Principles aren’t principles if they’re selective.

Becoming complete by subtracting something

Principles aren’t principles if they’re selective.

This time I am not going to debate J.K. Rowling’s views on sex and gender here, although I daresay that I will in the future. What caught my attention recently wasn’t what she said, but what she chose to do.

In July 2026, Rowling posted a photograph of the transgender journalist and campaigner Freda Wallace on X taken at a public event. The image, taken from a low angle during a public event, showed beneath Wallace’s skirt. Rowling shared it as part of a thread mocking Wallace for declining to debate her and repeatedly referred to her by her former name and with male pronouns.

The backlash was swift. Critics argued that, regardless of the legal definition, the image was an “upskirt” photograph: one that exposed an intimate view of its subject and was shared to embarrass or humiliate her.

Wallace herself later described the distress the post caused, saying it led to harassment, body-shaming, threats, and the circulation of edited versions of the image online.

The legal arguments don’t especially interest me. Laws define the threshold for criminality; they don’t define the limits of decency.

Suppose someone deliberately crouched on a pavement and photographed beneath a woman’s skirt. Would our first instinct really be to ask whether it satisfied every element of the criminal offence? Or would we simply recognise it as an invasive and degrading thing to do?

Likewise, if I were to share such a photograph with millions of followers in order to ridicule its subject, I doubt many people would rush to my defence on the grounds that the picture had been taken in a public place.

That is why this episode troubles me.

Rowling has spent years arguing that women deserve protection from misogyny, sexual objectification and humiliation. Those are principles I largely agree with. Yet those principles seem to have become conditional. When the subject was a transgender woman, an image exposing beneath her skirt apparently became fair game.

Whether you believe Freda Wallace is a woman, a man, or something else entirely is almost beside the point. The ethical question remains the same.

Would sharing that photograph have been acceptable if the subject had been a cisgender woman?

If the answer is “no”, then perhaps the standards we apply should not depend on the identity of the person beneath the skirt.