I have never read a Harry Potter book. I've never seen any of the Harry Potter movies. My kids have absorbed all of J.K. Rowling's most famous work, but it came along when I was already a parent. I will say that the Harry Potter novels got a lot of kids hooked on reading, and that is an unalloyed good.
While she's no conservative, J.K. Rowling does have some good sense, and of late she's been taking some heat for insisting that women are, you know, women.
On Monday, Rowling took to Twitter/X to let us all know she'd had enough.
I'm so sick of this shit. This is not a woman. These are #NotOurCrimes https://t.co/ycjWefLCiw
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 26, 2024
The Daily Wire's Hank Berrien has some comments about the crime that J.K. Rowling is angry about.
Famed author JK Rowling, fed-up with the media attributing crimes to women that have been actually committed by biological men who think they are women, fired back hard after the latest iteration of the media’s wrongheadedness.
Sky News tweeted, “A woman who filmed herself killing a cat before putting the animal in a blender has been jailed for life for murdering a man four months later,” in reference to Scarlet Blake, 26, who filmed himself torturing his neighbor’s cat before putting it in a blender, then murdered a man four months later.
It's not at all uncommon for people like this to start by torturing and killing animals, before moving on to humans, and indeed, that's what happened here. But Rowling's point is cogent: This was not a woman. This was a man LARPing as a woman.
See Related: J.K. Rowling Says She Would 'Happily' Serve Time in Prison for Views on Gender Identity
And this man murdered another human, while Sky News called him a "woman," thus rousing J.K. Rowling's ire. What's more, the murder was carried out with planning and malice aforethought.
Blake livestreamed the killing of the cat, in which he suspended the cat with a ribbon, cut it open, then, after the killing, dissected it and decapitated it before removing the fur and skin and dumping it in a blender.
After the dissection, Blake said, “Well, one day, I want to learn how to do this to a person.”
Blake murdered Jorge Martin Carreno, 30, in July 2021. Justice Martin Chamberlain, who sentenced Blake on Monday, stated, “Your decision to kill Jorge was not a reaction to something he had said or done. It was not a momentary mistake. It was not a decision made in anger, or because your emotions overcame you. It was the culmination of a plan you had been considering and formulating for months.”
It's a certainty that not all transgender people are murderers, of course; most are not. But this person seems to have stacked "transgender" status on top of what sure looks like callous sociopathy, and one has to wonder if the kid gloves with which health care providers are forced to wear when dealing with the vocally transgender prevented the detection of a darker, more insidious mental illness, one that resulted in an innocent man being murdered. This raises the question, "Has this happened before? Could it happen again?"
It's also clearly and undeniably true that the media, in the form of Sky News, handled this badly. If they had at least identified Blake as "transgender," it would have been preferable to just lumping him into the category "woman," which categorization angered J.K. Rowling, and, no doubt, other women as well.
Accuracy, after all, is supposed to be a primary consideration in journalism. Too much of the legacy media seems to have forgotten this.
