no sex-based rights.
Not forgetting fading celebrities quick to jump on a passing bandwagon to remind the world they still exist. All JK Rowling did was speak truth to power.
And yet I fear the tone of the documentary, once it has dealt with her remarkable transformation from a single parent on benefits to one of the most influential people in the world, will be snide, bordering on nasty. A witch hunt masquerading as an arts documentary. I hope I am proved wrong, but I won’t hold my breath.