A Response to J.K. Rowling

If you’ve looked at J.K. Rowling’s Twitter feed any time in the last year, you’ll have noticed that, bubbling beneath the charity work, the children’s drawing competitions, and the Potter trivia, there lurks a surprisingly persistent interest in trans issues. It has been clear for around a year that Rowling has had something to say. Two days ago she finally said it.

In a piece uploaded to her website and shared widely, Rowling gives 5 reasons why she is so concerned about the advance of trans rights. Abbreviated, they are:

1. Her work with charities may be affected by any changes to the legal definitions of sex and gender

2. She wants to protect children

3. She wants to defend freedom of speech

4. She is concerned that children and young women are being persuaded into transitioning

5. She worries that allowing trans people into single sex spaces will result in women being assaulted

In what follows I would like to address her concerns. Rowling simply states points 1 to 3 without offering any arguments so there’s not much to be done with those. Point 2 is pretty much covered in point 4, which I will cover at length. It is clear that the final two concerns are what she came to express and those are the points her piece is dedicated to justifying. I will take each in turn. Please note that I will provide sources for any claims I make. In her piece Rowling frequently refers to the ‘extensive research’ she has conducted but decides not to include any of it.

Kids will be persuaded to be trans.

I genuinely thought the gay rights movement had defeated this one. Fear that kids would be corrupted and turned gay was the reasoning behind Proposition 28, the justification for chemical castrations, and the reason Trump is trying to stop gays from adopting. Lets take a look at J.K. Rowling’s updated version:

Rowling cites a 2018 study by Lisa Littman that coined the term ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria’. This study purported to show that it was common for whole peer groups of children to start identifying as trans at around the same time, proving that trans identities often emerge out of social pressure and not due to some innate identity.

Rowling’s fear is that children who would otherwise grow out of their gender dysphoria will be rushed into procedures that are all too often irreversible. She writes of “the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility.”

This danger is very real, Rowling argues, because it’s now far too easy to change your gender without proper consideration:

“The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.”

So are children being led down a path of no return?

Well Rowling’s argument is that it’s too easy for children to make irreversible medical changes. By way of evidence she’s pointed to Gender Recognition Certificates, which are neither medical nor irreversible. In fact, the easier it is to change your legal gender, the easier it is to change it back. So that’s that.

But why, then, has she mentioned these certificates at all? She was in need of some evidence to back up her argument that kids are rushing into ‘sex reassignment’ without proper consideration. Of course, she knew what evidence she required. She’d already mentioned “the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning”. All she needed to provide was that number. Demonstrate that a worrying number of people are indeed regretting transition and you’ve proven that kids are rushing into it. So what is that number?

The most comprehensive data we have is from a 2018 survey of WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) surgeons. This found that 0.3% of patients who underwent transition-related surgery later requested detransition-related surgical care.

0.3%. That’s not really the evidence Rowling was looking for was it? But if your first sentence in a paragraph makes a claim about gender, and the second sentence provides a fact about gender, then you’ve used the structure of a well reasoned argument. So she included a different fact about gender. Does it support the argument? Of course not. Will an absent minded Potter fan notice this? Nope.

I’m not accusing J.K. Rowling of wilfully misleading people. I’m accusing her of intellectual laziness, which often creeps in when people speak authoritatively on subjects they have no expertise in. The thing is, when your expertise lies in writing, you can usually convince people anyway. I see Jennifer Saunders has just retweeted the piece.

OK, so she hasn’t proved that kids are being rushed into irreversible medical changes, but that doesn’t mean its not happening. Kids do go through phases. Kids are influenced by their peers and the media they consume. If we operate on a child just because they say they’re trans, surely that will sometimes lead to mistakes? Well the first thing to point out is that most authorities on the subject agree that gender identity is usually fixed by age three and is very difficult to change after that.[1] However, my experience, and the experience of many other trans people I know, suggests that gender identity is fluid. With that in mind, I agree that external forces might influence that identity. I agree, further, that sometimes children will experience short-lived gender dysphoria, and that it would be a mistake to perform irreversible medical procedures on them. So let’s do the work J.K. didn’t bother to do and examine whether that’s what actually happens.

