I started this when JK Rowling first dropped her essay, because on the surface, and for those unfamiliar with the studies and people she was alluding to, it might seem almost reasonable. It isn’t.
As I compiled and worked, things got worse. The use of her manifesto by Senator James Lankford to cut down an Equality Act LGBTQ civil rights bill motivated me to keep researching. All the while, JK Rowling continued her rampant rad-fem rhetoric.
Last week, while engaging with her supporters on Twitter, I was sent penis pictures because her supporters believed that a lesbian who is as invested in trans rights as I am must secretly want dick.
This is the culture that she’s cultivating.
My hope, in writing this, is to compile the work and the sources that will help illuminate why JK Rowling’s essay is inappropriate.
I will update this essay as needed, so please bookmark it!
Please be advises that some of the contents of this essay are transphobic. It’s the unfortunate byproduct of trying to deconstruct modern radical feminist discourse.
NOTES: Each point begins with a condensed section, in Italics, from Rowling’s essay. I did not copy it all verbatim because her writing is unnecessarily padded. The article is available here for anyone who wants to read it; I did not alter or change the meaning of anything she said.
1.JK Rowling Said: Maya Forstater, lost her job for what was deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She asked a judge to rule that believing sex is determined by biology is protected by law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.
This is a false representation of what happened. This wasn’t some specific case in which a person said “biological sex is determined by biology;” that is not the Judge ruled on. This case was about whether or not Maya was protected in her right to misgender individuals based on her belief that gender identity either did not matter or it was intrinsic to the sex a person is assigned at birth.
TRANSPHOBIC CONTENT WARNING: Scroll past image.
Maya Forstater was employed on a year-to-year contract. Forstater “was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), an international thinktank that campaigns against poverty and inequality”. She was a forward-facing, public representative for the company. Because the CGD did not share the views expressed in her (Content Warning) aggressively transphobic tweets, in which she clearly stated that trans women are not women on multiple occasions. She was not fired for this misconduct; her contract was just not renewed.
The Judge concluded that “a core component of [Maya’s] belief [is] that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” which was deemed unacceptable.
The 2010 Equality Act protects trans people from these intentional violations of their dignity and personhood, which informed the Judge’s ruling. This case had nothing to do with legally redefining gender or biological sex. It’s just about protecting the freedom of trans people to exist unharassed.
Another way of thinking about it is, well, if you constantly talked about a co-worker’s breasts, and when she complained, you argued that it’s your right to talk about her breasts because they exist. An HR person, or judge, telling you to stop does not deny the existence of your co-worker’s breasts obsolete, they’re just deeming it as massively inappropriate to talk about them at work. You can certainly harass people with the truth, or with what you perceive as the truth. For this same reason, arguing that not harassing trans people erases biological sex is ridiculous.
A little more context: ‘Gender Critical’ Feminism, or trans exclusionary feminism, understands that gender is a social construct and decides it’s dismissible for that reason. That gender, since it is constructed, does not matter and only biological sex does. The problem is that that isn’t really how social constructs work: imagine trying to pay for an iPhone with a penny because you reject the socially constructed value of that penny. Social constructs have meaning, whether we want them to or not.
JK Rowling, like Maya, professes to support trans women. But the thing is, JKR only supports (a) one category of trans women: women with dysphoria who have received gender-affirming surgery and (b) even then, JRK will always make a clear distinction between trans women and cisgendered (women who were assigned female at birth who are okay with their gender presentation).
2. JK Rowling Said: Magdalen Berns was a feminist and lesbian who was dying of a brain tumour. Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women.
TRANSPHOBIC CONTENT WARNING: Scroll past image.
Magdalen Berns was a hateful person and a transphobic icon, not a brave lesbian. Her views were in no way limited to the idea that lesbians shouldn’t be called bigots for not dating trans women. (Content Warning) Magdalen called trans people perverts; she was caught up in antisemitic right-wing conspiracy theories about George Soros funding Trans Activism.
She compared trans women to people in blackface. She believed that the video containing Milo Yiannopoulos’s pedophilic comments was only released because he criticised trans people. She even misgendered conservative right-wing trans woman Blaire White who holds trans-exclusionary views herself.
