Amnesty withdraw report listing anti-rights organisations following Rowling legal threat

Amnesty International UK has referred itself to the Charity Commission after withdrawing its recent report A Growing Threat: the Anti-Rights Movement in the UK following intervention from known bigot JK Rowling. The report listed 117 organisations which work to undermine abortion and LGBTQ+ rights across the country.

The list included anti-abortion groups like Right to Life UK, Both Lives, and Abortion Resistance. It also featured conversion-therapy advocates GENSPECT and Thoughtful Therapists, and anti-trans organisations Gender Critical Greens and Transgender Trend.

Rowling and the ‘women’s fund’

However, famously litigious anti-queer campaigner and sometime author JK Rowling waded in because of the inclusion of her sexual-assault support centre Beira’s Place as an anti-rights actor. Beira’s Place denies support to victims of rape and sexual violence if they are transgender.

Lawyers acting on behalf of Beira’s Place immediately threatened legal action against Amnesty. Rowling also offered to fund other groups’ lawfare against the human rights organisation, stating:

Should any of the women’s organisations targeted by @AmnestyUK’s recent ‘anti-rights’ blacklist wish to take legal action, applications can be made to the JK Rowling Women’s Fund.

The billionaire author extended the offer after Trans Widows Voices complained that it lacked the funding to defend itself. The organisation is made up of women who refer to themselves as ‘widows’ after their (still living) partners transition.

Rowling set up her ‘women’s fund’ in June 2025, to provide money for legal actions against trans-inclusive organisations. Whilst the fund is exclusively available to cis women, the author also stated that she was “more than happy to donate” to the men’s organisations named on the list.

A Growing Threat

Before Amnesty took down its report, A Growing Threat defined anti-rights actors as seeking to undermine human rights protections “in law and practice”. Its key findings included:

• An organised anti-rights movement targeting the rights of women and LGBT+ people is growing in the UK. Over 60% of the organisations mapped have emerged since 2017, the vast majority gender critical organisations.
• Out of the sample of 117 organisations mapped, 37 have spent over £144 million between 2019 and 2024, an increase of 47%.
• One in three of the organisations mapped are registered charities, this means they can apply for institutional funding and may be eligible for ‘Gift Aid’ – a scheme enabling registered charities to reclaim tax on donations.
• The biggest spenders are ultra-conservative Christian policy and advocacy organisations (£46.7 million), followed by UK branches of US groups (£43.9 million) and anti-abortion organisations (£35.8 million).

However, following legal threats from the listed organisations’ lawyers, Amnesty took down the list and issued an apology. On 16 July, the Charity Commission confirmed that the human rights group had self-referred by submitting a serious incident report.

A spokesperson for Amnesty stated that:

We regret that this briefing was uploaded to our website without going through the established, internal review processes that are in place to ensure consistency, accuracy and alignment with Amnesty International UK’s positions.

Anti-rights actor, or just anti-rights?

Beira’s Place is certainly a “gender critical” organisation, as A Growing Threat termed the anti-trans groups on its list. However, it is probably inaccurate to call it an “anti-rights actor” per se. The sexual assault support center doesn’t, to our knowledge, actively campaign actively against trans rights.

Rather, Beira’s Place genuinely does provide support for victims of rape and sexual assault. It just denies service to women who have been victims of rape and sexual assault if its founders don’t believe they are women. Abhorrent, sure, but it’s not a campaigning organisation.

Instead, Beira’s Place board member Susan Smith does her anti-trans campaigning through For Women Scotland, of which she is the director.

That’s the same For Women Scotland which is also named on Amnesty’s list, and whose litigation resulted in the Supreme Court defining ‘women’ as referring to sex-assigned-at-birth under the Equality Act.

Rowling leading the way on anti-rights lawfare

JK Rowling herself provided £70,000 to For Women Scotland to fuel its anti-trans lawfare. That lawfare resulted in the sharp reduction of trans people’s rights after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) chose to interpret the court’s ruling in the most transphobic manner possible.

Parliament is overwhelmingly likely to pass the EHRC’s code of conduct on 5 August, effectively segregating trans people and other groups perceived as trans – including gender non-conformists and intersex individuals – as a ‘third sex’.

Before it was taken down, A Growing Threat stated that:

Some of these groups describe themselves as ‘anti-gender’ because they visibly oppose the rights and equality of women and LGBT+ people. However, by targeting women and LGBT+ people, they also challenge a fundamental human rights principle: that human rights belong to everyone equally. Human rights are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. When the rights of one group are restricted, protections for others can also be weakened, even where the effects are not immediately visible.

We’ve already seen the interconnectedness of human rights in action after the publication of the EHRC’s draft code. TransActual UK reported that:

Our research has uncovered many stories of cis people, especially gender non-conforming women, being humiliated and excluded by staff or vigilante gender police when using the appropriate facilities and shown that this has already increased since the publication of the EHRC’s draft guidance.

An attack on us all

Anti-trans campaigners seek to create borders between cis and trans women, and cis and trans men for that matter. As with For Women Scotland, they may do this under the guise of ‘protecting women’s rights’, or ‘protecting gay rights’ in the case of the LGB Alliance and their ilk.

However, these arguments are just that – a disguise for anti-rights campaigning. NION (Not In Our Name) Women, a network of trans-inclusive women’s organisations, released an open letter stating that:

As women, we face so many pressing concerns: misogyny, gender inequality, violence and abuse from cis men, difficulties accessing appropriate healthcare and growing threats to our bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. These changes to the interpretation of the Equality Act and updates to the Code of Practice do nothing to address these issues.

Likewise, as the Canary has said before under similar circumstances:

Any border creates an ‘other’, and requires police to protect that border from the ‘other’. And policing, as we have seen time and again, begets violence.

It’s a sign of the severe failure of our democracy that a billionaire like Rowling can simply throw enough money at a cause to make a vulnerable minority’s rights disappear wholesale. That reduction in rights is an attack on us all, cis and trans alike.

If only somebody were to write a report on the vast sums of money anti-rights actors are ploughing into their legal campaigns.

Featured image via the Canary