He was born a female, but his identity is male. He’s also a fan, as so many kids his age are, of the Harry Potter series. That’s why it’s extra-painful that the author of that series, JK Rowling, has outed herself as a TERF — a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. My son, who has called himself a Gryffindor for years and has had Harry Potter-theme birthday parties, has learned that the author he idolized thinks his gender will always be second to his biology.
I cannot take away my son’s pain. All I can do is proclaim from the rooftops, as a medical anthropologist, as a feminst, and as a historian, that JK Rowling and her fellow TERFs are not just on the wrong side of history — they are just plain wrong. They are wrong from a cultural standpoint, from a biological standpoint, and from a human rights standpoint.
TERFs insist that trangender women should be excluded from feminist concerns, and kept away from spaces belonging to cis women, because biological sex and biological sex alone determines whether or not one is a man or a woman. Transgener women are not women, sayeth the TERFs. Those non-cis beings are trangender people who should stay in their non-woman lanes. The TERFs consider the fact that trans women are raped and murdered more often compared to cis women to be a human rights issue, but not a feminist issue, because feminism is about women and trans women are not ‘real’ women.
Ironically, TERFs insist they are not trans-exclusionary because they embrace trans men. Apparently the genitalia trans men were born with continues to place them (willingly or not) in the recognized tribe of cis-sisters. In this philosophy, trans men are real women, and trans women are not.
JK Rowling’s emergence as a TERF was slow. The first hints came in 2018, when the author began liking and supporting anti-trans tweets and transphobic activists. When called out for transphobia, Rowling initially apologized for her behavior with a statement “insisting it was a “clumsy” and “middle-aged” mistake.” However, at some point in the last year or so, Rowling must have found a TERF echo-chamber to validate her opinions, because now she is openly defending her transphobia in an essay on her personal website.
No one wants to ever, ever admit they are the baddie in any situation. Rowling is no exception. That is why she, and other transphobic TERFs, couch their bigotry as defending freedom of speech and defending women from those who wish to “erase” the concept of biological sex. In this worldview, it is the trans activists, not people like Rowling, who are in the wrong for denying the biological commonality of women. Rowling insists that it is the trans-activists, not her, who are ignoring the facts of biological reality. She argues that she is being ‘attacked’ due to misogyny, simply because she is daring to defend (real?) women. Finally, Rowling uses the fact that the understandings of gender dysphoria are still being researched and evolving to accuse trans activists of bullying children into transitioning.
Her arguments are errant and obvious malarkey.
Freedom of speech does not mean a freedom from consequences. Say something bigoted, and you’ll likely be termed a bigot. People will be mad at you, and might not want to give you their money anymore. This doesn’t mean you are being bullied. This means there are repercussions for bigotry.
Regardless of Rowlings assertions, there are NO trans activists striving to make people (or governments) erase or deny the existence of biological sex. There are activists demanding that babies born obviously intergender (with noticeable aspects of both male and female forms present in their genitalia) be allowed to choose their gender when they are older, rather than continuing the policy of surgically turning them into girls without their consent as infants, but that’s not erasing biological sex. That’s acknowlageing the biological FACT that sex is not axiomatically binary. Intersexed infants may be as many as 2% of all live births, which is roughly the same number of naturally occurring redheads in the world. Many of the intersexed infants will appear to be either male or female to the naked eye, and will be raised according to the gender that matches their genitalia. However, chromosomal analysis will find boys with XX or XXY chromosomes, and girls with XY chromones. Some boys will discover that the blood in their urine is coming from the hidden, but functioning, womb inside them. Some women will not menstruate, and a doctor’s examination will find testis (but no uterus) in their abdomen. Biology is fluid, whether TERFs like it or not.
Rowling’s essay also asserts that trans women should not be allowed to use the women’s restroom because she — as a cis survivor of sexual assault — feels threatened. She states that:
“When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.”
As a victim of sexual assault and domestic abuse, she has my sympathy, but the argument that forbidding transgender people from using the restroom of their choice make women safer is egregious hokum. I don’t know how to tell Rowling this, but no one has cast a spell on women’s toilets to magically prevent people with male genitalia from entering them. Rapists have frequently followed women into a women’s bathroom to assault them. None of those rapists were dressed as women. None of those rapists were trans women. None of those rapists were trans men, either. Rowling also admits that she’s aware that trans women are more likely to be assaulted (including sexually) if they are forced to use the men’s toilet, but clearly that’s a price she is willing to pay so that she, a cis women, can pretend women’s bathrooms are involate. She says she doesn’t want trans women to be harmed, but apparently not if that also means she has to call them women and let them in the same bathroom with her.
Undoubtedly some of the criticisms of Rowling have been personalized, cruel, and have used misogynistic phrases. This happens to women, including trans women, in a patriarchal culture. However, trans activists are not being misogynistic when they insist that trans women are women. If they were motivated by an ingrained prejudice against women, the last thing they would want is to be acknowledged as women. Trans women are taking nothing away from cis women, and they are not discriminating against cis women, by wanting to be acknowleged as women as well.
