Thank you for doing this. It gives it higher visibility for people to see.

She's not a bathroom bully. She supports trans rights to live how they choose. She might be insensitive and lack understanding, but she's not a right winger on this issue.
Maybe I'm not educated on all her utterances on transgender rights.

I don't understand what she means by "if sex is not real". Is she talking about the hardware that we are born with? She can't be writing about the broader category of birth gender (if I can use that term), a person can be born with hardware that doesn't reflect that person's gender.

Maybe the issue with her is that she isn't a horrible person as much as it is that she just can't wrap her head around the broad concept of gender. In my world growing up, gender was always either male or female, with both having hardware that matched that limited definition - that was a pretty small world because eventually I met people that didn't fit into the narrow definition of gender, that didn't make the reality of their birth form any less valid than that of people that fit into the narrow concept.

In this particular case she said that women are people who menstruate, ignoring trans men. But she has a history of transphobic tweets and misgendering trans people.

A person can be a woman by gender, even though she may not have been given female sex organs. I believe that I remember reading that a Trans woman has chromosomes that reflect that gender orientation - to me that sealed it, such women are what Nature made them, Nature doesn't make mistakes.

that science supports that alignment.

First, I strongly believe that trans women are women and trans men are men. I also recognize that we cannot allow discussion of women’s health to become ensnared with the quest for trans rights. They’re both very important issues and in discussing women’s health we need to be able to use common language that is easily understood.

In the case above, I think JKR was making a fair point that saying “people who menstruate” is needlessly complex that it would have been better to just write “women.” Of course some think it is trans exclusionary to just write “women” because some female-to-male are men who menstruate. But women’s health in general should not be held to that type of nuance.

Now, for your claims:

Last edited Sun Jun 7, 2020, 06:44 AM - Edit history (1)

Many feminists in England (and some prominent lesbian activists) do not support it. They feel that if anyone can simply self-declare that they are a woman, scholarships for women, sex-based rights granted to women, women's spaces, and legal protections will disappear.

On the other side, Transactivists and perhaps younger feminists feel like anyone can simply self-declare that they are another gender and be one.

It's a real issue and JK Rowling is making a statement. Here in the US, this issue has not become controversial. But in GB and other countries, there is an examination of this issue and it is very intense.

ETA: this issue overlaps with this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51676020

Rowling's implication is that zillions of cis-gender men will simply get up one morning and say "Today I'm a woman so I'll take this special scholarship set aside for women thank you very much" and then go back to being men.

That's not how it works, and the paranoia behind that kind of extreme framing is similar to the bogus "slippery slope" arguments we hear in the U.S. about gun control, abortion rights, affirmative action, etc.

I meant to add - thank you for your post giving the context for Rowling's behavior. That's important for people to understand. A lot of people in this thread think we're being unfair and picky because they don't know the context for Rowling's behavior.

Trans female teen athletes are taking scholarships from female athletes, which will have the effect of destroying Title IX.

There is a movement among some trans women to redefine what a woman is, which effectively erases what we non transwomen are. I resent and reject when former men dictate what it means to be a woman.

I doubt that there are thousands, hundreds, or even dozens of cis-men preparing to pretend to be trans women just to get scholarships and other benefits.

Instead of overreacting, let's look at the actual issues one at a time.

to compete against biological females in women’s/girl’s completions will effectively nullify women’s sports when the only athletes wining those competitions are trans females. Why would biological girls continue to run track if they have no hope of actually winning a race? Title IX was created to create opportunities for females in sports. If females lose interest in competing in sports because biological males dominate women’s sports, then Title IX is meaningless.

There is a lawsuit filed against the state school board by biological female high school athletes in CT that would bar trans females from competing in girl’s sports precisely because trans female athletes have started to dominate, i.e., win the top spots in track in a specific school district.

Granted this is happening in one specific school district, that I know of, but there are surely others where this is happening.

Biological males have built in physical advantages over biological females, hence the need for women’s/girl’s sports

How about persons with xy chromosomes who have testosterone coursing throughout their bodies?

The more we try to redefine biology, the more cumbersome the terms become that we use in the redefinition

Hence, these are the categories:

Female
Male
Trans female
Trans male
Hermaphrodite

Although hermaphrodites are born this way, there’s no such thing as a trans baby.

unscientific it gets.

Mixed teams, everybody plays, nobody is a "bench warmer."

The Olympic level athletes will out themselves. It shouldn't be the job of public schools to provide a platform for them.

I hated sports until I started running cross country and playing softball on coed recreational teams in college.

But it’ll never happen

And if it is legitimately occurring aren’t there better ways of addressing this... like increasing the number of scholarships for female athletes so that trans women are included?

In my state of North Carolina, a bigoted law was passed against trans people based on the pathetic fear that men would "dress as women just to rape little girls in bathrooms."

