JK Rowling is still wrong about trans issues and it is increasingly unlikely that this is accidental
So, we’re in the middle of Pride Month, we’re all supposed to be celebrating who we are, and instead we’ve got a billionaire kid’s author writing essays about how trans people are endangering kids and gay people. Now, most of the trans people I know are already exhausted. Honestly, I’m exhausted. But somebody has to write the debunking of this horrific thing and rather than put someone else through it I’m going to take a big dive into Rowling’s big tin bath of transphobic horseshit.
So there’s going to be two parts to this. The first half of her essay appears to be her “logical” reasoning for trans exclusion, so I’m going to debunk that data as I would if it were presented scientifically (and also cite her sources for her because she never does that). The second half is her emotional argument for trans exclusion and I’m just going to address the short paragraph that is the focal point of that.
Part 1: Facts and Logic
This is a lie. Maya Forstater wanted a judge to rule that her belief that people cannot change their (assumed) sex at birth was a philosophical belief worth protecting. It has nothing to do with whether sex is determined by biology, or even about gender. She wanted to enshrine the idea in law that someone once assumed that you’re a specific binary sex, and that person’s assumption is permanent, and if you attempt to self-determine in any way that she is legally allowed to ignore that.
The judge famously ruled that this belief is “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”, as “even paying due regard to the qualified right to freedom of expression, people cannot expect to be protected if their core belief involves violating others’ dignity and creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive environment for them.”[1]
Edit: This judgement has since been reversed — luckily there are another 40 paragraphs of evidence below so feel free to read on.
I’m obviously not going to debate whether Rowling did the reading and discussions that she claims to have done, at least not right now. I would cast some level of doubt on the idea that she was doing this as research for her crime novel, and if she was it seems to have been on how to be as transphobic as possible in a short space of time. In “The Silkworm” (one of her Galbraith-penned crime novels), she has her detective threaten to send a trans woman, with an explicitly described Adam’s apple and a compulsion to hide the size of her mannish hands, to prison where “it won’t be fun for you […] not pre-op”. [2]
I will remind the reader that at the time, that the piece in question was a Medium piece that described trans women as all potential rapists because of their male bodies. [3] I hopefully don’t have to delve deeply into why that’s hideously transphobic, sexist AND homophobic all in one go, but I will say this kind of bigotry is sadly prevalent throughout the Gender Critical (GC) community.
At the time, JK’s PR team said she liked it because she was holding her phone wrong, not because she was researching trans issues. The more recent explanation, as pathetic as it is, is still more respectable than implying middle-aged women can’t hold phones. [4]
Magdalen Burns also tweeted such great hits as:
“[Trans women] are fucking blackface actors. You aren’t women.”
“George Soros: The money behind the transgender movement”
“Pretty coincidental that video of Milo [Yiannopolous] emerges after he criticised trans identity on primetime TV.” [5]
So an anti-Semitic, transphobic, racist conspiracy theorist. Again, why this person is worthy of a deliberate follow I don’t know, and a lot of people were very angry and felt very betrayed, which is understandable when one of the most influential children’s authors of your time tacitly endorses a proud bigot.
While I am not going to condone abuse on Twitter, because it’s horrible (stop it), I think it’s very telling to conflate anger from trans people and allies with that abuse and not bother to make the distinction. People have every right to be angry, and every right to address her in ways that she makes available for that purpose. This could also have been an opportunity to turn her eye inwards and ask why people might be upset — but we’re going to keep learning that Rowling ignores criticism because she’s already made her mind up.
“Cancellation” isn’t real, and it’s certainly not real for the woman who can generate a hundred headlines just by hinting that she might write a book. In addition, while threats are very bad (I have to keep saying this and I still expect people to tell me I’m downplaying threats) she continues to conflate threatening behaviour with being insulted by angry people on Twitter, and dismisses the truth that transphobic rhetoric is responsible for the dehumanisation and death of trans people [6]. She doesn’t come back to this point ever again, I assume to try and diminish its importance, but it’s not considered controversial within the trans community to point out that this is the case.
Actually, TERF was probably coined by cis radfem Viv Smythe, who used it to describe people who excluded trans women from a women’s music festival and “implicitly aligned all radfems with trans-exclusionary radfems, which I resent”. [6] This implicit alignment is a tactic that Rowling repeats here. Rowling also advises that people called TERF are far from radical and for once I agree with her. I personally would like to move on from the term because there’s nothing radical about excluding trans women from feminism.
