Chris Bertram

An open letter to J K Rowling (November 2026)

Dear Ms Rowling

I see you have published an update on your June 2020 essay on transgender issues. As you probably recall, I responded to that at the time.¹ And here I am again, with a couple of brief(ish) remarks about your update.

The difficulty with this debate has always been, and still is, that most of the time both sides are running on rage. On both sides there is something laudable about that rage. For on both sides it’s rage against injustice; and on both sides the injustice is real.

I won’t go on here about the huge injustices against trans people that anger me. I could pursue that question by suggesting that you reflect on the murder of Brianna Ghey, or read Caroline Litman’s wonderful but harrowing book Her Name Is Alice, or look up the details of the appalling rolling anti-trans pogrom that is currently in progress in (of all places) “the land of the free”, the land of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the USA. I am saddened and angered that none of these anti-trans outrages seem to matter at all to the fashionable anti-trans elite who now dominate the UK’s media discourse and political debate about trans people. But we can talk about all that some other time.

You, plainly, are fuelled by rage about violence against women and girls. That rage is entirely justified, and I share it. Violence against women and girls is an epidemic in our society, and still at appallingly high levels: according to the UK Office For National Statistics, anti-female violence is one of the few kinds of serious crime that is not decreasing.²

We can all agree with you in being furious about this epidemic of anti-female violence, and about the scandalous lack of seriousness about this blight on our society that our politicians and media unfortunately so often display (even when they are not themselves contributing to it). The question is, though, what we are to do about it. And that question is where we need to move beyond rage, into a calmer and more philosophical consideration of the problem and its complexities. For complexities there are, and I am not convinced you are entirely doing them justice.

The way you present the problem, it looks as if the threat to women and girls is simply and straightforwardly men. And it looks as if you think pretty much anything is justified as a way of blocking the threat of male violence. But this doesn’t make you conclude that men (just as such) should be blocked from having access to women. The practical obstacles to doing that are of course overwhelming. Hardly anyone thinks, for example, that men and women should never set up house together. Yet statistically, the home is the most dangerous place of all for women and girls. According to a recent WHO report, about 1 in 3 women globally (roughly 31% to 35%) experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, with the vast majority of these offences committed by current or former husbands, partners, or family members rather than strangers.³

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The story of last week, which will certainly return, is the threat to the survival of humanity (and maybe all life on Earth) from artificial intelligence. I don’t know how real that threat is and find it hard to think about, but I am worried that even if humanity survives, AI will be a means of endless tyranny, with all hopes of human freedom extinguished.

Much of political philosophy over the past three centuries or so has consisted in elaborating a picture of what it means for a society to be one of free and equal human beings, and the implicit self-understanding of most of our societies has been to have that as our imagined collective destination, perhaps delayed by practical concerns and by deep and unresolved questions about what it would mean, about who is included in the scope of freedom and equality (and who not). When John Rawls wrote about an overlapping consensus or when Joseph Carens discussed shared democratic values or even when Habermas outlined the conditions of an ideal speech situation, they were pointing to possibilities unrealized in our actual societies but implicitly acknowledged as the promise of the future. And radical critique of our societies, such as articulated by Marxists or anarchists, did not so much renounce the aspiration to freedom and equality but argued that the desire for it that capitalism and modernity called forth would inevitably be frustrated within an actual society that reproduced domination and exploitation: that liberal society failed to keep its own promises, which would instead be realised by a socialist alternative.

But now we find ourselves on the edge, or perhaps over the edge, of a descent into a world where such visions of freedom and equality are unimaginable and where, to borrow a cliché, resistance is simply futile. The herald of this predicament was Edward Snowden, who revealed how comprehensive a monitoring of individual thought and action was possible in the world of the internet. Anyway it has turned out that, for most of the population, privacy is something they are perfectly happy to sacrifice, just so long as the algorithms end up being better tuned to the satisfaction of our wants and desires. And progress is no long measured in terms of our liberation from various forms of oppressions but rather in the ever increased abilities we have to acquire and consume, even if that comes at the expense of the natural and physical basis of our very survival.
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At La Pointe courte, in Sète, France, where Agnès Varda shot her film of the same name.

In the UK as elsewhere, we’ve recently seen the far right orchestrate a campaign against refugees, presenting them as dangerous to women and girls and the vanguard of an invasion aimed at destroying Britain. Asylum seekers, forced by the goverment into hotels pending the examination of their claims, have found themselves surrounded by angry mobs, demanding their removal from the neigbourhood. In one wave of riots, a hotel was set on fire, and the occupants feared for their lives. Recently in Northern Ireland there was a violent pogrom against anyone with dark skin, where people were burnt out of their homes. Calls for violence against refugees spread on social media and the perpetrators, when punished for incitement, have been lauded as free-speech heroes. I’ve heard from black friends that verbal abuse and physical assaults have become more common.

A big part of the far-right narrative which is often picked up and repeated by mainstream journalists and politicians concerns the demographic character of those who arrive on small boats, the purported “invaders”, who are described as being overwhelmingly (even “all”) young men, and sometimes as being of “fighting age” or “military age”. Part of this story is a belief that “genuine” refugees would be overwhelmingly women and children, the most vulnerable, and that these are the kind of people who warrant humanitarian concern, if anyone does. There is a presumption, then, that young men are somehow illegitimate refugees, who do not deserve sanctuary but should be removed from the country as soon as possible.

This prejudice against young male refugees is directly contrary to what even a short period of reflection and an examination of the facts would produce. In conflict after conflict, the story is the same. When a town or a city is conquered by one side or another, the first thing they do is to separate the young men (those of “fighting age”) and kill them. It is what happened in Srebrenica in 1995 where around 8000 men and boys were murdered. In the current conflict in Sudan, from whence many refugees arrive in the UK, militias have been rounding up all the males over the age of ten and killing them (before raping the women), as Nicholas Kristof reports.
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