Rowling poster removed from Waverley station despite zero public complaints The Times 12.09.20

The original article is here.

Not a single complaint was made about an advertising poster reading “I love JK Rowling” that was removed from Edinburgh’s largest railway station, it has emerged.

The digital poster was taken down by Network Rail in July after it was deemed to have breached guidelines.

In a response to a freedom of information request it said: “As of 19 August, 2020, we have received 158 complaints regarding the posters’ removal. We did not receive any complaints about the poster being up via our customer relations team.”

The advert at Edinburgh Waverley had been designed and booked for £1,200 by Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, a campaigner against reform of gender recognition laws that would make it easier to self-identify as a given gender.

The Scottish government wants to amend the present law to make it simpler for transgender people to update the gender on their birth certificate in Scotland.

Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, has become a heroine for feminists opposed to the reforms who want to protect “women-only spaces”.

She has refused to give ground in a succession of bitter online rows, including a stand-off last month with Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who played her boy wizard on screen.

Ms Keen-Minshull said: “I am astounded they found a way to take it down. We are in incredibly sinister times when an expression of love and solidarity is perceived to be hateful.”

Rowling, 54, had written on Twitter that she was puzzled by a headline on an article which referred to “people who menstruate”. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” she wrote. “Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

When others accused her of being transphobic, she argued that biological sex was meaningful to her and other women despite claims by some trans commentators that it was unimportant.

Radcliffe responded that “transgender women are women” regardless of biology.

In 2018 Ms Keen-Minshull paid for the dictionary definition “Woman, women, noun, adult human female” to be printed on a billboard in Liverpool during the Labour Party conference.

A spokesman for Network Rail said: “The poster in question is against our code of acceptance for advertising in our stations owing to its political nature.

“We do not allow advertising that is likely to support or promote one viewpoint over another.”