Do make a note how all the stories mentioned here are centred around the people who are scared of transition in other people, not trans people themselves. This is because despite Rowling’s assertion that she has spoken to trans people, none of her concerns seem to actually originate from trans people themselves.
(Bonus “WTF” points for claiming that ‘TERFs’ aren’t trans exclusionary because they misgender trans men, I actually can’t believe that she wrote this and thought she could get away with it. Astounding.)
“Speaking as a biological woman” is so on the nose of self-parody that, like the argument regarding trans men previously, I’m surprised that Rowling left it in the essay. There is no expertise that being a biological woman grants you. It’s the gender critical version of “As a mother”.
Here Rowling tries to muddy the waters of a specific argument by misrepresenting it, in order to make trans people look ridiculous. Many GC people have taken to Twitter to say that all species are dimorphic and cannot change sex so trans people must be unnatural, to which the natural response is “no they aren’t, for example, clownfish are all born male.” Rowling conflates this response with the idea that these people are saying that all species aren’t dimorphic, which is also not true. The accusation therefore that “trans activists” believe that humans can spontaneously grow testicles is not supported by any evidence, but then neither is anything else in this essay so I’m not sure why I’m remarking on that.
Again, JK Rowling is conflating two things in order to make the request look ridiculous. Trans people have full medical histories and medical professionals are, for all intents and purposes, professional — so there will never be any question of how doctors will handle individual instances of diseases in women, cis or trans. The idea that replacing the “legal definition of sex” (which doesn’t exist) with gender will mean that doctors have to treat trans women as if they’re physically cis women is ridiculous. You shouldn’t combine “trans women want to be treated like women” with “trans women will experience medical issues like men” and come up with “trans women want to be medically treated like women”.
As an example, I am allergic to NSAIDs. However most cis women are not allergic to NSAIDs. The idea that a doctor will not have access to that information and will therefore force-feed me naproxen until I die is ludicrous. But this is what Rowling is arguing — that allowing people to self ID as a particular gender forces the erasure of their sex, including their medical history. Luckily for trans people all over the country, doctors are not that short-sighted and will happily check a trans woman or non-binary person for testicular cancer, as I have had done in my lifetime.
Fun fact, Rowling co-founded that charity with Baroness Nicholson, who has spent a lot of time trying to stop Gender Recognition Act reform that would give trans people the right to self-identify, and more recently went public to say that she thinks that gay marriage “degraded the status of women and girls”. [8] It’s hard to believe that she didn’t know who she was opening a charity with before it was opened, or stopped for one moment to check her voting history to see she voted to get the gay marriage bill thrown out of the House of Lords. It’s very hard to believe it.
So, I don’t.
Her defence of inviting Donald Trump to the UK to spread lies about LGBT people and minorities is here inexplicably marked as a point in her favour.
This is where we start getting to the meat of where Rowling gets her information from. Despite claiming to be widely read on the subject, Rowling seems to have only internalised ‘facts’ from dubious sources — for instance that young people are transitioning, regretting it, then finding they cannot detransition as they have made irreversible changes to their body.
There is no evidence to suggest that this is happening save that which has been invented whole cloth by GC advocates.
Of the 3,398 trans patients who accessed NHS support to transition at Nottingham GIC, less than 1% regretted transition and went on to detransition. [9] They were fully supported, as they should be. What they shouldn’t be is used as a weapon to ‘concern troll’ about affirmative gender therapy for people of all ages. It is sickening to wield these people’s experiences against people who want to live their life authentically instead of just supporting them without prejudice.
A 4400% increase is meaningless and inflammatory unless you show the actual figures. The numbers are that 40 girls were referred for assessment in 2009/10. 1,806 were referred in 2017/18, out of an estimated population of 5 million girls in the UK who are between 5 and 19. Note also, assessment, not treatment — there is no mention in these figures (which came from that bastion of fair reporting the Daily T̶o̶r̶y̶g̶r̶a̶p̶h̶ Telegraph) of how many girls actually began transition, let alone ‘irreversibly’, as the article (and Rowling) deliberately conflate treatment with assessment.[10]
There is also the matter of her attempting to weaponise autism here to invalidate trans men. This sentence is a throw-away that’s just deployed to make trans identities less valid, there is no other reason for it to exist. Please be reminded here that autistic people’s identities are as valid as neurotypical people.
