Psycho dramas are all the rage: George Galloway defends JK Rowling and hits back at cancel culture

Ever since Alfred Hitchcock put Norman Bates in a dress, indeed his late mother’s dress, the cross-dressing murderer has been a thing. Hitchcock’s masterpiece (or mistresspiece) ‘Psycho’ is 60 years old.

Life teaches that murderers come in all shapes and sizes – including bra-sizes – and the novelist is free to interpret where the hat fits. Unless you’re in the 2020s woke lynch-mob cancel-culture of course. Get out of bed the wrong way and you might find they start burning your books, and talking about burning you. 

Such has been the fate of the once national-treasure JK Rowling after British newspaper the Telegraph revealed in an early review published on Sunday her new book to be featuring a cross-dressing slasher.

Britain’s greatest export since the Beatles was always going to attract envy – Rowling has after all, without training, education or posh peer-group approbation, amassed literally billions of pounds of earnings. But she could never, even in the vivid imagination that brought us Hogwarts and Harry Potter, have expected the savagery of the woke.

Rowling’s problems began when she took the evidentially unassailable view that men cannot become women by identifying as such. 

When confronted by a man self-identifying as a woman I treat them politely – even if they are not flashing and slashing a Norman Bates steak-knife. I do that out of human kindness, the very milk of which I exude. I had a comrade once whose hand I used to shake when he lived as a man, whose cheeks I used to kiss when he was “in transition” and, with some relief, whose hand I got to shake anew as he transitioned back again. That’s my story about Dave and Dianne.

Imagine my surprise then when addressing a packed meeting of students at Aberdeen University a few years back, a group of ‘Trans Rights Protestors’ stepped forward and threw a bag of “substance” in my face at point-blank range (it turned out to be glitter). Surprising because at that point I had not breathed a single word about trans issues ever in my life. The protestors – presumably now pin-striped anarcho-bankers in the City – had merely intuited that the day would come when I would not be woke enough and were getting their retaliation in early.

In a sense they were right. I stand with JK Rowling. People can wear what they like – even their dead mother’s clothes – and identify as Moon-landing astronauts if they like, and I will do my best to accommodate them. But not to the extent of signing in my blood that they actually ARE what they identify as. I wouldn’t give them a shot at a Moon-landing, at least not until they had completed training. 

Neither would I agree to their attending my wife’s baby-doll pyjama sleepover party – because those are for real girls. Or more seriously, allow them to bathe with my daughter, muscle in on her girls’ sports activities, batter her in the boxing ring, beat her to a pulp in the rugby scrum, or by a mile in the athletics. Because in all those cases, the ‘self-identifying woman’s’ freedoms are impinging on the freedoms of girls and women to their own spaces, privacy and self-expression. My freedom to swing my fist ends just before the end of my neighbour’s nose.

I’ve never read any of JK Rowling’s stuff, but I will fight to the end for her right to write it.

As I put down my pen, I’m about to say something similar to Piers Morgan live on the mass-audience Good Morning Britain television show. It may bring the house down. In which case consider this my last will and testament. “NORMAN?”

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.