In the UK, when a child goes to a GP to talk about gender dysphoria they will be referred to a Gender Identity Clinic. The wait will be at least two years.[2] After their first appointment they will receive psychological assessment in several sessions over a period of several months. They will then usually be referred for some kind of talking therapy. The wait for this can vary depending on the type of support chosen. Then they may be referred to an endocrinologist who will assess their suitability for hormone blockers. What percentage of young people referred to gender identity clinics reach this stage and are put on hormone blockers? 2.3%.[3] That’s according to The Tavistock Centre, the leading gender identity clinic in the UK.

And hormone blockers are totally reversible. They postpone or limit the effects of puberty in order to give young people time to explore their gender before the largely irreversible effects of their natural hormones kick in (like having a jaw so wide your head is basically a semicircle — centre partings are not an option for me). When you come off hormone blockers, you go through puberty, just a little later than you otherwise would have.

From the age of 16, teenagers who’ve been on hormone blockers for at least 12 months may be given cross-sex hormones, also known as gender-affirming hormones. If you choose to come off these hormones their effects may be reversed or there may be some changes that remain. We’re now around four years in to the process and we’re down to about 2% of referrals. The minimum age for gender confirming surgery is 18. By this stage we’re likely to be on year six of the process and down to about 1% of referrals.

After an average four to six years, between 1% and 2% of young people who see a GP for gender dysphoria will make irreversible changes. J.K. Rowling thinks this process is too easy? I’m on year two and I’ve not even had an appointment yet.

As a final note on this point, I’d like to make clear that the report Rowling is referring to does not use valid scientific methodology. It claims to show people transitioning due to peer pressure, and to reach this conclusion the study’s author used a survey. So in this survey did trans people confess that they had transitioned due to peer pressure? Nope. She didn’t ask them. She asked their parents. She asked their parents why they thought their kids had transitioned. And where did she find these parents? On ‘gender critical’ websites. She literally just contacted transphobic parents and said ‘do you respect this whole trans business your kid is going through?’ Also just FYI, none of the trans people who were (not quite) part of this study have medically transitioned and regretted it.[4]

Lets move on to the next point…

Cis women will be assaulted

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.

Anyone who has transitioned, or considered transitioning, or explored their gender identity in any way, or known and loved any trans people, will have come up against and easily defeated this argument. The fact that she thinks this argument is relevant is testament to how ill equipped she is to talk about these issues.

In support of this argument Rowling doesn’t even pretend to offer evidence and, yet again, its because there is none. No man has ever popped on a frock, nipped in the women’s changing rooms at H&M, and assaulted someone. It doesn’t happen. Why? Because men don’t need to do that. The reason rape is a feminist issue is because it disproportionately affects women and the reason it disproportionately affects women is because men feel entitled to women’s bodies. Rape and sexual assault are committed at home by partners, or in night clubs by friends, or in work places by colleagues. The same patriarchal ideas that make rape endemic make the men who do it unwilling to pop on a frock and go into a women’s changing room. The more likely a man is to rape, the less likely he is to cross-dress his way into female spaces.

Instead of evidence, Rowling offers her personal story. She is the survivor of what sounds like terrible sexual assault and domestic abuse. I want to commend her bravery for talking openly about her experience. I don’t know if she spotted it, but in the last few years a grassroots campaign has existed that could really have done with hearing her voice on this: the Me Too movement. That would really have helped women.

But no, she has applied this story in the trans debate. Why? Did a trans person assault her? Was she domestically abused by a trans person? Of course not. Her abuser was a cis man, as almost all of them are. But she doesn’t use this story as a chance to talk about men or masculinity or patriarchy. She uses it to talk about trans women. She uses it to insinuate that trans women are predators, rather than the women, of all women, who are most vulnerable to sexual assault and abuse.

For the sake of argument lets ask ‘isn’t it at least conceivable that, if changing rooms are trans-inclusive, a man might call himself a trans woman and use his access to women’s changing rooms in order to rape women?’ Yes. Here’s a scenario that is also conceivable. If access to changing rooms is determined by the gender you were assigned at birth then trans men must use women’s changing rooms, regardless of whether they identify as a man, and regardless of whether they are read as a man by most people. So, is it not conceivable that a man could call himself a trans man to gain access to women’s changing rooms, and then use that access to rape women? Yes of course it is conceivable. Its also conceivable that a terrorist could strap a bomb to a pigeon but pigeons are not the main threats to society.

