J.K. Rowling Is Turning A Free Speech Victory Into A Defeat
The backlash against Amnesty was justified. Suing them out of existence is not.
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Earlier this month, Amnesty International asked Britain’s charity regulator to review the status of 117 organizations whose views on sex and abortion it dislikes. It received the public thrashing it deserved. But the threatened libel campaign now being bankrolled against it risks converting a victory for counter-speech into a cautionary tale—one in which debates over first principles are decided by ruinously expensive litigation rather than the free battle of ideas.
On July 8, Amnesty published a report with the ominous title: “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK.” It included a list of organizations “whose aim is to restrict human rights,” and recommended that the Charity Commission review the charitable status of groups that “advocate for the removal of human rights protections, target minority groups, or promote disinformation and harmful practices.”
Who were these organizations so intent on undermining the basic rights of Britons? Islamist terrorists? Neo-Nazis?
No. Amnesty’s purported “anti-rights movement” consisted of 117 groups, many of which oppose abortion, defend the importance of biological sex, or argue that sex-based distinctions should remain legally relevant in contexts such as prisons, sports, medical treatment, and services for victims of sexual violence. It also accused twelve of the listed groups of promoting abusive “conversion practices” to change someone’s sexual identity—practices which Parliament may soon criminalize with up to five years in prison.
Most controversially, those branded “anti-rights” include Beira’s Place, a center for biological women located in Edinburgh providing support for victims of sexual violence. Apparently, Beira’s Place’s position on sex and gender (it excludes trans women) matters more than its work protecting the rights of Scotland’s most vulnerable women.
Amnesty’s report was met with a furious backlash from several of the targeted groups, and from the author J.K. Rowling, who founded and financed Beira’s Place. Under fire from an incredulous public and mounting media scrutiny, Amnesty temporarily removed its report pending an internal review. Amnesty then expressed regret that the report had been uploaded without proper review and referred itself to the Charity Commission as a serious incident. However, Amnesty has not convincingly explained which specific parts of the report it regrets or finds inaccurate.
In many ways, it was a perfect example of how such debates should play out in liberal democracies. Amnesty publishes a report containing some questionable logic, flawed methodology, hyperbolic conclusions, and a stunningly hypocritical recommendation that dozens of lawful groups with whom Amnesty disagrees face the denial or loss of charitable status. The targeted groups answer with criticism and counterspeech that wins vocal public support. Amnesty is forced to retreat, taking shelter behind opaque PR jargon that only further exposes the incoherence of its own conception of human rights.
Yet winning a victory in the court of public opinion did not appease the offended groups, nor J.K. Rowling, who has now offered to fund libel lawsuits against Amnesty. These legal threats were cheered on by a vocal chorus of social media users baying for blood in gleeful anticipation that the cost of litigation might force Amnesty to shut down.
But by threatening to sue Amnesty, the offended groups are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory—and significantly undermining the very principles that allowed them to criticize Amnesty in the first place.
For years, individuals and groups in the gender critical space have—rightly—charged that the views of the most vocal LGBT+ activists and their allies have hardened into orthodoxy, leading to cancellations of people daring to question them in academia, media, and cultural institutions. Hate speech laws in Western democracies have threatened persons espousing views that some may find offensive, but which reflect mainstream understandings of biology and are held by many ordinary people. Accordingly, free speech became a rallying cry for many gender critical activists. On July 26, Rowling herself invoked precisely this principle of reciprocal freedom:
Trans women aren’t women, and if that hurts your feelings, be grateful you live in a society where you are just as free to espouse gender ideology as I am to speak the truth.
But as happens so often in these debates, the opportunity to legally punish an opponent for their opinions was too seductive to stay principled for Rowling and her allies.
Many will insist that there’s a difference between hate speech and libel laws—and that, therefore, the threat of a lawsuit against Amnesty isn’t a violation of free speech principles. But for that distinction to matter, libel must be defined narrowly and enforced within a legal system that resists its weaponization through ruinous costs and protracted proceedings. English libel law falls short on both counts. It is claimant-friendly and extremely costly, and is far less protective of speech than American law. In fact, England has become a favored destination for those wanting to use defamation proceedings to wear critics down with expense and delay.
More importantly, the question at the heart of the matter—whether a group is “anti-rights”—depends on subjective opinions that should be firmly protected by freedom of expression, no matter how offensive to the group or person.1 Rights language does not eliminate political disagreement. It relocates political disagreement into questions about who holds a right, what that right includes, and how collisions between rights should be resolved.
J.K. Rowling’s position on gender affirming care leaves no doubt that conceptions of rights can clash. In 2024 she posted the following on X:
There are no trans kids. No child is ‘born in the wrong body.’ There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.
If any lawsuits financed by Rowling succeed in establishing that Amnesty’s conception of rights is defamatory, it would narrow the very space that shelters her own views. The beautiful and frustrating characteristic of a free society is that no one ever gets the final word, and that the remedy for old orthodoxies—including ones concerning identity and rights—is counter-speech, not new orthodoxies hardened by law.
For this reason, Rowling should hope Amnesty’s opinions are protected, too.
Jacob Mchangama, a contributing writer at Persuasion, is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media.
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It’s a different matter for the accusation of “conversion practices,” which, if proven, would be a far more serious allegation.
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The wold today would be better without the organization called Amnesty International as it exists today.
I think you are missing the part about the actual libel in the document. There were numerous factually false claims in it (funding sources in particular). Are they supporting suing over factually false, defamatory claims or just stupid opinions? I, like I imagine most of the readers of Persuasion, support one and condemn the other.