JK Rowling and the Essay of Doom

Quantum Harry, the Podcast

English - June 11, 2020 22:45 - ★★★★★ - 2 ratings
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The link to the podcast version of this essay.

JK Rowling has, of late, been digging
an ever-deepening hole concerning her attitudes toward transgender people. As
the parent of a trans son, as well as someone who co-led (for 10 years) an
interfaith 501(c)(3) educational organization that educated the public and media
about the existence of people of faith who support equal rights for sexual
minorities, reproductive freedom, and separation of church and state, I have
felt the impetus to respond to Rowling’s extremely damaging statements but felt
too full of grief, initially, to do so.

So, to begin to address this in terms
of the most recent statement Rowling has made, I will examine some parts
of her statement that particularly moved me to respond. I am working from a Google docs version of it.

This is the first problematic
statement I found:

“…last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax
specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She
took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a
philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law.
Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.”

According to Andrew James Carter:

This is the real reason that her
employment contract was not renewed. (She was not an employee, but a contract
worker, an important distinction.) Forstater refused to address trans people at
her workplace using the pronouns of their choice, fostering a toxic work-environment.
I’m sure that if she had been openly racist, few people would have come to her
defense. She simply refused to show the basic civility expected of most people
at their place of work. It’s a fairly low bar, and she not only couldn’t clear
it, she argued against having to, and JK Rowling supported her.

Rowling began to receive criticism because
she “liked” a Tweet of Forstater’s, after this referring to it as her “accidental
‘like’ crime” as if she had accidentally “liked” the Tweet, though it is very
clear that it was not an accident.

That’s part of the problem (but
hardly the only problem) with someone so high-profile taking a stance that puts
lives at risk. For folks who don’t have the kind of platform she does, having
her validate their views carries the same weight as when she was validating the
views of people who were fighting for equal rights (which she still seems
convinced that she’s doing, fighting for women’s rights and equality, despite
women around the world also fighting for the same thing disagreeing strongly with her anti-trans stance).
It is a stamp of approval from someone millions of people around the world look
up to. When she approves of the continued marginalization and negation of a
group of people who have to struggle daily to prove they deserve to exist, that
is dangerous to them, because those who agree with her have repeatedly acted on
that stamp of approval. So, to flippantly complain that someone wrote to her to
say, “I was literally
killing trans people with my hate…” as if that
is a patently ludicrous statement is a complete dismissal of the power that her
approval has in the world.

This is what we’ve seen
every day since the 2016 election. The day after the election, hate-crimes were
already on the rise across the US, and have been ever since. After lying about
George Soros financing “the caravan” at the southern border, which was classic
stochastic terrorism, a Trump follower gunned down 11 people at a Pittsburgh
synagogue. Words have consequences. This is not to suggest that JK Rowling is equal
to Trump when it comes to hateful rhetoric; Trump targets groups with a clear
intent to harm them, and panders to his cult by saying that he hates the same
people they do. I believe that she believes sincerely that she is doing more good
than harm, and I don’t classify what she is doing as pandering, either. But
while the harm is not Trump-level harm—and hopefully it never will be—it is
harm, nonetheless.

Rowling has received a
lot of support from other anti-trans folks; she says that she was overwhelmed
by their support, because, surprise surprise, people like their bigotry echoed
and reinforced by famous people of whom they are fans. (Such as, again, Donald
Trump.) It tells them that they were right to think you were “their kind” of
people. You are validating them by saying what they’re saying.

Historically, bigotry has
been cloaked in “worry”. In Rowling’s case, worry not just about women and
girls (who have a lot more to worry about from a deeply misogynist culture than
from trans folks) but also, supposedly, about trans youth, who are
some of the most outspoken Harry Potter fans who have felt attacked and
abandoned by Rowling for her statements supporting anti-trans bigots. She writes about: “…the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of
women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear
that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.”

If anyone is fostering a “climate
of fear” it is Rowling and others questioning the very right of trans people to
exist. This is why it is laughable that she then complains about the TERF
label, including saying, “Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary –
they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.”

That isn’t irony. That is
just turning anti-trans attitudes against trans men for a change of pace,
rather than trans women, by not recognizing that TRANS MEN ARE MEN. This may
seem like a weird idea, but maybe folks identifying as feminists should regard
all people who support feminism as their allies and not only the people they
deem to be “female” based on their understanding of their biology. There are
plenty of cisgender women who are hostile to feminism. It has become painfully
clear in the last four years that one of our biggest obstacles to moving
forward as a species are women who are misogynists and do not want equality for
women, in spite of being women. Just as biology does not dictate to whom you
are attracted or love and does not necessarily dictate your gender identity, it
also does not dictate your ideology, so continuing to pretend this is true does
not reflect reality. Conversely, many ardent feminists are men, cis or trans.
Their biology is beside the point; their support of feminism is the point.

