And so it continues:
A school has dropped JK Rowling as a name for one of its houses after the author came under attack from transgender activists.
The Weald School in Billingshurst, West Sussex, wrote to parents announcing that it was abandoning plans to use Rowling’s name because she was “no longer felt to be an appropriate role model”. The school has an exisiting house system but is renaming them to give a better representation of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and gender identity. [...]
In its letter to parents, the school said it had recently chosen the names DaVinci, Seacole, Mercury, Attenborough, Rowling and Thompson for its new houses.
These were named after Leonardo da Vinci; Mary Seacole, the black nurse from the Crimean War; Freddie Mercury, the front man from Queen, Sir David Attenborough, JK Rowling and Baroness Grey-Thompson, the paralympian.
The school wrote: “In recent days it has come to light that one of our new names may in fact no longer be an appropriate role model for our community.
“JK Rowling has tweeted some messages which are considered to be offensive to the LGBT+ community (specifically, transphobic) and we feel that we do not wish to be associated with these views.
“The Weald is a school which always seeks to be inclusive of people across all of the protected characteristics, and we would not want to cause offence, even inadvertently. We have therefore taken the decision to remove the name Rowling from our new house and it will be called Blackman instead.
“Malorie Blackman is a prolific author of children’s and young adult literature, writer of television and radio dramas, was the Children’s Laureate between 2013-2015 and uses her writing as a way of exploring social and ethical issues. We feel that she fits the bill as an excellent replacement for a modern-day female author, so that we retain our aim of having a combination of historical and modern significant figures."
I'm sure this was a result of a detailed discussion about trans issues in the light of Rowling's stated belief that sex is a biological reality, and in no way a cheap pandering to a nasty moral purification campaign...
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