Why Rowling returned award

Ihave always marvelled at people endowed with an unequivocal resolve to stand firm for their principles, regardless of opposition and the ‘manna from heaven’ kind of compensation offered to shift their stand. Renouncing knighthood, Rabindranath Tagore wrote to Lord Chelmsford, the then Viceroy, that he did not wish to prefix his name with a ‘Sir’.

Author JK Rowling is the latest to join this club. She was given the Ripple of Hope honour by the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Organisation last year. The award honours people across nations ‘who have displayed the individual moral courage to overcome injustice’.

The internationally acclaimed litterateur was particularly incensed because Kerry Kennedy, a human rights activist and the daughter of Robert Kennedy, had in a statement said Rowling had used her remarkable gift to create a narrative that diminishes the identity of trans and non-binary people.

Rowling stoked a gender-based controversy that gained momentum when she chose to describe females as ‘people who menstruate’. The controversy draws its logic from the belief that there are humans born as women and later turn into men, and there are men, who after surgical procedures, physiologically acquire female bodies.

Whenever a rigid two-gender classification is made, it outrages the transgender, and justifiably so. Humankind in such situations falls afoul of the principles of justice or equity. There is merit in this argument. Entry into academic institutions and gender-specific jobs and even recognition by legal protocols facilitating governance would fall flat if applicants are unable to describe their gender as either male or female. And now in India, after considerable struggle, transgender people, or trans, have recognition. There are special privileges for ‘women’ taxpayers/assessees.

Of course, there are issues for those classified as trans: whether they should use toilets reserved for men, or women. There are no gender-neutral toilets in India, or changing rooms.

Then there is ‘Terf’ (trans exclusionary radical feminist) that consists of women nurturing radical views. Rowling says one such was a mother of a gay child who desired a gender transition to escape bullying, and another who vowed never to visit a clothing brand again because they allowed any man, who claimed the identity of a woman, into women’s changing rooms.

Laws under the Indian Penal Code that say the term ‘he’ can be used for ‘she’ as well (Section 8), or that ‘man’ denotes a male human and ‘woman’ a female (Section 10) have become an irritable nomenclature for gender zealots. Activists cite provisions of the Constitution that pronounce freedoms sans discrimination.