Then, as if she thinks this
doesn’t make her look even more anti-trans, she says, “Speaking as a biological
woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which
is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that
clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).”

So, to break this down,
she’s a) equating testicles with courage, a classically misogynist/sexist
trope; b) acting as though trans men who’ve had bottom-surgery don’t exist; and
c) acting as though intersex people don’t exist. Yes, the vast majority of the
human species display particular biological qualities that make us, as a whole,
a dimorphic species. But not all do. And again, trans men and intersex people
exist, as well as non-binary people and those who are gender-nonconforming in
their appearance, behavior, or both.

Rowling lists five reasons
why she is particularly worried now about trans activism. One is her charitable
trust with an emphasis on women and children, as if she is concerned that trans
women could benefit from this without being what she considers “real” women;
the trust also supports survivors of domestic and sexual abuse, which is good,
but trans women also suffer from this and also deserve support. She also cites
her support of MS research as a reason; her mother lived for many years and
then died from multiple sclerosis, which is, in Rowling’s words “a disease that behaves very
differently in men and women,” but she fails completely
to explain how acknowledging the existence of trans people puts MS research at
risk.

The second reason she
cites for her interest now is that she has an interest in “education and safeguarding” as if trans people are not being attacked in educational
settings and in places where their safety is supposed to be protected; the
implication is that the trans folks are those from whom children need to be
protected.

Her third reason is
freedom of speech, which she has in abundance; she has a worldwide platform on
which to vent her spleen. As she herself has noted in the past, freedom of
speech includes the freedom to disagree with someone else’s speech. I know for
a certainty that I have in fact defended Jo Rowling’s freedom of speech when
she has been attacked for doing things like criticizing Trump. Just because people
disagree with her does not mean she no longer has freedom of speech; it just
means the people disagreeing also have freedom of speech.

Then she claims that the
fourth reason is very personal, which I fail to understand; if anything, it is
highly personal to me as the mother of a trans son. She talks about trans men
who detransitioned due in part to regrets about losing their fertility. (And she
fails utterly to note that trans men who have NOT lost their fertility do indeed
still menstruate, and this is part of why the organization she mocked with her
snarky response to the phrase “people who menstruate” used that phrase—to be
inclusive and kind. Her response to that kindness, inclusion, and accuracy was
to be snide and sarcastic.) She also claims that in some cases, trans men being
attracted to women but being afraid of homophobia (in the form of attacks on
lesbians) led them to conclude that to be in relationships with women but not
subject to homophobic attacks, they had to transition to being men, and some of
these trans men later realized this wasn’t what they wanted after all; they
wanted to be with women as women.

First,
here is what Carter has to say about this part of the essay:

And:

Further down the thread:

And:

Now, there have been a
handful of anecdotal studies, from the points of view of both trans men and
trans women, testifying to how very differently they live in the world after
transitioning. Trans women mainly report having to learn to do all of the
things most women are accustomed to, feeling the burden of these behaviors to
secure their safety and well-being against predators, as well as frustration
with men who dismiss and disregard women on a daily basis. Trans men report
people paying more attention to their opinions and valuing these opinions more,
plus having the freedom to exist in spaces where they wouldn’t have felt safe
before.

If homophobia (specifically
against lesbians) and misogyny sometimes make being male seem attractive, it shouldn’t
be surprising; men still very much rule the world. This doesn’t mean the rights
of people who genuinely feel that their bodies need to be male to reflect who they
are inside should be disregarded because some people thought the prospect of
moving through the world as a man was more appealing than doing so as a woman,
specifically, as a lesbian. (And, again, this is a surpassingly small fraction
of those who transition.)

But even if, for argument’s
sake, there are scads of trans men regretting their decision to transition
instead of remaining lesbians (THERE AREN’T—see above), this means we need to
fight harder against homophobia and misogyny. Being “concerned” about trans men
who transition and regret it doesn’t mean we should make it harder to
transition. It means we should support all of our youth and try to rid our
society of the type of discrimination and oppression that could lead to someone
who isn’t a good candidate for transitioning feeling like that’s what they need
to do to have the life they want. That’s not a failure of trans-activism; that’s
a failure to eradicate the oppression from which people are attempting to flee.

Rowling goes on to talk
about how rampant misogyny is right now. This is true, but not because of trans
people. If anything, the testimonies we’ve had from trans people about how
differently the world responds to them pre- and post-transition have been incredibly
eye-opening and helpful to highlight how much work we still need to do. She writes,
“From the
leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his
proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily
celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the
trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men
across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble.
Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.”

