Sturgeon says she stands by the principle that an individual has the right to self-identify in the gender of their choosing.
However she has also expressed regret that she did not pause the Holyrood gender self-ID bill, in order to seek common ground between supporters and critics, when the issue became mired in “rancour and division”.
“We’d lost all sense of rationality in this debate. I’m partly responsible for that,” she told ITV News, external.
Rowling is unimpressed, writing on her website that Sturgeon “caused real, lasting harm” by presiding over a culture in which women who did not subscribe to her “luxury beliefs” were “silenced, shamed, persecuted” and placed in degrading and unsafe situations.
“She is flat out Trumpian in her shameless denial of reality and hard facts,” adds the Edinburgh-based author.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast this week Sturgeon said she believed “forces on the far right” had sought to “weaponise” the trans issue to “push back on rights more generally”.
The comments echoed language she had used in an interview with The News Agents podcast, external in 2023 when she said that some opponents of the SNP’s gender reforms were “deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well”.
Rowling describes that as Sturgeon’s “basket of deplorables” moment, a reference to Hillary Clinton’s disastrous dismissal of half of her rival Donald Trump’s supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic.
With those comments, Rowling claims, Sturgeon “demonised and stigmatised” survivors of sexual trauma, lesbians, women with disabilities and “everyone concerned about safety, privacy, fairness and dignity for girls”.