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I’ll tell you this. What I admire about J.K. Rowling is that, no matter how often people threaten or slur her, she won’t back down. No matter how much wealth and success she has, she still talks about and uplifts women’s rights.
On October 21, 2026, J.K. Rowling published an update to her 2020 essay about sex, gender, women’s rights, and the consequences of speaking publicly about them.
An Update to My Essay of June 2020 – J.K. Rowling
I want to highlight ten things I applaud about her position. Not because I agree with every word she has ever spoken, or because I believe any public figure needs unquestioning loyalty. I applaud these points because they raise questions about women’s safety, dignity, language, legal protections, and our right to speak for ourselves.
And I want to begin with the question that keeps coming back to me.
If the word “woman” no longer has a specific meaning that identifies adult human females, what are we supposed to call ourselves? And then I think…forget that. Because I don’t care what people think we should call ourselves unless its something along the lines of “the human beings formerly known as women will now be referred to as goddesses.”
We are not some newly discovered population in need of a name. We are not an afterthought to be accommodated in language that once described us plainly. Women have lived, labored, organized, resisted, raised families, built communities, fought discrimination, and demanded recognition under that name.
I do not accept that recognizing someone else’s identity requires women to surrender the language we use to describe our sex.
Women are not going to be colonized out of a word that describes us.
1. I applaud her insistence that the word “woman” must retain its meaning.
Words are how human beings identify realities, communicate needs, and establish protections. The word “woman” has long identified adult human females, and that meaning remains important in discussions of sex-based discrimination.
If a word can no longer clearly identify the population whose rights we fought to establish, we have a serious problem.
2. I applaud her concern about predatory men exploiting access policies.
A safety policy cannot depend entirely on the assumption that everyone who approaches a boundary has good intentions.
Rowling raises a concern that deserves serious examination: whether rules based entirely on self-declaration can create opportunities for predatory males to enter spaces intended to protect women.
This does not mean that every person who identifies differently is dangerous. Rowling herself distinguishes vulnerable trans identified people from predators.
But we already know that predatory men exploit trust, authority, institutional weaknesses, and opportunities for access. We should evaluate safeguarding policies with that reality in mind.
3. I applaud her defense of female-only spaces.
Women do not seek privacy in changing rooms, shelters, prisons, or sexual assault recovery settings because we believe ourselves superior to anyone. We seek privacy because our bodies, experiences, vulnerabilities, and histories are real.
A woman recovering from sexual violence should not have to defend her need for a female-only support environment. Institutions should be capable of protecting her dignity while also providing appropriate services for other vulnerable populations. They ought to be capable of at least that.
Compassion never requires eliminating boundaries.
4. I applaud her refusal to treat women’s objections as evidence of hatred.
I have spent enough years advocating for Survivors to recognize how easily institutions can dismiss an uncomfortable question by attacking the person who asks it.
Calling women “hateful” STILL does not answer whether a policy is safe, lawful, or fair.
If an institution has made a sound decision, it should be able to explain that decision without demanding women’s silence.
5. I applaud her attention to women who cannot afford to fight back.
Rowling’s new essay describes her Women’s Fund, which provides financial support for women in the United Kingdom and Ireland pursuing legal action over their rights.
Now, that caught my attention.
A wealthy woman can hire lawyers, withstand a public controversy, or walk away from an institution. It’s easy for them to tell other women that their concerns are “no big deal.” To get comfortable with misogyny and other forms of disrespect, “or else.” A working-class woman may have to choose between her paycheck and speaking up about something that makes her uncomfortable.
Women’s rights cannot exist only for women who can afford to defend them.
6. I applaud her willingness to confront institutional failures.
Rowling questions the actions of employers, government agencies, schools, and other institutions that she believes have disregarded women’s concerns.
This is familiar territory for anyone who has worked in Survivor advocacy.
Institutions can write beautiful policies about inclusion, dignity, and respect. But what happens when a woman reports that a policy leaves her vulnerable? Who investigates? Who evaluates the risk? Who has authority to make corrections?