Rowling essentially “whitewashes” the opinions of Magdalen Berns to make them appear much more reasonable. She’s doing this in an attempt to make criticisms of these women, and herself, seem unreasonable by comparison.
No one should be forced to date people they don’t want to date. It’s incredibly disingenuous to suggest that trans women are predators, forcing or deceiving lesbians into relationships. That said, I think that lesbians who constantly talk about how much they would never date a trans person probably are probably prejudice only because I can’t imagine spending that much energy on the subject otherwise.
It’s another example, really, of harassing people with the “truth”. Once again, image yourself in a workplace, telling all of your co-workers how you just really aren’t attracted to, and would never date someone with, green eyes. This is a pretty harmless prejudice, sure, but also no one but specifically, a potential partner needs to know about it, and constantly talking about it reflects more on your beliefs than on the reality of the person with green eyes.
The notion that trans people want to date people who are not interested in dating them is ludicrous; recent studies suggest that 42% of trans women experience intimate partner violence. What Magdalen Berns, and by extension JK Rowing is doing, is trying to reframe trans women as the perpetrators of intimate partner violence, not the victims.
BONUS ROUND: JK Rowling Said: Radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary — they include trans men in their feminism because they were born women.
Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism does not include trans men. It denies the gender identity of trans men and misgenders trans men. That’s not “inclusive.” Trans men were not “born” women; they were born trans men.
3.JK Rowling Said: I have a charitable trust which emphasises women/fund medical research, etc. The new trans activism is having a significant impact on many of the causes I support because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.
This is a large section with a lot of ground to cover.
Part 1 — JK Rowling doesn’t want to see her donations go towards helping trans women. JK Rowling donates money to support women who are the victims of domestic violence, “female prisoners”, (etc.) These are great causes, but in stating that these issues are impacted by transgender activism, in my mind, she’s essentially saying that she doesn’t want her money to go towards helping trans women. I genuinely see no alternative.
Part 2 — No one is trying to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.
So first, after looking through Black’s Law Dictionary and Barron’s Law Dictionary and Stroud’s Judicial Dictionary, I can say with confidence that there are no set legal definitions for “sex” and “gender.”
JK Rowling is talking about amendments and changes to the UK Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act that were proposed at the time she was writing her essay. These changes pertained only to the rights of trans people, concerning the necessary steps they have to go through to get a certificate which recognises them as their preferred gender.
To get into what she’s talking about, a quick overview of the UK’s Equality Acts is necessary.
Please bear with me for the quick history lesson and please keep in mind that I changed some of the language no longer used to describe trans people, but that language is still present in the links.
- The Equality Act 2006 made public bodies obliged to take the threat of harassment or discrimination of transgender people in various situations seriously.
- The Equality Act 2010 officially adds “gender reassignment” as a “protected characteristic”. However: this Equality Act allows trans individuals to be treated differently under some circumstances. For example, a trans woman can be excluded from group support sessions within a sexual abuse crisis centre (and instead electing to provide the trans individual support privately) if their presence is deemed detrimental to the group. The exclusion can only be applied on an individual case-by-case basis and must not form part of a blanket policy for the treatment of trans people.
- In 2018 the Government Equalities Office maintained that the government had no plans to amend the Equality Act 2010 either directly or indirectly and that it planned to retain the Equality Act’s “provision for single and separate sex spaces.”
- The Gender Recognition Act 2004 enables trans people to apply to receive a Gender Recognition Certificate; a document that shows that a person has satisfied the criteria for legal recognition in the acquired gender.
- In 2017, Minister for Equalities Justine Greening considered reforms to the Gender Recognition Act to de-medicalise the process, with the principle of self-identification. Penny Mordaunt affirmed that the consultation on the Gender Recognition Act would come from the starting place that ‘transgender women are women’.
- And, on 22 April 2020, Liz Truss, the new Equality Minister, said she would recommend specific changes to the Gender Recognition Act by the summer. She generally said that “transgender adults” ought to have “the freedom to lead their lives as they see fit” and “without fear of persecution,” but that people under 18 should be “protected” from making “irreversible decisions,” that “single-sex spaces” also need “protection,” and that there should be “proper checks and balances in the system.”