I’m not going to lay out all the paragraphs that are based on Littman’s study. Rowling spends far too many words treating Littman’s fake diagnosis of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (i.e. coming out as trans without your parents noticing first) as real. Littman based this “condition” on conversations with the parents of trans children she contacted via GC-heavy websites such as Mumsnet. The journal that published it eventually forced Littman to change the title to the much more milquetoast “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria”, which might as well read “People on forums say things that may or may not be true”.
Rowling would have us believe that she has read into this issue heavily and at length from both sides, before falling on the side that invents and warps statistics, and fabricates clinical diagnoses based on conversations with transphobic parents.
27% of trans kids in the UK have attempted suicide and nearly 90% have thought about it.[12] I would question Marcus Evans’ competence and literacy, but it turns out I don’t really need to — he’s the husband of transphobe Susan Evans who has written for phrenology fanzine Quillette. She also resigned from the clinic, but 16 years ago because she thought that 2 years and half a dozen appointments with therapists was not enough time to work out if someone is trans. He got the job and waited 6 months before resigning after the trust disagreed that they were rushing children onto puberty blockers.[13] This couple’s outrage seems to be largely performative in service of their own bigotry.
It turns out that trans affirmative care really annoys the kind of person who would end up writing for Quillette, which is good actually.
The story that <enter GC person here> feels like they would have been forcibly transed if they were born in <current year> is so common coming out of GC twitter accounts that it’s a fully fledged meme in trans circles. Rowling spends three paragraphs on this fictional version of her that grows up wanting to be a boy, ignoring that if she were trans, she would still want that now. She confuses fleeting feelings of how it would be different if she were a different gender, with the persistent discomfort of having gender dysphoria, or the overwhelming joy of gender euphoria.
Occasionally wondering “what if?” does not make you trans and to pretend people are making life changing decisions on that basis and doctors are letting them is patronising, and another example of Rowling invalidating trans identities by trivialising them.
Firstly, the study that these numbers are likely based on (and it is only one study, with numbers from the Amsterdam gender clinic) stated that 80 out of 127 adolescents desisted from being trans after being discharged from the clinic (67%). This study was flawed in so many different ways I’m just going to give you the short version: the sample size is too low, 28 people didn’t respond, 38 were not diagnosed with dysphoria in the first place, and the person who actually authored the study said it is not a measure of desistance. [14]
Secondly, gatekeeping transition behind decades of having to obey gender rules that cis women can ignore and still be considered women is transphobic. I was once criticised by someone because I thought I was trans and had never worn a skirt, despite the fact that she didn’t own a single skirt herself. Our understanding of gender expression has evolved, and therefore our expectations of how trans people express their own gender should change with it. This isn’t removal of safeguards, it’s social progress.
Finally, you can’t get a GRC without 2 years of “lived experience” which you then have to present to a court of cis people and let them decide if you’re “real” or not. That’s why trans people want GRA reform. Rowling presents the outcome of GRA reform as scary current events, when it’s neither current nor scary.
Note how Rowling here talks about “trans activists declaring TERFs need punching and re-educating” and then moves straight into “men are telling women to shut up”. Again, I credit her intelligence so I won’t assume this is an accident. She is deliberately attempting to tie in the mind the idea that trans women are men threatening violence and telling women to shut up. This is textbook transphobia.
Again, Rowling ties one statement that seems ridiculous to another taken out of context, in order to make both come across regressive. Firstly she posits the idea that femininity is rooted directly in female bodies and that disagreement with this is the true regression. However, all biological women do not share a fully unified common experience, as some of their experiences result from ways in which their bodies differ from those of other women. To pack all women into one box marked “female experience”, defined by a unified sexed body, is to erase the experiences of millions of cis women, let alone trans women and intersex people. Rowling then attempts to flip that back on trans people— it’s actually the trans women asserting that they have no material differences between their experience and cis women, which also notably isn’t true, but it’s easy to just declare things when you never cite a single source I guess.
Again, a tacit admission that Rowling ultimately considers trans women to be men who think they’re women and are wearing femininity as a costume. Paragraphs like this one let the mask slip just enough to give you a good view of the person lurking behind it.