We should not confuse an institution’s stated intentions with the consequences of its decisions.
7. I applaud her concern for incarcerated women.
A woman does not lose her humanity when she loses her freedom.
Rowling specifically addresses women in prisons who must share intimate facilities with males who identify as women.
Prisoners cannot simply leave when they feel unsafe. They cannot select another institution, hire private security, or decide to go home.
The state controls their surroundings. That gives the state an extraordinary responsibility to protect their bodily safety, privacy, and dignity.
Prison officials should take sex, violence histories, individual risk, and women’s vulnerability seriously when making placement decisions. What are you doing if you aren’t doing that? How are you accessing risk?
8. I applaud her recognition that sexual assault Survivors deserve female-centered services.
Rowling discusses Beira’s Place, the women-only sexual violence support service she founded in Edinburgh.
As someone who has worked with Survivors, I understand why the availability of female-only services is important.
Some women need to speak about male violence without a male present. They may need time to recover their ability to trust, to speak freely, or simply to feel comfortable in a room.
Those needs should not become grounds for shaming them.
Society has the resources and imagination to provide compassionate services for different populations without requiring every service to operate under identical rules.
9. I applaud her insistence that women’s sex remains relevant to our rights.
Sex matters in medicine, reproductive health, sexual violence research, sports, and the study of discrimination.
We cannot adequately address problems affecting females if institutions become unwilling or unable to identify females as a population.
Consider maternal mortality, female genital mutilation, sex-selective abortion, or the historical exclusion of girls from education. These are not merely questions about how someone identifies. They involve discrimination and harm connected to being female.
Respecting someone’s gender identity does not require abandoning the collection of accurate sex-based information.
And women’s collective experiences deserve a language of their own.
10. Most importantly, I applaud her refusal to surrender the meaning of womanhood.
Rowling ends her October 21 essay by arguing that if males can be women, the category of woman loses its distinct meaning. That is her philosophical and political position, and it is the part that most strongly prompted my response.
Because my question is simple.
If men can become women by declaration, what are we going to call adult human females?
We already have a name. Women.
Our sex is not a personality, a wardrobe, a feeling, or a collection of stereotypes. Women can be feminine, masculine, soft, strong, nurturing, solitary, mothers, childless, heterosexual, lesbian, young, elderly, or anything else our individual humanity allows.
None of those differences makes us less female.
I do not believe women’s recognition as a sex class should depend on whether everyone agrees with our politics or approves of our language. We are grown-a** women. We don’t need permission from the human beings outside of our sex class.
Women will not be colonized out of our own name.
There is something deeply troubling about asking a historically disadvantaged population to surrender the very language through which it organized its struggle for recognition.
Women are still fighting fights we shouldn’t even have to fight.
Women have fought to be recognized as full human beings under the law. We have fought to be educated, to own property, to vote, to earn wages, to refuse unwanted sexual access, and to live without violence.
Black women, in particular, know what it means to fight for recognition in a society that has repeatedly exploited our labor, dismissed our suffering, and expected us to redecorate our lives to accommodate everyone else’s needs.
So when I use the word colonized, I am speaking about the attempted displacement of a population’s established language and the power to define its own material experiences.
Women should not have to accept the loss of sex-specific language as the price of demonstrating kindness.
We can recognize the humanity of trans-identified people. We can oppose harassment, discrimination, and violence against them. We can debate policies fairly and insist that institutions examine evidence rather than assumptions.
AND we can insist that adult human females remain recognizable in language, law, policy, and public life.
I applaud J.K. Rowling for continuing to raise questions about those protections, particularly for women who have little institutional power and few financial resources.
Women are not visitors to our own history. We are not temporary occupants of our own name.
We are women. We have a right to describe ourselves, organize around our shared interests, and defend the protections our foremothers fought to secure.
And we do not need permission to continue doing so.
Primary sources: Rowling’s October 21, 2026 essay and her original June 10, 2020 essay. The ten points above are commentary and personal interpretations, not ten verbatim statements by Rowling.
