Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling dared Scottish police to arrest her for misgendering transgender people under a new hate crime law, RadarOnline.com has learned.
Scotland's Hate Crime and Public Order Act 2021 went into effect on Monday, now criminalizing "stirring up hatred" related to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity, or being intersex.
The new law touts a maximum penalty of up to seven years behind bars. While critics, including Rowling, claim the hate crime law threatens free speech, the Scottish government insists it will provide protections without oppressing self-expression.
On Monday, the Harry Potter author took to X, formerly Twitter, to express her outrage at the law in an eleven-part post — and dared Scottish police to arrest her over a series of posts she made.
"Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal," Rowling wrote in the post.
"I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offense under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment."
Rowling tagged the post with "ArrestMe," "AprilFools," and "HateCrimeActScotland" hashtags.
Siobhian Brown, Scotland's community safety minister, told the Telegraph that Rowling's series of X posts could be reported to police, sparking an investigation.
"Whether or not the police would think it was criminal is up to Police Scotland for that," Brown said of the possibility of Rowling facing arrest over the post.
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Rowling claimed with the new law going into effect, Scottish legislatures have "placed a higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls."
"The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women’s and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honors and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men and the reality of immutability of biological sex."