Witless Sturgeon v Witty Rowling

The great contemporary master of the vituperative and coruscatory arts is J.K. Rowling. Formerly known as author of the Harry Potter stories, she may well become one of the great or indeed few exponents of the high art of writing for victory. Especially in the form of the riposte. Repost and riposte.

Her current enemy, or antagonist, is Nicola Sturgeon. Sturgeon is a Scot; Rowling is long resident in Scotland. Rowling is beloved of unionists. Sturgeon, according to my father, who is a Scot, is disliked even by nationalists. But Sturgeon has recently written her own wee stoury, entitled, hilariously, Frankly. Tom Stoppard once wrote a play called If You’re Glad, Then I’ll Be Frank. But now things are the other way round. For now that Sturgeon is frank, Rowling has become very glad.

By the way, what a title.

Have you noticed the way our political women entitle their memoirs?

• Michelle Obama in 2018: Becoming, a nice Hegelian title, if a bit vacuous for a memoir as opposed to the third bit of a logical treatise. Followed up by the equally inspirational The Light We Carry of 2022.
• Hillary Clinton who used to be Living History in 2003, then noticed her Hard Choices in 2014, before asking What Happened in 2017 before finally arriving at the less hard-faced Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love and Liberty.
• Angela Merkel in 2024: Freedom, of course, originally entitled Freiheit.
• Jacinda Arden in 2025: A Different Kind of Power.
• Nicola Sturgeon in 2025: Frankly.

Perhaps we can leave Michelle Obama out of it. But what we notice is ‘difference’ for Arden, as if women do it differently (“fascinating and engaging,” said Sturgeon). But we also notice the three shades of freedom. Liberty for Clinton, Freiheit for Merkel and Frankness for Sturgeon.

The word ‘frank’ originally means ‘free’.

So, all the actual political women are interested in brightness, hope, inspiration, intimacy, and a fearless display of the truth, especially the truth of themselves. Good.

Politicians!

Whereas the mean-spirited novelist, J.K. Rowling, why, she is not interested in freedom: she keeps writing about magic, darkness, corrupt politicians (remember Robert Hardy in the films?), demented demons, and whatnot. And yet she seems to be rather better at the truth than her antagonist.

Rowling and Sturgeon are antagonists over a single issue. This is what Sturgeon takes to be recognising the rights of those who wish to self-identify as another sex, and what Rowling takes to be denying the rights of those who are already identified as one particular sex, thank you very much, in particular, the sex of women.

The BBC has summarised the issue well, and there is no point my trying to rewrite it all:

Sturgeon says she stands by the principle that an individual has the right to self-identify in the gender of their choosing.

However she has also expressed regret that she did not pause the Holyrood gender self-ID bill, in order to seek common ground between supporters and critics, when the issue became mired in “rancour and division.”

“We’d lost all sense of rationality in this debate. I’m partly responsible for that,” she told ITV News.

Rowling is unimpressed, writing on her website that Sturgeon “caused real, lasting harm” by presiding over a culture in which women who did not subscribe to her “luxury beliefs” were “silenced, shamed, persecuted” and placed in degrading and unsafe situations.

“She is flat out Trumpian in her shameless denial of reality and hard facts,” adds the Edinburgh-based author.

Speaking on BBC Breakfast this week Sturgeon said she believed “forces on the far Right” had sought to “weaponise” the trans issue to “push back on rights more generally”.

The comments echoed language she had used in an interview with The News Agents podcast in 2023 when she said that some opponents of the SNP’s gender reforms were “deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well”.

Rowling describes that as Sturgeon’s ‘basket of deplorables’ moment, a reference to Hillary Clinton’s disastrous dismissal of half of her rival Donald Trump’s supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic.

With those comments, Rowling claims, Sturgeon “demonised and stigmatised” survivors of sexual trauma, lesbians, women with disabilities and “everyone concerned about safety, privacy, fairness and dignity for girls”.

Now, the thing about Sturgeon and Rowling is that Sturgeon is at a major disadvantage. Not only is she not a writer by profession, she is also not a truth-teller by conviction: because she is a politician, and, moreover, a politician who – unlike Michael Gove – appears not to recognise that there is a boundary at which politics ceases and something else begins where truth and falsity have a much sterner place. And the reason why Rowling is so brilliant a polemicist is because she is always extremely scrupulous, extremely careful. My wife reads her X posts out to me, and I always acknowledge their almost perfect pitch. Rowling never engages in overstatement. Everything is moderate. And yet it is expressed not only with humour, but with wit, and a particularly cool and derisive wit. She does not engage in abuse, as I would be tempted to do, and she does not engage in condemnation of almost everything even slightly twisted, as I would be tempted to do. Therefore, she gives almost no succour to her enemies. They remain stupefied. (Stupefy!) In fact, they become what they already were, which is stupid: stone-stupid. For they have met their match: a forensic antagonist, who knows the value in savouring and weighing a reply, even one expressed with a light hand.

