CLAIR 🎵🍄🌈🌿✨️

Tonight I spoke to one of the Guys in charge of Reform UK and he said he cares more making money than you and he believes that you deserve austerity on top of what is happening now. You pay the price. He makes the money.

JK Rowling has built a public identity around protecting women. She talks about women constantly. Women’s spaces. Women’s rights. Women’s safety. Women’s sport. Women’s everything. So where is she on Reform UK’s behind the scenes campaign against abortion rights? Silence. Where is she on Reform’s position on removing the United Kingdom from the European Convention on Human Rights, the legal framework that protects women from domestic violence, forced marriage, honour crimes and state discrimination? Silence. Where is she on the broader rollback of women’s rights being driven by the exact political forces she has chosen to align herself with? Complete silence. This is a woman with over thirteen million followers, a billion dollar franchise, a personal legal fund and the ear of Supreme Court justices. She is not short of a platform. She is not afraid of controversy. She has demonstrated repeatedly that she will say difficult things loudly when she wants to. She just does not want to say these things. The pattern is not subtle. Every campaign she has funded, every legal case she has backed, every public statement she has made has had one subject. Not women broadly. Specifically and only transgender people. When the conversation moves to abortion she is absent. When it moves to the ECHR she is absent. When it moves to Reform UK’s social conservatism, which would take the rights of women backwards by decades, she is absent. The European Convention on Human Rights is not an abstract legal document. It is the framework that has delivered concrete protections for women in this country. It underpins the right not to be subjected to domestic violence without state protection. It underpins reproductive rights cases. It underpins protections against forced marriage and trafficking. It underpins the right to private life, to bodily autonomy, to equal treatment under law. Reform UK wants to remove the United Kingdom from it. It also protects transgender people. That appears to be the problem. Because the only coherent explanation for Rowling’s silence on every other women’s rights issue while spending her fortune on this one is that her campaign was never really about women. It was always about transgender people. Women were the framing. Trans exclusion was the goal. A person who genuinely cared about women’s rights in 2025 would be screaming about Reform. They would be funding legal challenges to abortion restrictions. They would be speaking loudly about the ECHR. They would understand that you cannot claim to defend women’s rights while staying silent as the political movement you have empowered works to dismantle the legal architecture that protects women from the state and from violence. Unless the rights you actually care about are not women’s rights in general. Unless they are specifically the right to exclude transgender people from public life. In which case the silence makes perfect sense. Follow the silence. It tells you everything the statements do not.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ She wonders why she lost friends. I’ve spoken to 3 of her old friends in person. And they had the worst possible for us to say about her. So she may be your hero but it seems to me that she’s not a very nice person.

Graham Linehan has now reposted content calling for women to be stripped of the right to vote in the United States. This is not a joke and not satire. The post explicitly argues that women should lose the franchise and frames women as a threat to law and order. By amplifying it Linehan is endorsing the idea that women’s political rights are expendable. This matters because Linehan presents himself as defending women. In reality he is promoting authoritarian politics that would remove women’s most basic democratic protection when they do not conform to his ideology. The right to vote is not a reward for obedience. It is a fundamental human right. Anyone advocating its removal is not defending women. They are attacking them. This is what the so called gender critical movement aligns with when pushed to its logical end. Not safeguarding. Not feminism. Control.

I genuinely cannot understand how generation above me ended up here. We grew up idolising David Bowie and through him discovered Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. We lived through punk and post punk smashing gender norms in public. We watched Prince blur masculinity and desire. We danced to Boy George. We worshipped Grace Jones. Then came the flamboyance of the eighties where androgyny excess and self invention were celebrated. Gender bending was not a threat. It was art. It was freedom. It was cool. So how did the same generation become so hostile to people simply existing outside rigid boxes. How did we go from celebrating difference to fearing it. This backlash does not come from culture or history. It comes from forgetting who we were and what we stood for. None of this is new. Get over it.

For 16 years until 2014 Julie Hesmondhalgh played a trans woman called Hayley Cropper on Coronation Street. Nobody screamed. Nobody rioted. There was no national meltdown. People just watched the show and got on with their lives. During those same years Helen Joyce worked at The Economist and Maya Forstater was a tax advisor and JK Rowling just wrote books. Oh and Nadia won Big Brother! So what changed. Not trans people. The only thing that changed was the hate campaign.