First, in this passage she
seems to be calling “trans activists” men, which means that she’s calling trans
women activists men. She is so dedicated to the idea that trans women
are not women (and that trans men are not men) that she seems to be incapable
of not misgendering trans folks. (Is it any wonder that people are
upset?) Also, anyone advocating against rights for trans folks does need
re-educating (though punching is never an effective way of doing that.) Second,
as mentioned earlier, one of the biggest problems in the fight against misogyny
is that too many women are enamored of the status quo. If all women were in
favor of equality, plus all men who identify as feminists, we’d be in a great
position to move forward, but this is not the case.

Then she writes: “I’ve read all the arguments
about femaleness not residing in the sexed body” which
is her disingenuous way of coming back to her “sex is sex” argument. She is
neglecting to acknowledge that for cisgender people, their bodies and brains
match, but just because that is their experience, it is not everyone’s. This is
like white folks claiming racism doesn’t exist because they don’t experience
it. I’ve seen JK Rowling telling off people who have suggested exactly that. We
all experience the world differently. I don’t know why this is so hard for her
to grasp when it comes to this topic, since she has shown, in other cases, that
she gets it. When those who are supportive of trans folks say trans people have
a different experience of this, they are not saying (and I hate this term) “biological women don’t have
common experiences.”

Carter says this about Rowling’s choice of words:

Asserting that trans women
deserve to be recognized and affirmed is not synonymous with denying the lived
experiences of cis women; if anything, as noted, trans women have provided a
damning testimony of the misogyny that women live through on a daily basis from
the perspective of people who did not always live that. This only supports the
fight against misogyny from all sources. She refuses to acknowledge this, saying:

“‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos
or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover,
the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people
with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why
trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for
those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not
neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.”

There’s so much horrifying
stuff here to unpack. First, trans women know that ‘woman’ is not a costume, a ‘pink
brain,’ or a liking for women’s clothing. Second, the organization she snarked
at for using the phrase “people who menstruate” was being inclusive, kind, and accurate.
It was the furthest thing from dehumanizing and demeaning, which she would know
if she weren’t so against calling trans women women, trans men men, acknowledging
the existence of non-binary people (who are also ‘people who menstruate’) and acknowledged
that women who no longer menstruate or never did for whatever reason are still
women, that menstruation is not the sole way to identify a woman. (She is a
year younger than I am and I’m coming very close to no longer menstruating.
When I do, I will still definitely be a woman. If this has not happened to her
yet, it will eventually. And when it does, like me, she will still be a woman.)

If you see someone else’s
kindness and inclusion as hostile and alienating, that says a lot more about
you than the people you are criticizing for being kind and inclusive (plus
accurate). She continues:

“If you could come inside my
head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the
hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral
sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last
seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I
realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of
my attacker.”

Now, it is horrifying for
anyone to experience this. It is also horrifying to say that you have
experienced solidary and kinship with trans women who have experienced this
after saying the things she has said that dehumanize trans women. She refers to
a serious sexual assault, something no one should ever have to live through; I
know far too many people who have, and I have come terrifyingly close more than
once in my life, knowing that it is only through sheer luck that I escaped,
because there is only one cause of rape: rapists. Just like black folks who experience
police violence, you can do everything “right” and it can still happen. What I
fail to understand is how living through that seems only to have cemented her
dedication to attacking the vulnerable instead of doing more than giving
lip-service to standing in solidarity with trans women. Every attack she makes
on trans folks negates her claim of solidarity and kinship.

She also writes: “Late on Saturday evening…I
forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation –
and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women.” Again, viewing language that was kind, inclusive, and accurate
as “degrading” says more about her than the people she snarked at. I believe
that if someone is in need of seeing “nuance” here, it is JK Rowling. She seems
particularly offended—and I think that was the point—by this, “You are Voldemort said one person,
clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.” While that may seem an extreme response, let me, as she says,
attempt to speak a language JK Rowling might possibly understand.

In the seventh Harry
Potter book, the Ministry undertook a pogrom, essentially, to eradicate
Muggle-born magical people from wizarding society. People who knew for a
certainty that they were magical were deemed inauthentic pretenders and
stripped of their wands. How could anyone who didn’t have at least one magical
parent be a magical person? Rowling depicted this very clearly as an injustice,
a failure to recognize that sometimes magical people cropped up in non-magical
families, that your parentage/biology may have absolutely nothing to do with
your magical ability, and yet, still, YOU ARE MAGICAL. (She also depicts “Squibs”
in the books, people of magical parentage who, despite this, are NOT magical.)

While Rowling may have
meant readers to see this pogrom as analogous to the Third Reich (it works
pretty well for that) plus “one-drop” laws around the world that decreed that
people who had even one-drop of blood from an ancestor who was not considered
Caucasian could not access the rights of white people, it also works well as a
critique of her own bias against trans people. She continues:

“It would be so much easier
to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans
rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter –
scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s
joy, relief and safety in conformity.”