This argument is so contemptibly poor that it would be shocking to hear a person of Rowling’s intelligence and compassion using it if we hadn’t seen arguments exactly like this one used by earnest intelligent people time and time again. These arguments are never about evidence. They’re about the fear of change.

Members of disliked minority groups are often stereotyped as representing a danger to the majority’s most vulnerable members. Jews in the Middle Ages were accused of murdering Christian babies in ritual sacrifices. Black men in the United States were lynched after being falsely accused of raping White women.[5] Gay people have often been portrayed as predators and a threat to children. Back in 1977, when Anita Bryant campaigned successfully to repeal a Dade County (FL) ordinance prohibiting anti-gay discrimination, she named her organization “Save Our Children,” and warned that “a particularly deviant-minded [gay] teacher could sexually molest children” (Bryant, 1977)

In this country the idea of the gay predator justified the exclusion of gays from the military and is the foundation of the ‘gay panic’ defence that has seen homophobic killers escape murder convictions. The ‘backs against the wall lads’ attitude that gay men are seeking to take advantage of straight men has been featured in every long running comedy show I can think of up to about 2005. You may think this attitude has died but let me tell you, as a stand up comedian who still sees these jokes consistently rolled out on the circuit, it has not. This is in spite of the fact that research on child sexual abuse shows that most instances of child sexual abuse (one cited percentage being over 90%) are perpetrated by heterosexual males raping underage females[6] and that 91% of rape victims are women.[7]

So why, throughout so much of 20th century history, were people disproportionally scared of sexual assault by gay men? Because gays challenged the status quo. The gay rights movement challenged the certainty and dominance of straight people. The desire of gay men for justice threatened to undermine the privileges enjoyed by straights (gay women were usually considered less scary partly because the optics of the gay rights movement were so often dominated by gay men and partly because old fashioned misogyny says women aren’t a threat). The desires of gay men were unnatural, in the sense of defying the natural order of society, in defying the status quo. The desires of gay men were to be feared. And who must be protected from threatening desires? Our poor defenceless bairns.

Nowadays, cisgender heterosexuals fear that the desire of trans people for justice threatens the dominance they have always enjoyed. Will the world stop looking so much like them? Will they have to change their jokes and learn new words? Will they have to change their morals? And so the desires of trans people are to be feared. Cis-het people are afraid. They look to their vulnerable women and children. What of our delicate ladies and our poor helpless babes? They will never cope with this level of change.

It is a smokescreen. Things have changed, things will continue to change, women and children will cope, J.K. Rowling will be fine.

Rowling has been the target of much anger and abuse. While I share that anger I do not wish to add to the abuse. In everything she has written on the subject Rowling has been measured and respectful. I do not believe that she is writing out of hatred. I believe that she sincerely feels that women and children need to be protected and she is using her voice in an effort to do that. I also believe that those opposed to the gay rights movement genuinely believed that children were at risk of being made gay. I believe that those opposed to the civil rights movement genuinely believed that white women were at risk of being assaulted.

Prejudice is usually sincere and it usually ‘means well’. J.K. Rowling, I implore you to see it in yourself.

[1] For a quick overview, here’s the Wikipedia page. However, for more authoritative information, see Bukatko, Danuta; Daehler, Marvin W. (2004). Child Development: A Thematic Approach. p. 495 or Hine, F. R.; Carson, R. C.; Maddox, G. L.; Thompson, R. J. Jr; Williams, R. B. (2012). Introduction to Behavioral Science in Medicine. p. 106.

[2] See here for an article: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/26/trans-patients-in-england-face-soul-destroying-wait-for-treatment

or here for the official guidance from the Gender Identity Development Service: https://gids.nhs.uk/about-us

[3] Statistics published up to 2016 by the Tavistock Centre, the UK’s largest Gender Identity Clinic https://tavistockandportman.nhs.uk/documents/408/gids-service-statistics.pdf

[4] The original study can be found here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330

[5] Rape, Racism, and the Law, Jennifer Wriggins, 1983 https://digitalcommons.mainelaw.maine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=faculty-publications

[6] Rahman, Mahrin. “Definition of the Problem”. Also Carole Jenny; Thomas A. Roesler; Kimberly L. Poyer (July 1994). “Are Children at Risk for Sexual Abuse by Homosexuals?”. Pediatrics. 94 (1): 41–44.

[7] US National Sexual Violence Resource Centre https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf