Yes, the people who call themselves 'trans' exist and they deserve exactly the same rights as everyone else, which, fortunately, they already have in the UK. It would rightly be considered discrimination if a person was refused employment, housing or the vote because they identified as trans. 'Trans women are women' is a thought-terminating cliché. Men are not women. That doesn't mean they're not allowed to present themselves however they like, call themselves whatever they like and believe whatever they like about themselves. It means they haven't changed sex. If we replace the objective, observable characteristic of sex with the unfalsifiable concept of gender identify, women and girls lose, among other things, their right to fair and safe sport and women-only spaces, including changing rooms, prison cells and rape crisis services. Women and girls are provably more vulnerable to forms of abuse including sexual assault, harassment and voyeurism in mixed-sex spaces. There is no evidence that trans-identified men don't have exactly the same rates of criminal offending as all other men. Trans people exist. I have no desire for them not to exist; indeed, I wish them safety, happiness and health. However, 'existence' does not, and should not, mean the violation of other people's right to privacy, dignity and freedom of speech, or the reconfiguration of society to indulge a fallacy.

I'm seeing quite a bit of comment about this, so I want to make a couple of points. I'm not owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created. The idea is as ludicrous as me checking with the boss I had when I was twenty-one for what opinions I should hold these days. Emma Watson and her co-stars have every right to embrace gender identity ideology. Such beliefs are legally protected, and I wouldn't want to see any of them threatened with loss of work, or violence, or death, because of them. However, Emma and Dan in particular have both made it clear over the last few years that they think our former professional association gives them a particular right - nay, obligation - to critique me and my views in public. Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created. When you've known people since they were ten years old it's hard to shake a certain protectiveness. Until quite recently, I hadn't managed to throw off the memory of children who needed to be gently coaxed through their dialogue in a big scary film studio. For the past few years, I've repeatedly declined invitations from journalists to comment on Emma specifically, most notably on the Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Ironically, I told the producers that I didn't want her to be hounded as the result of anything I said. The television presenter in the attached clip highlights Emma's 'all witches' speech, and in truth, that was a turning point for me, but it had a postscript that hurt far more than the speech itself. Emma asked someone to pass on a handwritten note from her to me, which contained the single sentence 'I'm so sorry for what you're going through' (she has my phone number). This was back when the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak, at a time when my personal security measures had had to be tightened considerably and I was constantly worried for my family's safety. Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames, yet thought a one line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness. Like other people who've never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she's ignorant of how ignorant she is. She'll never need a homeless shelter. She's never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I'd be astounded if she's been in a high street changing room since childhood. Her 'public bathroom' is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door. Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who's identified into the women's prison? I wasn't a multimillionaire at fourteen. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women's rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges. The greatest irony here is that, had Emma not decided in her most recent interview to declare that she loves and treasures me - a change of tack I suspect she's adopted because she's noticed full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it was - I might never have been this honest. Adults can't expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend's assassination, then assert their right to the former friend's love, as though the friend was in fact their mother. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public - but I have the same right, and I've finally decided to exercise it.

The Sandie Peggie employment tribunal is currently exposing, as perhaps no court case to date has, the issue of class as it relates to the top-down imposition of gender identity ideology in the workplace. 'Diversity officer' Isla Bumba has now admitted in court that she didn't bother consulting the 1992 regulations guaranteeing single-sex spaces when she told a trans-identified male, Dr Beth Upton, to use the female changing room at the hospital where he was working. Bumba justified this decision with comments that I assume sounded really clever and convincing, inside her own head. 'I don’t know anything about Beth’s body. I didn’t at the time. I don’t now. I don’t need to know. But it wouldn’t be something that I would ever have the information of exactly what she is made of, biologically.' Kate Searle, a consultant in emergency medicine, backed Bumba up, expressing outrage on the witness stand that anyone would be so insensitive as to ask about Upton's chromosomes. ‘I could only imagine how upsetting and invasive a question that would be for Beth, and also not relevant to a colleague to ask another colleague. Beth identifies as female, and it does not matter what her chromosomes are to her.’ In Bumba and Searle's world, a belief that gender identity trumps biological sex is proof you're intellectually and morally superior to women like Sandie Peggie, so I'd imagine it's come as a shock to discover, in a blaze of public and press scrutiny, just how idiotic and cruel they appear to people outside their dinner party circle. When Upton, a 6' tall, 28-year-old ex-rugby playing male, claimed that a petite 50-year-old female nurse was making him feel 'unsafe', his word appears to have been taken as gospel. Searle, Bumba and management fell over themselves to coddle the middle-class doctor who shared their voguish post-modern views on gender. What did Sandie matter? She's just one of those ghastly uninformed bigots who still thinks sex is real and important - so embarrassingly gauche and simplistic! Whisper it - she probably drinks red wine with chicken, too. According to @tribunaltweets, an emotional Searle blurted out on the stand 'I am kind.' This is not something genuinely kind people need to say. Genuinely kind people don't find themselves compelled to explain in court why they helped whip up a witch-hunt against a woman whose only crime was wanting to change her clothes without a man watching. Well, the nurse who was supposed to shuffle off in disgrace wasn't having it. Sandie Peggie refused to be sacrificed on the altar of elitist ideologues who believe themselves to be higher and better than she is. She fought back, for herself and for every other woman who's currently being silenced, persecuted and punished by a smug management class that preens itself on its virtue while imposing rampantly misogynistic policies on its workforce. Sandie Peggie is a heroine. The woman NHS Fife thought they could treat abominably without any consequences to themselves has succeeded in shining the brightest spotlight yet upon the brain rot and compassion deficit suffered by supposedly intelligent people when they embrace gender identity ideology. Women everywhere owe her a debt of thanks. Whatever the outcome of this tribunal, Sandie Peggie has already won.

