Transgender criminal defendants should not be referred to as their preferred gender, JK Rowling has suggested, as the row over pronouns escalated after the sentencing of Scarlet Blake, the cat killer and murderer.
The controversy began after Blake, a transgender woman, was sentenced to life in prison for fulfilling a warped sexual fantasy by mutilating a cat and killing a stranger.
Blake, 26, copied a Netflix “true crime” killer when she skinned a cat and placed it in a kitchen blender while live-streaming herself on the instruction of her American lover, before moving on to murder Jorge Martin Carreno in July 2021.
After it emerged that Blake had transitioned to female, Rowling criticised Sky News for referring to Blake as a woman in its reporting.
Sharing a clip of the news video on Twitter/X, the author wrote: “I’m sick of this shit. This is not a woman. These are #NotOurCrimes.”
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The hashtag “NotOurCrimes” is often used by “gender-critical feminists” to point out when a crime allegedly committed by a transgender woman is described in the media or by law enforcement as having been committed by a woman.
In a separate post, Rowling added: “Crime statistics are rendered useless if violent and sexual attacks committed by men are recorded as female crimes. Activists are already clamouring for this sadistic killer to be incarcerated in a women’s prison. Ideologically driven misinformation is not journalism.”
Judges have been told that they should refer to criminal defendants by the terms they have chosen for themselves.
Despite the controversy sparked by Blake’s case, the Ministry of Justice confirmed that Blake was being held at a male prison. Transgender women with male genitalia are not allowed to be held in mainstream women’s prisons. More than 90 per cent of transgender women are housed in men’s prisons, the ministry has previously said.
• Women will live in fear under prison trans guidelines, says JK Rowling
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In summing up the evidence against Blake at Oxford crown court last week, Mr Justice Chamberlain said the fact that Blake, who was kept in a men’s prison while on remand, was transgender had “no particular relevance to this case”. He allowed jurors to consider whether, weighing nearly 11st and being 5ft 7in, Blake was “physically able” to kill Carreno.
The judge ruled that the decision to kill was because Blake thought her partner “would find it sexually exciting”, adding: “You said you killed because ‘your lover thought it would be hot’… I am sure you did derive pleasure from killing Jorge, as you did from killing the cat.”
After her criticism of the Sky News report, Rowling reposted a lengthy complaint by the journalist Louise Tickle, written to Katharine Viner, her editor at The Guardian. Tickle, an award-winning journalist who had written for The Guardian for more than 20 years, had said she was boycotting the newspaper for failing to tell its readers that Blake was transgender.
Tickle accused the newspaper of “deceiving its readers” by using the word “woman” in its headline and omitting the fact Blake was transgender in an article covering the case.
The newspaper updated its article to include the note: “This article was updated on February 23, 2024, to add further details and biographical information, including reference to Scarlet Blake’s transgender identity, which were not included in the agency copy on which our initial version relied.”