The effect of this bigoted law was to bring ridicule down on my state, economic loss of untold millions (frankly, we'll never recover; too much was lost forever), and to bring even more harm to some of the most vulnerable people in our communities.

So when I hear the same kind of rhetoric from Rowling I'm not inclined to excuse it.

trans female athletes should have their own competitions. It isn't fair to women and girls to have to have to compete against biological males who are born with physical advantages. Why even have women’s sports if biological males are allowed to participate?

Young lady finished 4th in state in a track event. Scholarship offers were contingent upon improvement over junior year to top 3 in state, plus actual quantifiables.
The top 2 competitors were transitioning young women.
Her family sued the HS association for damages equal to the cost of the education. I'm not aware the case has come to trial yet. That said, it happened in 2019.
It seems to be an outlier, and quite rare. But, it did occur so it's not 100% propaganda. Making it seem routine would be, though.

I think there is a legitimate discussion to be had about how to handle the transitions of those who are below a certain age. However, I don't agree with the feminist movement's position. I am curious about whether this is mainly a white feminist phenomenon and how much it intersects with how white female privilege is being challenged here in the U.S. When demographics started shifting and people started to talk about diversity and inclusion, there was a public discussion about white male rage (Michael Douglas's "Falling Down" character was on the cover of Newsweek). I think we are heading in this direction about how white women are handling shifts that affect their power.

People have explained that she's mistaken and that her statements are hurtful, and she doubles down.

Ask yourself how many people would bother to tweet over and over again about menstruation? How many people get up every morning and decide to post yet again about how trans women aren't really women?

Rowling is doing this on purpose. It's a thing with her. It's a big disappointment to many people. We're sad that she's doing this. But we're not going to pretend she isn't saying what she's very clearly saying. She's had plenty of opportunities to clarify.

National Center for Lesbian Rights

“I know and love transgender people” is the same rhetorical device racist indoviduals use when they say “I can’t be racist because I have Black friends.” It isn’t an excuse to racist or transphobic. Please do better for #transyouth,

loves trans people? Are you saying she is a liar to suggest she has trans friends?

That know and love trans people just as there are many racist that know and love black people.

you start calling people who aren't using approved language transphobic and racist. As here, where she's labelled transphobic because she isn't toeing the party line.

Am I transphobic now??

transphobic?"

And I wonder why there are hardly any LGBT posters left here. Jesus, thanks for your support.

If she is transphobic I want to know. I read the tweets and don’t see what is transphobic.

Can you quote it and explain it to me? I’m someone who wants to understand.

you erase the lives of trans men, many of whom also menstruate. Some of whom bear children.

Those fuctions are tied to having a uterus, not to being a woman.

This is not the first time she has questioned the legitimacy of trans individuals (of course, while mouthings words that make her seem reasonable to people who don't instantly get her intent when she excludes men from "people who menstrate," especially when she says it in response to a call for greater sensitivity in trans health care.

transmen and women? I am a woman with a uterus. No transman has my experience and I don't have the trans man's experience. We are not the same.

So black women aren't just women, because their experience isn't yours? Are the categories black women and women?

How about lesbian women? Are the categories lebian women and women?

Anytime the minority group is required to tack an adjective to the main category you send the message that they are not real women (or whatever the main category under discussion).

If your gender assigned at bith is relevant, both/all should designate their status: cis/trans. Otherwise, it is just women. In the same way it would be bigoted to expressly name black women by race, but to treat "women" as presumptively white.

Yes, in any category - sub-categories have different different experiences. What is transphobic is to insist that the majority sub-category has exclusive title to the main category and all others must declare their sub-category.

It's boggling how we've ended up like this. But the attrition of diverse voices here continues.

It's disappointing to see so many people dismiss the perspectives of actual gay people and gay organizations, but not surprising, unfortunately.

I only visit infrequently at this point since so many voices I was aligned with have left since 2016 primary season. The gutting of so many voices here, especially from the feminism side, cut deep and wide here and I don't think people really recognize that still.

on! They do matter! To say sex is a real thing and is important to women apparently means she hates lesbians!

that the act of sex is real, she means that...I'm not sure what word I'm allowed to use here...the fact that there are people with XY chromosomes and there are people with XX chromosomes and the two are different is real.

She follows transphobes and she liked transphobic tweets. I guess she even wrote a trans character in a book that was problematic.

She has been a great advocate for many of the issues that we hold true. Holding my fire for now.

(1) this is not the first time she has spouted bigoted nonsense about trans individuals

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/why-these-harry-potter-fans-are-standing-with-the-lgbtq-community-against-a-jk-rowling-tweet/2020/03/02/31992d72-4834-11ea-8124-0ca81effcdfb_story.html

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/20/uk/jk-rowling-transgender-tweets-scli-intl-gbr/index.html

(2) she's already responded with more of the same nonsense.

was fired for it. Rowling's tweets says she's fine if you want to "dress however you please," but doesn't agree with firing someone who won't refer to you as your correct gender. That's transphobia. She supports transphobia, which is bigoted nonsense, as is the "sex is real" shorthand, which implies that someone can't correct the gender assigned to them at birth.

