I see the woke lobby has taken a break from saying ‘black lives matter’ to launch yet another misogynistic crusade against JK Rowling. She’s pure scum, a cunt, a bitch. What awful crime has she committed to deserve these ceaseless insults? She said women menstruate. She stated a biological truth. So deranged has political correctness and trans correctness become that you can now be witch-hunted for saying menstruation is a female phenomenon.

Rowling has been sceptical of some of the claims made by the transgender lobby for quite a while. In the eyes of the trans thoughtpolice this makes her a ‘TERF’, which literally means ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’, but really it is wielded as a misogynistic insult. It’s a variation on the word witch. It means bad woman, hysterical woman, fallen woman. Light the matches!

Rowling’s latest TERF thoughtcrime was to question the headline to an article that said: ‘Creating a more equal post-Covid-19 world for people who menstruate.’ Rowling responded on Twitter: ‘”People who menstruate.” I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?’ Which is pretty funny. Except to the humourless enforcers of correct-think on gender, of course. To them, Rowling’s words were evil (she’s worse than Voldemort and Draco Malfoy, yada yada). Her words will cause significant hatred and harm against trans people, they said. This is the kind of censorious emotional blackmail we’ve come to expect from the intolerant: ‘If you express your views, people will die.’

The reason sexist, dehumanising phrases like ‘people who menstruate’ are used these days is to avoid saying ‘women’. The word women has become almost verboten in discussions about gender. Indeed, sticking with the Harry Potter theme, as so many of the sexist shamers of Rowling love to do, saying ‘women’ is fast becoming the equivalent of saying ‘Voldemort’: it’s a taboo, and if you break it, terrible things will happen.

The word woman even comes with an X through it sometimes – ‘womxn’ – indicating how unacceptable it has become to utter this frightful noun. In 2018 the Wellcome Trust hosted an event that it said was aimed at ‘womxn’. Cancer Research removed the word women from its smear-test campaign, replacing it with ‘anyone with a cervix’. In right-thinking circles you’ll even hear phrases like ‘cervix-havers’.

Why is the word ‘woman’ being so studiously erased by the PC set in favour of speaking about women almost as if they are animals (cervix-havers, menstruators)? It’s because nothing must ever be done to offend the infinitesimally small number of men who identify as women but of course do not have women’s bodies (trans women), or women who identify as men and who still menstruate but do not believe that they are women (trans men). This is how bonkers trans ideology is becoming: the entirety of womanhood, the very word woman, must be expunged from decent society in case it upsets men who think they’re women and women who think they’re men. Those individuals’ fantasies take precedence over women’s realities. Know your place, women – sorry, I mean cervix-possessors.

Rowling is absolutely right to say this is sexist, to say that subjugating the language and experience of womanhood to the needs and sensitivities of the trans lobby is anti-women. As she points out, if we don’t talk about sex, if we stop believing that there are such things as men and women and that they are physically different, then we erase womanhood, and with it women’s sex-based rights. ‘If sex isn’t real, the lived experience of women globally is erased’, Rowling said in response to her spitting, raging detractors yesterday. She is correct. But in the Orwellian world of gender self-ID, where people are what they say they are and woe betide any heretic who questions them, Rowling is nothing short of Satanic.

It is really important to defend biological truth, the reality of sex, and the language of male and female that humanity has been using since it has been able to communicate. These things are real, and they have real meaning, too. We cannot bury truth to satisfy the delusions of small numbers of people who believe they are literally women, or literally men, when we all know that they are not. This war on reality, this mangling of truth and speech and understanding, must be confronted. To coin a phrase, women’s lives matter, despite what woke misogynists might say to the contrary.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy