Euan McColm: Amnesty's characterisation of JK Rowling and Lucy Hunter Blackburn is a travesty of the truth

JK Rowling is a remarkable woman, slightly eccentric, fiercely intelligent, and gentle in nature. If you met her, you’d like her.

I feel able to make these judgements because it’s my very good fortune to count both of these women as friends. And it was once my huge privilege, at Rowling’s request, to introduce them to each other.

Since that first meeting, Rowling and Hunter Blackburn have – along with countless other feminists – been great, effective allies in the relentless, grinding battle to defend women’s rights against the increasingly unhinged demands of trans activists.

Working alongside Dr Kath Murray and Lisa Mackenzie as part of the policy analysis collective MurrayBlackburnMackenzie (MBM), Hunter Blackburn has spent years divining and presenting the facts about the law as it stands and not as gender cultists claim it to be.

Rowling, meanwhile, has used her profile – and a fair chunk of those Harry Potter millions – to support the fight to preserve women’s rights. Not only does she offer financial (and emotional) support to women being hounded out of their careers for refusing to accept the crank belief that trans-identifying men are women but, since 2022, she has personally funded Beira’s Place, a women-only rape crisis centre in Edinburgh.

Perhaps, one day, a serving First Minister will acknowledge this remarkable gift to Scotland and thank Rowling.

I know Hunter Blackburn and Rowling to be women of wisdom, integrity and kindness and so I was more than a little surprised that, according to Amnesty International UK, they are in fact part of an anti-human rights movement.

Beira’s Place and MBM are condemned in a new Amnesty report entitled “A Growing Threat – the Anti-Rights Movement in the UK” for their entirely reasonable conviction that sex is a matter of biology and not vibes.

This bizarre and wildly defamatory document names a number of other so-called “gender critical” organisations as being a threat to human rights. Among them is For Women Scotland (FWS), the organisation headed by Marion Calder, Susan Smith, and Trina Budge, which triumphed at the Supreme Court last year, securing a ruling that, so far as the law is concerned, a woman is a biological female.

Just when I thought the trans movement could not sink any lower in its tactics, Amnesty – once a proud and serious human rights organisation, and the inspiration for several dozen tattoos among the inhabitants of Stockbridge and Hyndland – has proved me wrong.

Beira’s Place was established in 2022 – its existence funded in perpetuity by Rowling – because Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre not only refused to guarantee victims of life-changing sexual violence that they would be seen by female counsellors but went so far as to appoint a trans identifying male as its chief executive.

That Amnesty has decided to condemn this magnificent gift to the women of Scotland is contemptible.

It would be no bad thing if a combination of cancelled direct debits and legal payouts to organisations it has defamed forced the closure of Amnesty International UK. It has long since ceased to be fit for purpose and now actively campaigns against women’s rights.

The women Amnesty condemns are among the most committed human rights defenders I have ever met. They are part of the most effective feminist movement since the introduction of universal suffrage.

Rowling (who, irony fans, worked for Amnesty in her early 20s), MBM, FWS, and scores more women from all kinds of backgrounds are equal participants in a focused campaigning movement quite awesome to observe.

There’s no formal structure, rather there’s a network of individuals and organisations united completely in their objective to push back against the demands of trans activists, each bringing their own unique skills and – crucially – respecting the different things others contribute.

So, when For Women Scotland leads on an aspect of this issue, they will almost certainly be at least partially informed by research conducted by MurrayBlackburnMackenzie. When Rowling makes a substantial intervention, she will do so armed with facts provided by trusted allies.

It’s not for a man to try to define what “sisterhood” is, but I imagine it looks very much like this.

It is wholly unchic to discuss one’s friends in print but the chasm between Amnesty’s characterisation of these women and the reality of who they are is deep and wide.

Rowling’s long history of charitable giving is well known. The minute she began making money as an author, she started handing it out.

This desire to use what she recognises as her remarkable good fortune to help others is authentically who Rowling is. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve witnessed her kindness and the discreet way in which it is delivered. I’ve never met a more genuinely “don’t mention it” person in my life.

I know Hunter Blackburn and her colleagues at MBM less well but far from being, as Amnesty wishes us to believe, opponents of human rights, they are dedicated to preserving the safeties women fought for years to win. This, they do with good humour and a level of intellectual rigour unseen among Scotland’s elected representatives.

I know the FWS women less well, but I know them a damned sight better than the buffoons at Amnesty who fail to recognise in Marion Calder, Trina Budge and Susan Smith three women whose track record on defending human rights is impeccable. This trio could teach Amnesty a lot not only about the law but about actually getting things done.

From the memberships of Scottish organisations traduced in the new Amnesty report, you could create, by some distance, the highest calibre cabinet of the devolution era. These are serious, accomplished, and devastatingly effective people. They are, to a woman, more impressive than the vast majority of MSPs.

And if you met them, you’d like them.