- During the process of considering changes to the Gender Recognition Act, 64 % of the 102,818 responses received, said there should not be a requirement for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in the future, because being trans was neither a medical nor a mental health issue.
- But these changes were not made, and the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act were ruled out. This means that legally, in the United Kingdom, trans protections are only afforded to individuals who are undergoing medical transition, and self-identification of trans identity is deemed insufficient. To be very clear, even with this change, the UK still had no intention of allowing trans women unfettered access to “sex specific” spaces, but this act would have allowed for changes to birth certificates without a medical diagnosis.
All this to say: JK Rowling is mischaracterising the law. While personally, I think it’s discriminatory to bar trans women from women’s spaces, that wasn’t even what was being debated. Never, as JK Rowling claimed, were the non-existent legal definition of sex and/or gender challenged.
Part 3 — Sex Differences in Medical Conditions.
Since no one is eroding ideas of sex and gender, medical differences that are based in sex is really, an irrelevant point. But it’s worth mentioning that in most cases, diseases that behave differently do so not only due to biological reasons but also because of gendered behaviours and bias in the medical field. Further, undergoing hormonal replacement therapy (HRT) as a part of transitioning could potentially cause diseases to act in a specific way. For example, taking HRT can increase a transgender woman’s risk of breast cancer. The reason MS is more common in women than men is also hormone-based, so HRT might play a similar role in increasing a trans woman’s chances of developing the ailment, those this has not been studied extensively.
So the waters around medicine and the subject of disease behaviours and trans identity is far murkier what JK Rowling suggests. Gender identity and biological sex may both be important in medicine, and trans people do need to disclose that information to their doctors, just as everyone does. But the information that is disclosed to doctors is never anyone else’s business.
4.JK Rowling Said: I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning. There used to be more trans women than trans men, but now that number has drastically reversed, and the UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.
The Actual Numbers. This “fear” of increasing numbers of trans men and the persistent doubling down of misgendering them does seem to directly contradict with this idea that TERFs include trans men.
“Detransitioning” does not always mean a person is not trans. In fact, the most common reason for a person to consider detransitioning is that “the person couldn’t cope with the family and community support they lost and the experiences of transphobia.” Individuals feel social pressure to not transition because of transphobia. Not because they’ve felt their transition was a mistake.
Secondly, according to research, less than one per cent of individuals “who had appointments at an NHS Gender Identity Service between 2016 and 2017 said in those appointments that they had experienced transitioned-related regret, or had detransitioned.” JK Rowling’s claim that there is some massive increase in people detransitioning is blatantly false, a misrepresentation of the data, and completely ignores the influence of transphobia and prejudice plays on why an individual may consider to detransition.
Finally, JK Rowling’s idea that there is a sudden disproportionate increase in trans men over trans women confuses me. There’s simply no evidence of an “explosion” of trans men. In one 2019 survey, 3.5% of the population were trans women and 2.9% trans men.
As for the 4400% increase, that seems to be taken from “a report finding that 40 people assigned female at birth in the UK sought gender treatment between 2009 and 2010, while 1,806 did between 2017 and 2018. Rowling attributes this to a “transgender trend”, but there are plenty of other reasons for the increased number of individuals transitioning.
Namely, access to better medical care, medical professionals backing the need for transition, and increased social acceptance all play a role in why more people are finally able to access the care and support that they need. This all relates to the World Health Organization removing “transsexualism” from the Internation Classification of Diseases which was explicitly done to allow for better “access to necessary health interventions.” In other words, it shouldn’t be shocking to anyone that the removal of roadblocks against trans people identifying as their authentic self has allowed more trans people to do so.
The number of individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual has also vastly increased over the past few years. No one questions the correlation between public acceptance and the freedom to come “out of the closet” when it comes to sexuality. It’s disingenuous not to consider the very same reasons when considering why more people are “coming out” about their gender identity.
Autism and Gender Identity Research has suggested that there may be a relationship between autism and gender dysphoria. This is still an underexplored area of understanding. “Existing literature makes a significant contribution of drawing our attention to the presence of gender-related concerns in individuals with ASD. However, it is unclear whether the most fruitful way to conceptualise this issue is in terms of comorbidity”.
