{"id":346450,"date":"2025-08-15T11:51:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T11:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/346450\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T11:51:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T11:51:14","slug":"nicola-sturgeon-book-reignites-trans-row-with-jk-rowling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/346450\/","title":{"rendered":"Nicola Sturgeon book reignites trans row with JK Rowling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sturgeon says she stands by the principle that an individual has the right to self-identify in the gender of their choosing.<\/p>\n

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”.<\/p>\n

“We’d lost all sense of rationality in this debate. I’m partly responsible for that,” she told ITV News, external<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“She is flat out Trumpian in her shameless denial of reality and hard facts,” adds the Edinburgh-based author.<\/p>\n

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”.<\/p>\n

The comments echoed language she had used in an interview with The News Agents podcast, external<\/a> 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”.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sturgeon says she stands by the principle that an individual has the right to self-identify in the gender…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":346451,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[748,393,4884,12,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-346450","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115032639634120139","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}