Against polite transphobia: JK Rowling, the Sunday Times and Keir Starmer

JK Rowling’s recent decision to lash out at a trans woman for acting as a manager for a low level women’s football team has led to a lot of criticism, some of it from an unexpected source. The Sunday Times’ football columnist Martin Samuel described Rowling’s behaviour as a “gratuitous intrusion” (H/t to Lee Hurley for flagging on Twitter).

It felt a little unnecessary. Clark isn’t invading female space because if that’s the case, so is any coach not born female in the women’s game — and nobody complained about Marc Skinner steering Manchester United to the FA Cup. Clark has spoken about football saving her life when she considered suicide, so her involvement has been enormously positive. Rowling took down Scotland’s poorly-conceived gender reform laws in a series of whip-smart social media posts. By contrast, this just seemed gratuitous. — Martin Samuel, Man City’s four in a row is only boring if you think genius is a snooze, Sunday Times

This intervention surprised a few of us in trans circles because the Sunday Times is not exactly known for its trans positive editorial policy, so what’s going on here? Samuel’s short criticism of Rowling gives us a few clues; his defence of Lucy Clark is made on the basis that she is not “invading female space,” which leaves one wondering if he thinks it would have been acceptable for a multimillionaire celebrity to publicly attack a random member of the public if she had been doing such a thing.