However, instead of engaging with this research, JK Rowling’s statement makes it sounds more like autistic people are being tricked into transitioning, which is exceptionally ableist.
5.JK Rowling Said: Lisa Littman set out to explore the increase in trans identities. Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers’ in her heavily contested paper.
The section above deals with why the number of trans people is probably increasing and the cause is not Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, because ROGD doesn’t exist.
The research that suggested Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria existed is incredibly contested — that’s true. JK Rowling, however, doesn’t even begin to get into why the research was deemed problematic.
Littman argued that young people are transitioning because their friends or online spaces encourage it. She “proved” this to be true with online surveys with parents about their observations.
This method of data collection is downright terrible. Not only because it focused on the guesses of parents about their children, but also because the sampling of parents with trans children was not random. From the study: “To maximise the chances of finding cases meeting eligibility criteria, the three websites (4thwavenow, transgender trend, and youthtranscriticalprofessionals) were selected for targeted recruitment.”
“4thwavenow” is a website that boasts being “A community of people who question the medicalisation of gender-atypical youth” “transgendertrend” claims they “question the trans narrative” and “youthtranscriticalprofessionals” has been taken offline but the URL alone seems very aligned with the others. These websites cater to a concrete, biased base that already believes that transgender identities are a problem, a trend, meaning using only these resources for collecting data would create a partial dataset. It’s just bad science.
The paper can be read in its entirety, here.
TL;DR: Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is not real, and we know it isn’t real because the only study and data that supports it is bias.
6.JK Rowling Said: psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’
Marcus Evans’ claim is unsubstantiated. JK Rowling took that Evans quote from a blog post he wrote about his resignation — not a peer-reviewed article or academic presentation of evidence. It should be noted that Evans does not back up his claim in that blog post with anything besides anecdotal experiences.
Cornell University, on the other hand, did a meta-analysis of over 70 papers on the subject of whether or not transitioning had a positive impact on transgender people and related issues, and found that an overwhelming majority of the researchers agree that indeed, transitioning yields positive results. Further, The suicide attempt rate among transgender persons ranges from 32% to 50% across the countries, and suicide rates decrease among youth when their gender identity is supported and recognised by their family.
Bonus Round; JK Rowling Said: The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition.
Trans people experience anxiety, dissociation and have experience with eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred because of their gender dysphoria. Those are often manifestations of that dysphoria. Experiencing those symptoms independently, however, has nothing to do with being trans.
7. JK Rowling Said: 60–90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria.
This is outdated, bad data. The article most used to source this claim is this one. The primary problem with this data is that in treated gender non-conformity (for example, girls who liked to play soccer with boys instead of playing with dolls) with gender dysphoria. In other words, since certain activities are wrongly perceived as gendered (sports are for boys & dolls are for girls) children with an interest in activities that didn’t align with their gender were wrongfully considered to have mild dysphoria or “gender incongruence.” Since the notion that anyone’s relationship with gender is decided by whether they like dolls or basketball is a little ridiculous, this study and its findings become easily dismissable.
Recent findings in Australia suggest that 96% of all patients who were assessed and received a diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria by the 5th intervenor from 2003 to 2017 continued to identify as transgender or gender diverse into late adolescence.
That means that only about 4% of teenagers and young people who experience gender dysphoria grow out of it. And given the fact that The Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health support the use of puberty blockers for kids because the effects are reversible, there is genuinely no harm in allowing a child to explore their gender identity even if they are part of that 4% who desist gender dysphoria.
8. JK Rowling Said: Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.
No one believes there are no differences between cis and trans women. No two individual women are identical with identical experiences; differences/similarities do not define gender. Differences and experiences vary across all manner of class, race, gender identity, and sexuality lines. The notion that a difference in experience is enough to delegitimise someone’s gender doesn’t make any sense. My experiences, as a Canadian lesbian, are different than my American partner, a bisexual woman, different than my heterosexual mix-race friend, and different from my friends, who are trans women. These differences do not make us not women.
