Ohhh, the schadenfreude is truly rich on this one, friends. It’s almost too much! I’ve really hit my limit, here… I couldn’t possibly have another bite.
Look, listen. JK Rowling is low-hanging fruit at this point, right? Giving attention to jerks is sorta kinda my job (though I prefer to frame it as keeping my community informed), but even I know when it isn’t worth spotlighting somebody we all know is a relentless piece of shit. So, with that in mind, I haven’t bothered reporting on the Queen of TERFs’ shenanigans for a while now… but I just cannot resist a good dunk.
It is my most neolib character flaw.
So, Assigned has been reporting on Rowling for years now. Basically since our inception, or close enough to it. No surprise there, I think; Rowling is a staggeringly wealthy woman whose hackneyed garbage book series takes up an unbearable amount of space in the modern cultural zeitgeist. Even now, years after having gone fully mask off, Rowling has a powerful voice in popular culture, which she uses primarily to bend as much energy as she can towards destroying transgender people. Her Twitter page is wall to wall, hour by hour unhinged rants about trans people, and she even established and maintains a “charitable” fund specifically to funnel money to anti-trans organizations.
Surely you can understand, then, that I am over the fucking moon about the fact that last Friday, Dr. Q Manivannan, a nonbinary immigrant to the UK from India (eligible to run for election in Scotland as a Commonwealth citizen, despite not having permanent residency status or citizenship), assumed office as the Member of the Scottish Parliament for Edinburgh and Lothians East… meaning they are now JK Rowling’s representative in parliament.
Oh, baby!
I want to carve out a moment to just generally celebrate the election of a trans person to an important political position during a time where, globally, we are facing tremendous pressure to simply not exist. In fact, Dr. Manivannan isn’t the only trans person who won an election in the Scottish Parliament: Iris Duane, a trans woman of color and a member of the Scottish Green Party, like Dr. Manivannan, was elected representative for Glasgow. Together, they are the first two openly transgender Members of Scottish Parliament, and I think it’s important to jump for joy about that fact without qualifying their success as wins against any one specific person.
Anyway, back to giggling and kicking my feet at how incandescently furious JK Rowling must be about this!
Regrettably, Rowling hasn’t posted publicly about Dr. Manivannan, or Iris Duane, since they took office. She has posted more anti-trans nonsense, because that is the bulk of what she puts on social media on any given day, but mostly she’s antagonized Prime Minister Keir Starmer over his choice for an Adviser on Women and Girls being somebody who believes trans women deserve basic respect and decency and can be counted among the ranks of women. She also praised an anti-trans politician who lost her bid for re-election and supported the 2025 UK Supreme Court decision that trans women could not benefit from the general legal protections provided for women and girls. No explicit decrying of the new brown MSPs who won out in literal political popularity contests despite years of the awful hag insisting that everybody secretly hates trans people, and only brainwashed fools captured by “gender ideology” believe that we should have civil rights.
Still, given her vicious commitment to eradicating trans people from public view, there’s no doubt that Rowling is seething in her moldy little castle, grinding her teeth and shaking with rage at the thought of somebody who’s different from her representing her in government. Yet, in spite of her presumed misgivings, I’m certain that Dr. Manivannan will do an excellent job representing Rowling as one of their constituents, because—despite what our many detractors would have you believe—trans people are just as capable of being good, hard working, honest folks as literally any other class of human being in the world.
Congratulations to Dr. Maivannan and Iris Duane for their huge wins. I think I can safely say that we all hope to see more wins like those, both across the pond and here at home in the States. No matter how much these rich ghoulish losers despise us, they cannot break our spirit.
We will continue to thrive and do great things in this world. That’s just a fact.
Aly Gibbs(She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.