She was a temp and was not hired permanently. And I think she had been migendering a colleague which was what started the problem.

Repeatedly called out for what she says, then she couches it in a way to make her seem reasonable while still engaging in the bad rhetoric.

Basically, if a whole lot of trans folks are saying its bad, gay and lesbian groups of notes saying its bad, LISTEN to them.

Really don't see how people who are smart can get mixed up when it comes to the two terms. Yet they do mostly in dismally simple terms that a fourth grader would see as bogus.

Hopefully she will educate herself.

interpretation? I can't see how this is "targeting trans people" or should be compared to racism. In fact, how dare anyone say she hates trans people? How dare anyone question her integrity based on this Tweet?

Really? She has a history of this, these organizations know what they are talking about, they are some of the leading voices of the LGBT community. I’m sorry you don’t support them, that’s disappointing.

shape your opinion of JK Rowling?

my exposure to many within my community. Ives seen first had the lives destroyed by transphobia. Why would you not care what the LGBT community feels?

in her books LGBT. Some people want to tell the author of the most popular books ever how she should have written her books. They feel slighted that LGBT were not included. Then when she says, well actually two male characters had an "intense relationship" she was still criticized for retrospectively stating that. Then when she said, love and relationships transcend sexual identity anyway, she really became a figure to hate.

More recently, she has suggested that women should be called women, rather than "people" when it comes to outreach for screening and hygiene, and for women to talk about their health and their lives. That too created outrage, because it was considered a slight against trans people.

It doesn't matter how many times she says she supports the LGBT community. It doesn't matter how many times she makes it clear she embraces and encourages people to identify as they want and love who they want, some people want to only look for the worst possible interpretation of what she says.

All of that was made even more confusing by me having a bisexual brother who clearly didn't fall into the neat concept of gender that was drilled into my head at church and school, my parents resigned themselves to my brother's sexuality. So it was sort of a mess for me as I wondered about my own sexuality, which is a process that all kids go through.

I didn't meet a Trans person (that I knew of) until pretty far in my professiona career.

I, like most heterosexual people struggled with the broader concept of gender. My bisexual brother was attracted to both men and women, so to an extent, he didn't force my reckoning with better understanding what gender really means. Fortunately for me, I was open to accepting that gender meant more than what I was taught, a lot of that acceptance came from me being a Warm Deist and accepting the concept that God never creates a person or object that does not have a unique identity and/or purpose. Maybe JK Rowling's issue is that she can't somehow open her mind to the broader reality of gender, but I argue, at the risk of getting pounded, that doesn't mean that she is transphobic, even as her poorly informed thoughts on the issue of gender causes harm. Some people are just evil and they set out to purposely do as much harm as possible, there are others that say harmful stuff whose intention wasn't to do harm and they can pull themselves away from the path without meaningful intervention of someone that they care about and trust.

It's important to understand the context for her comments. She has a mission. I think she's wrong. I disagree with her premise. But we're not being picky and these aren't just random throwaway comments.

that aren't fully getting it.

Also read my response to post 29.

In summary: Rowling aligns with a group in the United Kingdom that is opposed to recognizing trans women as women, for fear that men will take women's rights.

Many people disagree with this group's position.

Rowling's years of statements about trans women not being women are not random, naive statements. She's being very deliberate.

just made explains the issue fully.

This may be new to some people, but Rowling has been on this for something like three or four years easy of incendiary language and basically being pretty TERFy.

Erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many(second sentence implied ALL) to meaningfully discuss their lives. That's the "Many's" problem and doesn't prove anything.
I'm gobsmacked that with her imagination she's stuck in her own little small minded self made box.

sexual preferences and identities many times. One thing she objects to is calling women "people" rather than women when it comes to appealing to women for health screening and hygiene, and talking about their lives. She has made this point in several Tweets that has resulted in her being attacked for ignoring trans-gender people. I am not particularly a JK fan, but cannot see why it is so hard to understand that the intention of her words are not to be "small-minded."

who say "I am not a <fill in theblank>":
Those who actually are, and
Those who actually aren't.

Saying someone IS a <fill in the blank> primarily on the basis that they said they are not, sounds more like wish-projection than fact.

One should have more than a denial.

and the right of all people to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, or they don't.

Rowlings doesn't matter. What does is that back in the 1960s we added an inferred constitutional "right to be left alone" by our government (when Connecticut made birth control illegal), and right now America's "don'ts" are stacking the courts to reverse that.

Elections ALWAYS further empower those who do or those who don't.

and I think the howling over every little thing she says is ridiculous.