I confess I did not make much sense of Rowling’s review of Sturgeon’s book, since it depends on a conceit by which Rowling likened Sturgeon’s book to a novel, Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer. Well, no good for me. But along the way she ticks off Sturgeon for engaging in extreme distortion of language in relation to the ‘Isla’ Bryson affair, and also for having no discernible sense of humour. Rowling apparently thinks that Sturgeon believed all the gender recognition tomfoolery; whereas it may be, as Philip Patrick suggests in the Spectator, it was all politics, and Sturgeon believed nary a word of it. Well, it hardly matters. Sturgeon was a politician, and therefore was in the game of believing remarkable things for the sake of a consensus, real or imagined: but also is of course a person who is still human and formed by her political experience so that she, to some extent, like an actress, becomes the roles she plays. Consider, for instance, the end of her marriage (cf. Rowling remains happily married), and the sudden spate of speculation about her sexuality: including her own suggestion that she has never been binary about sex. Well, this is exactly the sort of thing that people say or believe when they have been spending a lot of time with the LGBT community and developing friendships with Val McDermid, Jo Sharp, Hannah Bardell etc. Say or believe? Distinguish them. Say something enough, you in effect believe it. Peel away the layers of a politician when you think they don’t believe what they are saying and you’ll find that the onion, like Peer Gynt, has no centre.

Let us leave this unsavoury subject and return to Rowling. Note how Rowling is not dependent on the papers. She doesn’t need mediation. She is rich, untouchable, and writes on her own website and uses X. She can interact as directly with the public as Trump can.

I daresay everyone knows the history. These are the bits that have stood out for the press.

1. Rowling becomes transcritical in 2019 and gradually emerges as the champion of common sense.
2. Rowling encounters an apparent difficulty. In 2020 half-witted Harry Potter actors and actresses, plus Eddie the Remayner, condemn Rowling for anti-trans beliefs. Daniel Radcliffe: “Transgender women are women.” Emma Watson: “Trans people are who they say they are.” Etc.
3. J.K. Rowling wins in the end. In April of 2025 she celebrates victory, posing with a whisky and cigar on her yacht: when the UK Supreme Court affirms the Biblical doctrine that there are only men and women.
4. And there is a happy consequence. In June 2025 Stephen Fry says, “She seems to be a lost cause” as he drifts out further into the sea of silliness / the footlights of folly.

Rowling has made it her business to remind everyone of reality.

To a story by a ‘non-binary’ man with pink hair lamenting the fact that someone in a hospital called him ‘daddy’:

Imagine being in labour with twins and hearing the father of your children telling your midwife his pronouns.

To someone saying that if trans people have to announce they are trans before sex, then cis people should have to say they are cis before sex.

The man who witnessed me giving birth to his children might find it a tad odd that I keep announcing that I am a woman before we have sex, but fine, I accept your terms.

To Sturgeon, when she said that Rowling upset her and endangered her, Sturgeon, when she, Rowling posted a photograph of herself wearing a t-shirt defining Nicola Sturgeon as destroyer of women’s rights.

Is there a clinical term for an individual who has extreme thinness of skin when it comes to their own perceived hurts, coupled with a rhino hide when it comes to the fear and suffering of others?

Nicola, you hated the t-shirt picture because you couldn’t ignore it, as you’d ignored so many other women trying to make you understand their concerns. Appeals to your sympathy, your intelligence and your compassion all failed. Apparently the only way to get through to you is through your vanity.

To someone who bought Rowling’s book and then burnt it:

I still get the royalties whether you burn it or not.

To someone who wrote, “What an awful hateful witch you are no wonder kids hate you now”:

Speak up. I can’t hear you over the din of four theme parks.

To the BBC:

The BBC calls a male neo-Nazi ‘she’ because their absolute belief in gender identity ideology means any man – rapist, voyeur, terrorist, murder or paedophile – must be described as a woman the moment he say he’s one.

Anyhow, read it all for yourself. I am sure someone could collect it and make it into a small book. One more:

STURGEON: We have lost all sense of rationality in the gender debate.

ROWLING: Only one side has lost rationality. Only one side pretends there’s more than two sexes. Only one side let’s male rapists into women’s prisons. Only one side support child sterilisation. Yours.

Rowling has even posted some of her annotations of Sturgeon’s book. On pages 108 and 109 where Sturgeon was saying she wanted to “make the ‘public sphere’ safe for women and girls”, Rowling wrote: “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???”

Sturgeon is stuck in an artificial rut. The gender debate, she says, “has been hijacked and weaponised by people who are transphobic and homophobic and racist”. Except that the gender debate is tendentious and twisted rubbish from the outset, so it should come as no surprise that we are all objecting to it. But Rowling is now the champion of the entire cause. The entire cause consists of stating the absolutely obvious as if it is a fresh discovery.

Hers are not Wildean displays of empty wit or exhibitions of Private Eye predictable inversion. They are for the most part, except when she is simply knocking people away for impertinence, extremely focused on one issue. They are displays of Boadicean wit: battling wit. They are unique in our time, and evidence of why Stephen Fry (ex-friend or never-friend, depending on who one believes) is not only unwitty but incapable of recognising real wit.

The encounter of Sturgeon versus Rowling indicates what happens when a genuflecting and compromised and probably confused or collusive political mind encounters someone who is not a politician but a philosopher and, in fact, a human – of course, a woman. Sturgeon, whatever she is (whatever they may be…), has no chance in this battle, and can only survive if she ignores Rowling completely. Sturgeon is living in a fake world, an artificial world, completely artefactual: Rowling, despite her riches, is living in the real world and could step into most suburban or urban or rural living rooms and talk sense to the majority of the nation.

Postscript. Of course, the entire trans/gender issue should never have arisen, and is, from the ground up, complete rubbish. For anyone interested in attempts to think it through, try this and this and this from earlier issues of the Daily Sceptic.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.