In this passage, she’s
being snarky again, but she also already spoke quite warmly of the love and
support she received from people who, like her, are against recognizing that “trans
rights are human rights” and “trans lives matter,” no matter how much she slaps
these slogans onto an essay that states, over and over, that this is absolutely
not what she believes. There is indeed “joy, relief and safety in conformity,” but she’s made it abundantly clear which community she chooses
to conform to, whose approval she seeks and revels in, and it is those who
agree with her when she demeans people for being kind and inclusive, when she
reacts to that kindness with snarkiness, when she misgenders people and, yes,
fails to comprehend the message of inclusivity in her own work.

She continues: “Huge numbers of women are
justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have
got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of
losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.”

There’s a meme that regularly
makes the round on the internet that goes something like, “Trump supporters were
against Obama because they are racists; we’re against Trump because he’s a racist.”
This draws the distinction between someone being targeted because of identity
versus being targeted because they hold a particular belief. One of these
things can be changed; one cannot. If you choose to target a vulnerable
demographic like trans people, if you choose to be biased against that group
and actively fight to erode their rights, you can also choose to stop believing
those things. If you are trans—or gay, or non-binary, or black—that is who you
are. Being attacked for who you are means there’s never an escape. This is why
black folks march with signs saying, “My black skin is not a weapon.” Being
attacked for what you believe, especially when what you believe is that you
should have the right to attack another group for their identity and deny their
humanity—that’s another story.

We like to believe we are
all tolerant of others’ beliefs, but that tolerance cannot extend so far as to tolerate
the belief that someone’s identity makes them less than human, less than worthy
of equality, less than worthy of existing. Maya Forstater could have behaved
professionally. She could have been respectful of her colleagues and had her
employment contract renewed. She could have refrained from attacking trans
people on Twitter (as Rowling could have also). She chose not to, as Rowling
chose not to.

Rowling also writes, “None of the gender critical
women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became
interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and
they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their
lives,” but being “sympathetic” in occasional statements is not the same
as putting actions behind those words, or even ceasing to spout words that
wound and that justify policies that make life harder for trans folks. Plus,
the reason they seem to be concerned about trans youth is that they want to
stop them from transitioning. That is not “concern.”

At the moment, the world
is convulsing due to demonstrations all over the world in solidarity with the
Black Lives Matter movement. We have seen and heard, every day, the stories of
black lives being at risk for simply LIVING, for existing, sometimes in spaces
where white people in particular do not wish anyone not-white to exist. For
years, various ethnic groups have been stereotyped in a way designed to make
them seem frightening, Othering them, keeping them on the margins and somehow “justifying”
(it didn’t) the treatment they received for merely existing. That happened very
memorably with LGBTQ+ people during the Stonewall riots, a response to
persistent persecution by the police against sexual minorities. Trans women of
color led that rebellion, and JK Rowling used the name Stonewall High for the secondary
school Harry Potter was to have attended, if he had not gone to Hogwarts.
Evidently, she didn’t know of the connection between Stonewall and trans women
or she might have chosen something else.

Demonizing all members of
any demographic for the behavior of a few people in that demographic is what we
are fighting against. A particularly vocal group that has been dedicated to
this is the HP Alliance, inspired by the principles of equality Rowling
enmeshed in the Harry Potter series. The HP Alliance has repeatedly made
statements refuting Rowling’s anti-trans stance and does not wish anyone to
think that they share that stance because they evidently believe that it is
antithetical to the values of the Harry Potter series.

They are not alone when
it comes to people linked to the series, whether it’s people, like me, who have
written books or created podcasts about it, or actors from the franchise’s
films. Below are a number of links to helpful articles and statements from people,
who, like me, are disappointed in JK Rowling’s doubling-down on this issue, not
least because, in the new essay, she indicates not only a stubborn refusal to
consider, for a moment, that her stance might hurt people (especially those who
thought a great deal of her and feel that her work changed their lives for the
better), but an even more stubborn refusal to try to learn, to see that the way
she speaks about trans people is indeed not dissimilar from Umbridge’s work to have
“inauthentic” magical people banished from the wizarding world. That time,
Harry set them free. Would that Jo Rowling could see the similarities and
follow the example of her creation. Until that day comes—if it comes—many of us
will continue to delve into the Potterverse on many levels—as independent
scholars, literary analysts, podcasters, fanfiction authors, wizard rock bands,
and HP alliance activists, among other things—because it is bigger than its
creator now. Harry belongs to all of us, and we won’t let anyone take that away
from us with divisiveness and bigotry.

Even
JK Rowling.

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Links:

Daniel Radcliffe

Emma Watson and Bonnie Wright

Rupert Grint

Jackson Bird’s author page

The HP Alliance

JK Rowling and the Essay of Doom

Quantum Harry, the Podcast

Twitter Mentions