An Open Letter to J.K. Rowling
CW: discussion of rape and transphobia.
It is hard to come up for breath when the violence we face is so ubiquitous. Transgender people face hatred and violence on a scale that I find difficult to express meaningfully to cisgender people (people who identify as the genders they were assigned at birth). Allies are fickle and fleeting. They mess up and simply mentioning that mess up and they disappear. This is a hard fight. And it’s costing transgender people their lives and their freedom.
Earlier you liked an article, which I’m not going to link to, this hatred has been spread enough.
This article, written by a transphobe and a TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist), directly links rape culture and transgender womxn. Directly. It also misgenders trans womxn and femmes, calling us “male… …regardless of presentation, or hormonal/surgical status”.
If that, in and of itself, is not enough to put a fowl taste in your mouth then I wonder whether you can count yourself among our allies. Don’t you remember when the bigots used the same argument, the self-same argument, against homosexual people?
I wish I had the strength and power of words that you have to explain to you why this all hurts; why transphobia and the support of transphobia among our allies remains one of the chief reasons why no progress is made in gaining transgender people the freedoms we so desperately need.
I wish I could explain to you why this hurts: while transgender people are the victims of sexual assault at a rate far higher than cisgender people. As many has half of transgender people have been sexually assaulted. As many as half of those have been sexually assaulted multiple times. Myself included. I wish I could explain to you why this hurts, while sexual assault is tied to the fact that I exist… existing as a human being who often needs to use public bathrooms.
I wish I could explain to you why it hurts, when transgender people face violence in public spaces for being transgender. I go into a men’s bathroom I get beaten up by men. I go into a woman’s bathroom I get yelled at.
I wish I could explain to you why a famous, powerful, and rich person’s share of this violent rhetoric has impact and is not insignificant. Even the author of the article bragged about it.
My problem is that I don’t think I possess the words to explain this problem to you. I’m tired. This is the world I find myself living in where the simple act of wanting to take a shit has been criminalised and stigmatised and linked to rape culture.
Every day we are expected to defend our existence to the world and it is exhausting. Our bodies, our lives, our identities are treated as subjects of debate as if we could be sufficiently reasoned out of existence, which seems ridiculous, but then again the suicide rate among trans people is equally as alarming.
So, I don’t know how to ask you to undo this, or whether you can. I don’t know how to ask you to be our ally. I don’t know how to ask cisgender people to be more discerning with the media they consume and critical of the voices of hatred that spring up around us.
At a time when Nazis are openly walking the streets regurgitating this hatred; when TERFs sound exactly like Nazis; whose side are you on? Transgender people need allies. And this, this is not how you act as an ally to a very vulnerable and embattled people who are very obviously not surviving a war waged against us on the premise of hatred and lies.
Transgender people are who we say we are. Transgender womxn are womxn. Transgender men are men. Nonbinary people are nonbinary. All are valid and good and true. And sometimes, we like to go to the bathroom. Our existance and our need to exist in public spaces does not add to rape culture. We are not the perpetrators, the aggressors, or the enemy.
I will end on a quote: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” ~Malcolm X.
Regards
Charl Landsberg
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