There’s also a fundamental misunderstanding of how inclusive language works here, which arises because of what seems like Rowling’s need for women to have ownership of something that she would otherwise consider it sexist to be defined by. She wants women to have ownership of menstruation, but she also doesn’t want women to be defined by that function. She just can’t eat that cake and have it too. Either we talk about women, and we therefore acknowledge some women do not menstruate, or we talk about people who menstruate, and we acknowledge that some men and non-binary people also menstruate.
I’d also want her to be aware that when misogynists do reference periods to shame women, they don’t generally check if the woman involved actually menstruates. This goes for a lot of slurs, in fact — one thing I’ve noticed about being called slurs is that they rarely ask to see your “female sexed body” before letting fly. The idea that misogyny and repression against cis women has to be kept separate to misogyny and repression against trans women is one of the more baffling things that Rowling keeps holding to. Luckily, she explains it for us in the next part.
Part 2: Feelings and Emotions
The next 5 paragraphs are Rowling’s emotional argument about why trans women have to be excluded from women’s spaces. To her credit, she spends 60–70% of it admitting that trans women experience abuse and violence at rates that equal or exceed that of cis women and attempting to show empathy. And then:
This is actually worse than just overt transphobia, because at least that’s honest. Here Rowling is lying in such an absurd way that if she doesn’t know she’s lying, she has mastered self-deception. The idea that no man would enter a woman’s space without applying for a gender recognition certificate first is absolutely ludicrous and I just don’t believe for a second that she’s not intelligent enough to be aware of that.
It’s a fact that her “simple truth” is rooted in personal bigotry. For all of her admission that trans people have it worse, that trans women experience issues in the same ways as cis women and at higher rates, she literally cannot let go of that final nugget of transphobia, sexism and racism. She would rather trans people be denied access to resources that would help them deal with abuse, with people who experience abuse in the same ways, than have a single “man” gain access to a woman’s bathroom or changing room.
This one paragraph completely overturns every kind word she may have said about trans people at any point on this page, before and after. It eradicates the idea that she’s coming at this in good faith. You can’t say you love someone then throw them to the wolves for your personal safety. You can’t say you empathise with someone’s struggle, then say “though please do keep struggling because it’s personally convenient to me for you to do so”. For Rowling, it seems that trans women are women right up to the point that solidarity from her would help them, and that’s when she pulls up the ladder.
Conclusion: Rowling is a Transphobe, but We Kind of Knew That
So we got through all the “facts” in the top half, but personally I think that those are all just rationalisations for her deeply held belief. I think she’s much like Shapiro in that regard — she has already concluded that treating trans women as women may put her in harm’s way so she went back and found reasons to feel justified in feeling that way. That’s why her claim that she’s done research feels hollow and doesn’t match up with her seeming kindness to individual trans people. She’s perfectly capable of being kind to individuals but systemic support is discomforting to her so she’ll fight against it.
The amount of information in this essay that is clearly sourced from transphobic sources, then presented without criticism or provenance, shows exactly where she’s placed herself. She’s happy to surround herself with people who will push traditionalist views of gender and pretend she’s progressive. Unfortunately Rowling has proven herself to be a dishonest relic of a time that, as a society, we should be moving on from.
On a personal note, I want to add — Rowling would have you believe that all cis women have identical experiences and that trans women want you to believe they also experience identical experiences. I don’t see it that way. I see all women, trans and cis, all different from each other with unified threads of experience that weave through, linking some women and missing others. Rowling makes the mistake of looking at womanhood like one single thread that runs through history, whereas I think if you look closely enough, it’s actually a rope — it’s made of millions of tiny threads, some fraying, some looping back on themselves, some short and some long, but all threaded together, creating something that’s stronger than any of those threads could hope to make.
You might think that if you take a knife to the weaker threads the rope will get stronger, but you can’t cut a rope without ending up with a weaker rope. We’re all in this together, and we can’t let opportunistic self-centred shits like Rowling keep us apart.
Sources
[2] https://www.them.us/story/is-jk-rowling-transphobic
[3] https://medium.com/@GappyTales/me-too-now-what-sex-the-left-and-gender-identity-236b08f194b0
[5]https://imgur.com/a/ftnDK7c
[6] https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/2018AntiTransViolenceReportSHORTENED.pdf
[8] https://twitter.com/Baroness_Nichol/status/1270703409931452416
[9] https://www.gendergp.com/evidenced-research-on-detransition-regret-newsnight/
[12]https://www.stonewall.org.uk/sites/default/files/trans_stats.pdf
