Scotland’s emergence as new ground zero in the culture wars appears to be solidifying as opposition to a new hate crime law grows and backlash against what many perceive as an uncompromising transgender agenda intensifies.

The spark was the passage this month in Scotland of a new law on hate crimes that makes it an offense to “misgender” someone online — but is increasingly seen as intruding on the rights of free speech. Author J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, recently stated that “freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.”

While Ms. Rowling is the most famous person to take issue with the legislation that was backed by the Scottish National Party chief, Humza Yousaf, she is far from the only one to do so. A groundswell of opposition is forming, and from wildly disparate quarters. This comes as the Vatican on Monday reiterated its opposition to gender theory.

The Vatican’s newly released “Infinite Dignity” declaration warns that “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.”

Events in Scotland show that the debate over gender theory is anything but theoretical. At a feminist march against the new law at Edinburgh over the weekend, women complained of intimidation by pro-transgender activists. One of the placards trans rights  activists brandished read, “Trans dogs bite terfs.” The acronym “terf,” which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,”  is used disparagingly by trans activists to describe women like Ms. Rowling who do not believe that gender is unfixed.

One of the goals of the march, which was organized by Women Scotland, was reportedly to see how police officers would react to gender-critical chants. The police are central to the fate of the hate crime law because they are the ones tasked with enforcing it. Exactly how they will do so remains to be seen, but in the meantime there are some who want to jam Police Scotland’s circuits from the start. 

Groups described by the Observer as “far right and neo-Nazi” have reportedly been spamming the police with complaints in order to overwhelm their complaint tracking systems. One of those groups is said to have seized on a statement on the police website that says “young men aged 18-30 are most likely to commit hate crime” as evidence of “anti-white” hate crime. 

The group’s leader stated on the messaging app Telegram, “This public targeting of a group deeply offended us and thus we will report it as a racially motivated hate crime.”

Scotland’s new law recognizes hate crime based on prejudice toward the following groups: “race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, transgender identity, variations in sex characteristics. It is not clear, though, how “variations in sex characteristics” is a “group.”

More clear is that the number of hate crimes against transgender persons is infinitesimal when compared to cases of domestic abuse against women. Sky News reported that Scotland data for 2023 indicated there were 55 cases of hate crime with a trans element, which was down from 86 the previous year. By contrast, there were 61,934 cases of domestic violence — but the Scottish parliament prioritized passing the hate crime bill while letting an anti-misogyny bill languish.

The Scottish turmoil over transgender rights and the blurred lines between criticism and criminality are starting to have repercussions elsewhere in Europe. In France, a new book called “Transmania” is rocking the boat on the whole notion of transgenderism. The authors are a pair of feminist journalists, Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern, who told the French newspaper Sunday Journal that “it is legitimate to ask who is benefitting from” the expansion of transgender ideology. 

The answer to that question could be anyone or anything from fashion labels to big pharma, but the genesis of  society’s current predicament is with the “transmania” crisis itself. For the authors, that is the frenzy around the transgenders and “the transition from transsexualism to transgenderism.” Transsexualism was seen as a medical condition, they contend, while transgenderism “is an ideology that hinges on propounding as fact that sex does not matter and that what counts is gender, that is to say the societal label.”

According to the book’s promotional material, in France “it is possible to be legally recognized as a woman while having a penis. Men calling themselves women win women’s sports competitions in the utmost calm. Hospitals carry out medical experiments on children with the aim of making them ‘change sex.’”  Furthermore, “any unbeliever who mentions that gender is binary is dragged through the mud.”

The writers pledge to tell the French the story “of one of the biggest conceptual heists of the century” — namely, how transgender ideology is infiltrating all spheres of society. It is doing so “by presenting itself as a simple movement for the rights of an oppressed minority, yet, behind the glitter, lies a harmful political project which is about to disrupt our relationship with reality.” In Scotland, as well as the Vatican and now France, that reality is already being disrupted, but the backlash is becoming more vocal — in the press and, in Scotland at least, in the streets.