Chris Columbus, who directed two of the Harry Potter films, wants you to know he doesn’t agree with J.K. Rowling on trans issues. Which trans issues, one may ask? Indeed, Rowling has asked this herself. Is Columbus desperate to keep male rapists in women’s prisons? Does he hate thinking of lesbians never experiencing the joys of the male penis? Is he a fan of breast binders and mastectomies for traumatised teenage girls?

Well, he’s not going to say. He just wants everyone to know that Rowling’s questioning of all of these things and more makes him “really sad”.

In fairness, Columbus is only one of a long list of people with professional links to Rowling — including Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Stephen Fry — who keep declaring how much they disagree with her without ever stating why. They might produce some waffle about kindness, but at no point do they explain why their position should be considered the kind one.

This is a common feature of the “trans debate”. Even Judith Butler, supposed high priestess of gender wisdom, can’t muster a single argument against the women she denounces as Terfs. The entirety of her attack on British feminism in her 2024 book Who’s Afraid of Gender? amounts to smearing feminists as Right-wing, misunderstanding the concept of biological essentialism, and not showing any signs of having read a gender-critical text to the end. Then again, she doesn’t have to. After all, she’s on the “right” side.

How did it come to this? Columbus et al. aren’t necessarily stupid — that the feminist case against gender self-ID is distinct from the conservative one is hardly difficult to grasp. Both trans activists and their Right-wing opponents are happy to define women using regressive stereotypes; they merely disagree on whether a regressive stereotype should be born with a vagina. Yet rather than engage with women such as Rowling, who rejects both positions in favour of centring female subjectivity, many in the arts and academia have chosen to pretend the feminist position simply does not exist.

The double standard is staggering. One thing that the past decade’s “gender wars” have thrown into sharp relief is the difference between those who get their views by thinking through an issue and making a choice, and those who simply self-ID into being a member of Team Progressive. From a distance, if you didn’t think very hard about it, trans activism could look a bit like the fight for gay liberation. After all, it seemed to annoy the very people who’d get annoyed about the latter. It’s therefore incredibly ironic that so many people who claim to want an end to binaries have found themselves supporting a misogynistic, homophobic movement because they can’t conceive of there being more than two sides.

It is much easier to don a “Protect the dolls” t-shirt than to answer any of the following questions: what’s the difference between a trans woman and a man who says he’s a woman? How do you conflate sex and gender without reinforcing sexism? How is gender diversity promoted by telling gender non-conforming children they’re actually the opposite sex?

Ask such questions, and you will be commanded to shut up and listen to trans people. Alas, as many of us who did this discovered, you were only ever really expected to obey the first part. Genuinely engaging with the arguments of trans activists is a surefire way to turn anyone into a Terf. This is arguably one of the reasons why Rowling has been excluded and denounced by so many supposedly thoughtful, kind people. They can’t refute her arguments.

Columbus might have no in-depth knowledge about this particular issue. That he, like so many others, is so willing to condemn Rowling without any clear justification is nonetheless to his shame.

If you’re in favour of puberty blockers for confused children and the end to all single-sex resources and spaces, you ought at least to own it. Tell us why. Otherwise, you’re just a man throwing rocks at a woman because all your mates are doing the same.

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Victoria Smith is a writer and creator of the Glosswitch newsletter.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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