If some people paid half as much attention to the harm or good their own vote or failure to vote did, our nation would be in incredibly better shape. All social advances are liberal advances. Democrats are the party of liberalism. It really is that simple.

but sadly I am not. Let's take some of the issues raised.

One, what is so bad about saying sex is sex (it should be gender is gender BTW but ignore that). The fact is she is erasing transgender people by doing this. People aren't claiming they are women to get scholarships in the UK or here. Just like when marriage equality was being debated and we were assured that hordes of people would fraudulently declare themselves gay couples to get benefits, and of course, that didn't happen. It didn't happen for two reasons. One, most people are honest. Two, there is a somewhat significant price one pays for being gay in this country and the UK and a huge price one pays for being transgender in this country and the UK.

Two, she says she loves transgender people, so what is the big deal. Well, the big deal is if you say transgender women aren't women, then you are saying they don't exist. You are saying it is OK for them to be ignored. It is OK for society to throw them away.

JK Rowling has many great qualities. She is clearly a great writer, I admire the fact she has been giving away her fortune, I admire her rags to riches story. But she is a howling bigot. Sometimes people with great qualities are bigots. Wilson and Churchill were great leaders in many respects, they were howling bigots.

Of course, this is back in December

Link to tweet

So many great statements.

she embraces LGBT, and encourages people to be who they are and love who they want. Why isn't that good enough for you? Why would you call her a worthless human being? If this is your idea of humanist activism, count me out.

you are free to have any beliefs you want, when you express them, expect to get criticism and pushback. This isn't the first time she's expressed transphobic beliefs, after all.

It seems those defending her haven't followed this issue at all.

"Gender identity" might be a fluid concept, but sex is most definitely binary with the exception of rare medical disorders.

This is the kind of stuff that drives people to the right.

Really?!? A simple google search disproves that. XXY.

what do you put in the single slot identifying sex/gender on your intake forms at the doctor's office. (That is the context of the article she was responding to - health care).

If you put your gender down, does it match your insurance records? Your legal documentation?

If you have legally changed your gender markers, what happens when you, as a trans woman, need a prostate exam?

I can guarantee you there is not a separate question on medical records for sex v. gender. And I can also give you assurances that if you identify yourself with the marker on your insurance records, your driver's license, your social security records (most of which are labeled "sex&quot that a fair amount of the time you will be denied coverage for that prostate exam.

What matter is your gender identity, and what organs you have that may need medical care - not "sex." Which is exactly what she was responding to - she was dismissing a call to focus medical care on body parts, not the gender of the person who owns them, by insisting that people who menstruate are all women. They are not, and trans men who menstruate also need competent non-biased care for their ovaries, uterii, vaginas, etc. And there is no medical reason to force them to declare their sex female to get that care.


And "sex" is far less binary than you imagine. Please educate yourself:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/opinion/sex-biology-binary.html

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/stop-using-phony-science-to-justify-transphobia/

I dont have enough fucks to give about how JK Rawlings feels about anyone. It's just so unimportant with everything else happening. Wake me up when her views on the subject actually impact anyone else.

Asking for a friend.

These people don't actually matter. Who cares what some British lady who wrote a story about a boy wizard thinks about trans rights?

danced to celebrate George Floyd's life. Then it was Joe Biden because he said something about if you can't figure out if you are for him or Trump, you aren't black. None of this is important. On all three examples, their words and actions weren't taken in good faith and a bigoted interpretation was projected onto them.

Twitter is really bad about this and it seems to be spreading from there.

Somebody says something that people don't agree with. Maybe it really is something stupid that they shouldn't have said, but just as often it's something blown totally out of proportion. Then everyone starts to pile on and "cancel" the person. All of this for doing what every person does all the time, say something that they didn't think through, didn't mean, or just a bad take.

If it really is something that bad, can't they just apologize and move on. So long as it doesn't happen regularly just let it go.

She did things that are transphobic and people are properly calling her out for it.

Just gratuitously?

No reason she can’t learn since she is progressive on a lot of things.

I don’t agree with this at all though I consider myself a post-modern believer in freedom of thought and freedom of lifestyle

Though NOT unlimited freedom.

But that’s the point. Do we have to be forced to adhere to someone else’s dogma?

Liberal or conservative or somewhere in between.


I totally agree with Rowling on this one.


I understand LGBT folks have had a terrible time of it but its a difference IMO in rights and philosophy.

You have every right to believe what you like and live your lifestyle but do you have the right to impose your beliefs on others?













?

So, it's okay to be a bigot and not ahve LGBT "force their lifestyle" on you?

attacks for not including LGBT characters in her books. How many times does she have to say that she wants people to be who they want to be and love who they want to love, irrespective of gender or identity?

...to be a bigot.


I don't think she's a bigot. And I don't think what she said was bigoted.