J. K. Rowling: Very Wrong About Many Things
I’ve been back and forth about writing this for a while. After people expressed interest, I decided I would write it, but not as my regular weekly post, and without trying too hard. Because, I’m gonna be honest, J. K. Rowling’s essay makes me very angry. I’m allowed to be angry. Just as Rowling says she’s aware of “extensive research” without citing anything, I’m allowed to occasionally just go HAM. If you want to see some of my own extensive research, with actual references, here’s some suggestions: Trans Rights and Liberalism, r/neoliberal’s transgender problem, and What Trans Activists Want. I wrote these three articles, and each contains links to help back up what I say.
In addition, I won’t be taking on the entire essay. The entire thing is one long dogwhistle, and the thing about dogwhistles is that most people don’t hear them, and it is difficult to learn to hear them if you don’t already. Saying “this is a dogwhistle, she’s saying but not outright” relies heavily on you trusting me over her. I’m not gonna make this a trust game. Instead, I’ll focus on the sheer, obvious bullshit. Part one: This garbage. Emphasis mine.
Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.
Why did Rowling bring up autism? Anyone familiar with the intersection of autism and transgender identity can tell you: autistic people are frequently denied that they can define their own gender. And that is bullshit. It is ableist, and it is wrong. It is an infantilization of people with autism, demanding that their decisions be blocked behind an even bigger gate than transgender people typically already experience.
The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:
‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’
Holy shit she’s really going for Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria? That garbage? That is awful science through and through. Oh my god. I can’t believe that anyone serious about solid science would genuinely believe in ROGD. The study in question went around online asking parents who were already skeptical of or hostile to transgender identities if their children seemed to just suddenly become trans, and if after coming out they seemed less well-off. The conclusion was that those parents thought that it was out of the blue, and that they didn’t seem happier after coming out. Uh… yeah, we’ve established very well that parental acceptance makes their mental health better! And why the hell would they come out quickly or show signs early to people they know are hostile to their identities?
And nobody has asked the children for their perspective.
Given psychology already has a huge replication crisis, and how awful this study is, it begs belief to think that somebody could, in good faith, think ROGD is a real thing worth taking seriously.
I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria.
These studies are often garbage. Again, skepticism of psychology is a good thing. So when you see studies conducted across time (1968 to 2012, last I checked; remember that the APA classified homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973) and space (Canada, USA, Netherlands) with varying methodologies (one included a child as young as three in the cohort and used goddamned Rorschach ink blots to determine if a child is gender variant!) getting varied results (as Rowling said, 60-90%), I get skeptical of their results. I am especially skeptical because, to my knowledge, none of them actually applied the criteria that experts recommend for minors medically transitioning: consistent, insistent, and persistent gender dysphoria. (Even if one of them has, I would be looking for more than one due to aforementioned replication issues.) Basically, the literature on desistance is embarrassing.
I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive.
This is incredibly dismissive of the work of Black feminists who have pointed out for a long time that Black women do not have the same relationship to femaleness that white women do. Rowling published this essay during worldwide BLM matter protests; there was no need for her to draw attention away from Black lives, but she decided to anyways. I can only feel like she is representative of the “white feminism” that some denounce as being exclusionary of Black people.
So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. 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.
Trans women have been using women’s restrooms for a long, long time. There is no evidence that not penalizing trans women for using women’s restrooms or changing rooms increases violence against women. This is baseless fearmongering, and that is the simple truth.
But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.
Trans women are predators, or at the very least protecting predators. Cool. I wanted to avoid pointing out the dogwhistles, but I think this one is obvious enough.
None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary.
Rowling keeps talking about her anecdotal experience. I can add mine, right? I’ve received so much hate from gender critical people that this feels like a disgusting lie.
All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.
This line was cited by a Republican in blocking the Equality Act, which would’ve been a gigantic step forward for women’s rights. If you want to know who is listening to this. “Gender critical” feminists and their friends have long sided with extreme conservatives, doing shit like trying to compromise Gillick competency (which allows minors to get abortions in the UK) in an attempt to attack transgender women.
And that’s only scratching the surface of how bad this is. Others have gone on and on about how awful this essay is in detail that I won’t here. I do want to say at the end though: Rowling’s desire to make transition harder (when it’s already extremely difficult), to more closely regulate how people get to define their gender (when, again, it’s hell trying to get those legal changes), to uphold “single sex spaces” (which would have a horrible impact on transgender women trying to seek help, for example, in women’s shelters)… it’s awful. And it’s incredibly dismissive of the lived experiences of numerous transgender people, who go through hell just trying to live.
Many people have found Rowling’s essay understandable, even while not being transphobic. That’s why I beg of you to be a good ally and listen to transgender people when it comes to transgender issues. My lived experience and what I’ve heard other transgender people tell me about their lives says that much of what Rowling wrote about would make their lives actively worse, and with hardly any benefit to cisgender women. If you care about transgender issues, please, please listen to transgender people.