(LifeSiteNews) — On March 2, J.K. Rowling summed up the current culture wars surrounding gender neatly when she posted a story from Chronicle Live. “That thing only evil, nasty bigots claim happens, and that never, ever happens, has happened,” she wrote. “Again.”
That “thing” was yet another trans-identifying pedophile who was caught secretly videoing women in a public female bathroom and who had sexually assaulted a tourist last June. Twenty-two-year-old Kurtis Mawson was arrested after being “spotted inside female toilets near the Odeon at Millburngate shopping centre in Durham City,” standing on the toilet of one cubicle and peering into the next.
A member of the public called the cops, and young women were escorted out of the bathroom. Upon arrival, the police asked if anyone was still in the cubicles; Mawson attempted to answer in a falsetto voice to sound female. According to the prosecutor: “When challenged with what he is doing in a women’s toilet he said: ‘Just chilling.’ He then said that he was there as he identified as female.”
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According to trans activists, this self-identification should have been good enough for Mawson to be considered female both by the women in the bathroom and the attending officers.
Mawson had purchased a mini-camera to film women and had been lying in wait to put his plan into action. The police searched his home, and found other images on multiple computers, including “indecent images of children.” The prosecutor stated that there were “80 category A images – the most serious – as well as category B and C images,” and an image depicting bestiality.
Mawson ultimately pleaded guilty to “sexual assault on a female, voyeurism, three counts of making indecent photographs of a child and possessing an extreme pornographic image” as well as “breaching a sexual risk order and failing to comply with the sexual offender register.” His attorney stated that he knew he “needed help”; Mawson was sentenced to 25 months in prison and a “sexual harm prevention order for a period of ten years.”
Interestingly, Mawson’s claim that he is a woman does not seem to have resurfaced during the court proceedings, although his attorney did say that he had “slight Asperger’s syndrome.” Clearly, Mawson was simply taking advantage of “self-identification” – whereby people can simply claim to be the opposite sex and be accepted as such. Mawson was aware that by making this claim, many people would accept his presence in a female bathroom, regardless of how obvious it was that he was actually male.
Transgender ideology means seeing the world not as it is, but through an ideological lens. Interestingly, J.K. Rowling is not a social conservative, and would, only a few years ago, have been classified as reliably left-wing on the ideological spectrum. She is a feminist and a “progressive” on many issues. Yet, she has refused to accept the new elite dogma and has instead been willing to fight an unpopular culture war that puts her offside with her class. She could have picked climate change, or the LGBT movement. But she picked gender sanity.
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I agree with a recent Telegraph editorial that credited her with running one of the most effective extra-parliamentary crusades in recent memory – and exposing ruling class cowardice in the process. How many progressive politicians would happily send Mawson off to a women’s prison to serve his sentence if he had persisted in identifying as a woman? That’s not a gotcha question – that’s a legitimate political issue that ended the career of Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon (who got it wrong, by the way).
This question should be posed to every politician who champions the transgender movement, starting with Tory MP Alicia Kearns, who angrily denounced one of her colleagues recently for using the acronym “LGB” and leaving off the “T.” I wonder who Kearns thinks legitimately falls into the “T” category, or if she can answer the question: what is a woman?
