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.
As a reformed fan of the potter verse and as a cis woman,I will try to be polite about this situation. A wealthy while woman feels at risk of erasure. To quote a meme, more rights for one group doesn’t mean fewer for you. It’s not pie.
Women are women, by which I mean if one identifies as a woman then one is a woman. If therefore this woman regardless of her sex assigned at birth should be using the ladies room. She just wants a damn safe place to pee. The implication that transgender women are rapists is both demonstrably false and repugnant. It makes as much sense as saying that I don’t think rich authors should use the ladies room because they could rape me.
Sure it’s most likely a logical fallacy but I’m too pissed off to care.
Women who want to breathe/walk/use the toilet should be permitted to. It is a feminist issue because transwomen are one of the most discriminated against subgroups of women.
And here’s my main problem: this is the hill they wanna die on? This is where you make your stand? About a potty? This is the “evil” that must be eradicated from the earth…not climate change, racism, human trafficking, domestic violence, poverty? Those aren’t more offensive?
This is as explosive a subject as dynamite. Yesterday I watched the first version of Carrie, a film from 1976 and it is quite surprising that back in 1976 they showed so much female nudity in a girl’s locker room, with girls freely walking around as naked as when they were born.
I would, quite frankly, be bothered to know that a man who identifies himself as a woman is walking freely in the same locker room as my teen age daughters. If he does not walk around in the nude, it becomes sort of creepy, if he walks around nude, it is actually worse since that “woman” keeps walking around with a thing dangling between her/his legs.
On the other hand, if your daughter/son decides to use a man’s locker room and decides to do so while nude, I can be pretty sure there is going to be quite a reaction from the guys in the locker room.
Does your daughter/son use man’s or women’s locker room? If a man’s locker room, did she ever comment with you about the reaction of the guys who are simultaneously using those premises?
I sincerely want to know that. Also, if she does, did she ever feel threatened of being raped in such a place?
Quite honestly, I am not capable of making up my mind about this subject. I can see arguments both pro and against either option.
I am however honest enough to express my discomfort with a transgender woman using the locker room with my teenage daughters. Don’t know if that makes me a bigot.
Again, I fear your son/daughter may find a man’s locker room dangerous.
My two cents.
First, please call my child my son. I know it is confusing and hard for people to know the right terminology if they don’t live with it, but trans men go by “male” titles and trans women go by “female” titles without addenda regarding their natal genitalia. As for your question about the locker room, it is reasonable and just. The YMCA locker room back in Bloomington was mostly naked, and would indeed be an issue. My son could not dress around other boys/men in a locker room like that, because it would be obvious he has female anatomy. He would not want to go to the women’s locker room, because he would feel like he was a male invading their space, regardless of his biological similarity. If we were still in the US, he’d change his clothes in a cubical in the men’s room. I think any trans woman who had not had surgery to ‘look’ female on the outside as well would choose a bathroom cubical too. Trans women and men don’t want notice and confrontation. They won’t want to ‘flaunt’ a difference. Most trans people already hate their bodies because their biology betrays their true identity, and tend to conceal it from untrusted eyes. At my son’s wonderful, WONDERFUL school here in Wales, there is a gender neutral place to change clothes separate from the other kids. If we are out and about, he goes to the men’s room and no one comments cause he looks like a boy. He obviously uses a cubical, not the urinal. I am always, ALWAYS terrified he might be assaulted in the men’s room if someone discovers his biological sex. I live in mortal fear and dread of the dangers he will face when he’s an adult, and I can’t be with him all the time. I also fear for my daughters when they are adults, because as a woman I know what horrible things can happen to women. However, I do not fear that my son or my daughters would be harmed by a trans woman in a woman’s restroom. Trans women are almost never rapists. Rapists who invade women’s bathrooms for prey do not bother to dress up in women’s close and pretend to be trans to commit their crimes. I am scared every day that I cannot protect my son and my daughters from everything and everyone, but I do no use it as an excuse to deny other people autonomy or dignity. Think of it this way — I am often afraid of cis men, because cis men have hurt me. Would it be right to demand that cis men not be allowed on the streets, or to hold certain jobs, or to be teachers or doctors? No. Because no one denies that men should have basic human rights … including autonomy. As for women only spaces …. trans women ARE women and therefore fit those spaces. I hope this helps.
“I am always, ALWAYS terrified he might be assaulted in the men’s room if someone discovers his biological sex. I live in mortal fear and dread of the dangers he will face when he’s an adult, and I can’t be with him all the time.”
I think your fear is legitimate and, for that reason, I tried to put myself in your shoes and think what I would do if I were you. What I am about to say may seem like unsolicited advice, but it is NOT. It is just some thoughts which may or not resonate with you.
Being born a girl, your son is most likely a small boy for his age also his skin is probably soft, his voice might have some remnants of a girls voice. Summarizing, I might be wrong, but chances are that he will most likely be seen as an effeminate boy.
From the photo he seems like a very pretty boy which might make him quite successful with the girls, but might make him an object of lust for those predators who like pretty and effeminate boys.
He probably would not stand a chance if a bigger and stronger boy/man decided to act on his lust.
Even if not sexually molested he could be harassed and bullied by other boys/men.
In view of the above thoughts, I thought that if I were in your shoes I would very, very, very much try to convince my son to become an expert in martial arts, such as karate, box, anything like that.
Since these are “manly” activities, it might interest your son.
Please don’t take this as unsolicited advice. Just a few thoughts.
Good luck for you and your son.
Huge hugs to you and to him. This is so hard. And I am so disappointed in JKR. All those kids, male and female, trans or not, who looked up to her, and now see that their hero is so terribly wrong on something this important. I’m sure Scott’s heart is breaking. I wish I could hug you both.