Her final year at the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre School saw Georgia Frost crowned winner of the coveted Alan Bates Award at a glittering ceremony in London’s Covent Garden.
The accolade, for the country’s most promising drama student, was presented by Noma Dumezweni, who played Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the stage sequel to the Potter novels, in the West End and Broadway.
Hers was the role made famous on the big screen by Emma Watson. Miss Frost was the only woman in the final of the competition in 2017.
‘As a woman it’s hard for us,’ she said as she collected her gong. ‘We are on our way to equality but we need to keep pushing and having this network, and having this support, will be the thing that will lift me up and help me go far.’
Four years on, and the irony is almost beyond parody. For this is the very same Georgia Frost who this week appeared in a picture taken outside the Edinburgh home of Harry Potter author JK Rowling.
Her final year at the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre School saw Georgia Frost (pictured) crowned winner of the coveted Alan Bates Award at a glittering ceremony in London’s Covent Garden
Frost was standing next to fellow ‘trans activists’, ‘drag king’ Richard Energy (real name Janina Smith) and drag queen Holly Stars.
The picture, which clearly showed Rowling’s address, was posted on social media.
Its effect? To stir up online abuse of the author, who has found herself accused of transphobia ever since she mocked an online article in June 2020 which used the words ‘people who menstruate’ instead of ‘women’.
The trio, whom Rowling has accused of trying to ‘intimidate’ her for ‘speaking up for women’s sex-based rights’, were carrying placards with the messages ‘Trans Liberation Now’, ‘Trans Rights Are Human Rights’, and ‘Don’t Be A Cissy’, a pun on ‘cis’, a term meaning someone whose gender identity corresponds with their sex at birth.
Rowling is very much a ‘Cissy’, to use the trans vernacular, voicing her views on the importance of biological sex, arguing that the activity of a tiny minority was leading to the ‘erasure of women’.
Speaking up for women, in other words, in the same way Miss Frost did during her acceptance speech.
In the eyes of the hate mob that now makes Rowling — and others like her who are targets of the ‘cancel culture’ zealots — fair game for almost any kind of abuse.
Four years on, and the irony is almost beyond parody. For this is the very same Georgia Frost who this week appeared in a picture taken outside the Edinburgh home of Harry Potter author JK Rowling
Even Frost, though — who has appeared in BBC shows — surely couldn’t have imagined targeting (hounding, many would say) the author of Harry Potter a few years after receiving a prize from an actress acclaimed for her role as Hermione Granger.
Frost, 29, and her companions appear to have been very careful not to overstep the mark, despite identifying Rowling’s home.
Presumably they knew that breaching someone’s privacy is not a criminal offence and it would probably be up to the author to pursue a civil case against them, which was unlikely.
So they adopted a cowardly tactic known as ‘doxing’ — publishing personal information to enable others to take action. The hate mob duly responded.
Rowling’s agent did not wish to disclose whether any of the threats and vile insults she was subjected to were sent directly to her home.
But within hours of her address being tweeted by the three trans activists, the sluice gates had burst open.
Rowling is very much a ‘Cissy’, to use the trans vernacular, voicing her views on the importance of biological sex, arguing that the activity of a tiny minority was leading to the ‘erasure of women’
The vast majority of the trolls hid behind anonymised profiles and sometimes substituted letters with other characters in the most offensive words to avoid being removed by search engines such as ‘D!e’ (Die), ‘R*pe’ (Rape), and ‘K!ll’ (Kill).
Almost all the vitriol sent to Rowling’s online account has been deleted.
The Mail found this, however: ‘D!E ALREADY FFS (for f**** sake).
Other examples, which poured in from all over the world, are still on Twitter groups set up specifically to target Rowling, including: ‘Rot in Hell’, ‘JK Rowling is a liar’, ‘JK Rowling is trash, ‘JK Rowling stands for… j k*ll rowling,’ and ‘jk Rowling I am about to dress like myself to K!ll you’.
Much of the onslaught is unprintable. Rowling contacted the police, who said in a statement that they were aware of the incident last Friday and ‘inquiries were continuing’.
Frost, Smith and Stars said they stood by their actions but revealed on social media the following day that ‘while we stand by the photo, since posting it we have received an overwhelming amount of serious and transphobic messages so we have decided to take down the photo’.
Being reduced to the level of the mob, whatever the circumstances, is never advisable.
Nevertheless, it would be difficult to find a more glaring example of hypocrisy than their self-serving statement painting themselves as the real victims of this disturbing affair.
It was the latest episode in a sustained and hysterical campaign of harassment and abuse against Rowling that began 15 months ago when she sardonically pointed out that there was such a thing as a ‘woman’ after an article had referred simply to ‘people who menstruate’.
She subsequently wrote a carefully-argued, 3,600-word essay posted on her website explaining her reasons for speaking out on sex and gender issues and the dangers posed by a change in the law to allow people to switch gender without a medical diagnosis, which critics claimed would open up female-only spaces such as changing rooms and refuges to anybody who claims to be a woman.
The Government has ditched the amendment to the Gender Recognition Act but the Scottish Government is pushing ahead with the controversial reform.
Since voicing her views Rowling, 56 — who had an abusive first marriage and suffered a serious sexual assault as a young woman — has been singled out by what one commentator called ‘the mob of the perpetually outraged’.
‘I have to assume [they] thought doxing me would intimidate me out of speaking up for women’s sex-based rights,’ Rowling wrote after the most recent incident.
‘They should have reflected on the fact that I’ve now received so many death threats I could paper the house with them and I