In light of recent open letters from academia and the arts criticising the UK's Supreme Court ruling on sex-based rights, it's possibly worth remembering that nobody sane believes, or has ever believed, that humans can change sex, or that binary sex isn't a material fact. These letters do nothing but remind us of what we know only too well: that pretending to believe these things has become an elitist badge of virtue. I often wonder whether the signatories of such letters have to quieten their consciences before publicly boosting a movement intent on removing women's and girls' rights, which bullies gay people who admit openly they don't want opposite sex partners, and campaigns for the continued sterilisation of vulnerable and troubled kids. Do they feel any qualms at all while chanting the foundational lie of their religion: Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men? I have no idea. All I know for sure is that it's a complete waste of time telling a gender activist that their favourite slogan is self-contradictory nonsense, because the lie is the whole point. They're not repeating it because it's true - they know full well it's not true - but because they believe they can make it true, sort of, if they force everyone else to agree. The foundational lie functions as both catechism and crucifix: the set form of words that obviates the tedious necessity of coming up with your own explanation of why you're one of the Godly, and an exorcist's weapon which will defeat demonic facts and reason, and promote the advance of righteous pseudoscience and sophistry. Some argue that signatories of these sorts of letters are motivated by fear: fear for their careers, of course, but also fear of their co-religionists, who include angry, narcissistic men who threaten and sometimes enact violence on non-believers; back-stabbing colleagues ever ready to report wrongthink; the online shamers and doxxers and rape threateners, and, of course, the influential zealots in the upper echelons of liberal professions (though we can quibble whether they're actually liberal at all, given the draconian authoritarianism that seems to have engulfed so many). Gender ideology could give medieval Catholicism a run for its money when it comes to punishing heretics, so isn't it common sense to keep your head down and recite your Hail Mulvaneys? But before we start feeling too sorry for any cowed and fearful TWAWites who're TERFy on the sly, let's not forget what a high proportion of them have willingly snatched up pitchforks and torches to join the inquisitional purges. Call me lacking in proper womanly sympathy, but I find the harm they've enabled and in some cases directly championed or funded - the hounding and shaming of vulnerable women, the forced loss of livelihoods, the unregulated medical experiment on minors - tends to dry up my tears at source. History is littered with the debris of irrational and harmful belief systems that once seemed unassailable. As Orwell said, 'Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.' Gender ideology may have embedded itself deeply into our institutions, where it's been imposed, top-down, on the supposedly unenlightened, but it is not invulnerable. Court losses are starting to stack up. The condescension, overreach, entitlement and aggression of gender activists is eroding public support daily. Women are fighting back and winning significant victories. Sporting bodies have miraculously awoken from their slumber and remembered that males tend to be larger, stronger and faster than females. Parts of the medical establishment are questioning cutting healthy breasts off teenaged girls is really the best way to fix their mental health problems. One seemingly harmless little white lie - Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men - uttered in most cases without any real thought at all, and a few short years later, people who think of themselves as supremely virtuous are typing 'yes, rapists' pronouns are absolutely the hill I'll die on,' rubbing shoulders with those who call for women to be hanged and decapitated for wanting all-female rape crisis centres, and furiously denying clear and mounting evidence of the greatest medical scandal in a century. I wonder if they ever ask themselves how they got here, and I wonder whether any of them will ever feel shame.

Men defining what a woman is, what women should and shouldn’t fear, what women should and shouldn’t say, what rights women should be fine with giving up and, of course, what constitutes ‘real’ misogyny: get a bloody mirror. That’s real misogyny, looking right back at you.