Inasmuch as there is no utopia or infallible medical systems currently available on this planet, Rowling is able to cherry-pick incidences where people have regretted transitioning. She implies this is due to careless doctors misdiagnosing gender dysphoria and trans activists pushing teens and children into transitioning. This is simply not true. The NHS website on gender dysmorphia states outright that the treatments for children/teens “are psychological rather than medical. This is because in many cases gender variant behaviour or feelings disappear as children reach puberty.” No one is rushing to give kids puberty blockers or surgery. Gender dysphoria, like gender identity and autism and so many other issues, is on a spectrum. It is true that kids with mild gender dysphoria might accidentally get misdiagnosed as having severe gender dysphoria. Doctors are humans, not gods, and mistakes will happen. Nonetheless, the reason trans activists campaign for puberty-suprressing drugs and other help to be made available to children and teens, in spite of a small chance of misdiagnosis, is because there are far, FAR more cases where untreated gender dysphoria leads to self-harm, including suicide. Giving kids puberty blockers when they ask for them is proven to reduces sucicide. It saves children’s lives. The number of children saved by treatment is far greater than the number of teens/adults who later regret early steps in gender transitioning. So … how dare those trans activists bully doctors into saving the lives of many children even though the system is imperfect?
Rowling also claims that she might have tried to erroneously transition to escape misogyny when she was younger, and is clearly glad no trans activist could bully her into it. The fact that she thinks transitioning is ‘easy’ or that trans men somehow escape the harm of patriarchal gender norms is ignorant beyond belief. The process of transitioning is incredibly complicated and takes years, even now. A child unhappy about her gender role, as Rowling claims to have been, would almost certainly be denied medical intervention until she was older and had proven that she actually had severe gender dysmorphia. Even then, transitioning is traumatic. You have to reconstruct your entire life, and deal with any socio-cultural fallout that comes with it. Furthermore, transgender FTM people like my son will spend their whole live having to visit doctors regularly to monitor their hormones and medications, and that is on top of any painful surgery he might wish to have. Once a trans man has fully transitioned, it’s still no bed of roses. If he can ‘pass’ as a cis man, it’s true that he might get some of the patriarchal benefits of his new gender, especially if he is white men, but if they are outed as trans, they are much more likely to experience violence than a cis women. Then there is the minefield of dating as a trans man.
What is exceptionally distressing in Rowling’s essay is the self-pitying tone, the concern for cis women over all other women, and the implication that victims of one form of injustice cannot, by definition, perpetuate injustice upon others. She is very upset at the way she, as a cis woman, has been treated by the patriarchy. She is very upset the way she, as a cis woman, has suffered harrassment. Her needs, as a victimized cis woman, are the reason she has the right to exclude trans women from cis women’s ideologies and spaces. The needs of cis women (the real women) are obviously much more important than the needs of trans women. Nor should she be castigated for her beliefs about the supreme of cis women’s needs, because she has suffered from male assault and thus she can never, ever perpetuate against others the same patriarchal systems that harmed her.
Her essay is such a tone-deaf, self-justifying, specialist pleading for cis women that I have to wonder if the K in Rowling’s pen name secretly stood for “Karen”.
As a sexual assault survivor myself, I have to wonder — just how large is this umbrella that prevents me from being criticized? If I can’t be called transphobic, is no one allowed to accuse me of being anti-semetic, racist, or homophobic either? If I can still be called out for racism or other discriminatory positions, then why is transphobia against trans women permissible? Is it because I would only be supporting transphobia as a means of ‘protecting’ cis women? As it so happens, Dylan Roof insisted he murdered black people in a church shooting because he was ‘protecting’ white cis women, too. The argument that patriarchal roles were there to ‘protect’ cis women has been used by anti-feminists for a long time, but it was shown to be a lie by the way those protections mysteriously evaporated when it came to women of color. The protect-the-women argument has always been used historically as a means of justifying discrimination, and that’s what TERFs are usuing for it today to excuse their transphobia.
Somehow, Rowling’s essay is made even more offensive by her strident claims that she is not transphobic. That she loves and supports trans people. This not only smacks of the ‘but I have black friends’ defence so beloved of benign racists, it is hard to reconcile this claim with her words in the rest of the essay. For Rowling, loving and supporting trans people is apparently achieved by calling trans women ‘men in dresses’ and denying them gender identity. She loves and supports them, but not enough to acknowledge them as women or men outside their natal genitalia. Rowling cannot seem to grasp that most trans people do not feel loved and supported by people who insist their biological sex is more important than their personal gender identity. She has tweeted that she would march to defend transgender rights, without seeing the irony that she doesn’t want let them pee in the stall next to her after that march. That’s as delusional as someone saying, “I’m not racist, but I don’t believe in mixed marriages.”
I can also say for certain that Rowling’s declaration that biology is more important than gender has not made my son feel loved and supported. It has done the opposite, and it has materially lessened his enjoyment of her work. The Harry Potter series was important to him, and now it will forever be tainted by the knowledge that the woman who wrote it doesn’t consider him to be a real boy. Rowling, through her determination to defend herself and portray herself as a feminist martyr standing against trans activists, has stolen a piece of my son’s childhood.
I would like to think that if she knew how much she had hurt an innocent child it would bother her, but I doubt acknowledgement of her culpability will penetrate the armor of smug, self-righteous, faux-feminism that she has patently wrapped around herself.