JK Rowling goes on to talk about how gender is not a costume, yet reduces gender to a singular shared a similar experience, which completely invalidates not only trans experiences but the experiences of cis gendered women if they are different than her own.
People treat ‘social construct’ like it is a dirty word, but in a nutshell, all it means is that the meaning of something was assigned by social agreement. No one dismisses money, calendars, time, languages, school grades, or countries have meaning and are important — but these are all examples of social constructions that only have meaning because we give them meaning. The same is true of gender identity. Grappling with the socially constructed nature of gender identity is a bit beyond the scope of this paper, but I recommend Dr Emer O’Toole’s book Girls Will Be Girls, as a comprehensive, compelling work which provides a great overview of what sociologists mean when they talk about how gender is constructed.
9. JK Rowling Said: I stand in solitary with women who have histories like mine (i.e. Domestic Partner violence, abuse), who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces. 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.
As I’ve gone over in point 3, in the United Kingdom, a person still needs a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria before they are granted Gender Recognition certificates. While I think it should change for a number of reasons, it has not changed, and I find the idea that JK Rowling, after talking extensively about protecting women, is now reducing womanhood to hormones, extremely off-putting.
I am extremely sympathetic to the fact JK Rowling has a history of abuse; a lot of women do. But it’s inappropriate to use that fear to try and deny trans women their gender identity, and it’s largely irrelevant. There is no data the suggests that allowing trans people to use the bathroom they are most comfortable with creates a risk to anyone.
Additionally, trans women who are forced into men’s bathrooms are more likely to be violently or sexually assaulted. The survey of 3,673 trans and nonbinary teens in American middle/high schools found that more than one in four reported being sexually assaulted in the previous 12 months. When schools required students to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on their sex assigned at birth, transgender boys were 26% more likely to experience sexual assault; transgender girls were 50% more likely to experience assault when they had to use restrooms and locker rooms for boys. Arguably then, advocating to disallow trans people the use of facilities that align with their gender identity is advocating for putting trans people at risk.
10. JK Rowling says:
JK Rowling seems to get incredibly angry at the fact this article about menstrual health uses the phrase “people who menstruate” instead of women. Not only is it true that not all women menstruate; certainly women don’t menstruate after menopause, but Rowling is also absurdly complaining about the headline of an article which contains information such as “Importantly, advocates are calling attention to the many gendered aspects of the pandemic, including increased vulnerabilities to gender-based violence during lockdowns, and the risks faced by primary caretakers — particularly women in the household and health care workers, approximately 75% of which are women”.
The article’s primary focus is on drawing attention to the hygiene issues of women and other people who menstruate which were created by lockdown. But instead of using her platform to draw attention to this issue, she instead complains about the inclusivity of the headline, even when the article makes a point of centring the needs of women.
Bonus Argument # 1 Robert Galbraith
Content Warning: Homophobia.
Robert Galbraith is the pen name that JK Rowling uses for a selection of her books. JK Rowling claims that she chose the name “Robert Galbraith” by combining the name of her political hero Robert F Kennedy and her childhood fantasy name “Ella Galbraith.”
Maybe that’s true. I don’t know.
What I do know is that Robert Galbraith Heath implanted electrodes into the septal region of a gay man’s brains, and electrocuted them while making them watch heterosexual porn in an attempt to turn them heterosexual. This man was later forced to have sex with a sex worker as part of the study. Further, the patient was recruited for the study while under legal duress. While I won’t be linking to the “scientific findings” of Heath’s study, there is more information available here.
Perhaps this is just an accidental coincidence, but I don’t know if I can extend the benefit of the doubt to JK Rowling, anymore.
Bonus Argument # 2 WildWomyn
Content Warning: Transphobia
JK Rowling pinned this store to the top of her twitter. Besides this witchy T-shirt, the store also sells a variety of anti-trans merchandise including pins with slogans like “F*ck Your Pronouns” and “Trans Women Are Men”.
The term ‘womyn’ utilised by the store is a nod to trans exclusion. In 1978, the Lesbian Organization of Toronto adopted a womyn-born womyn-only policy in response to a request for admittance by a transgender woman who identified as a lesbian.
All this to say that the notion that she unintentionally platformed a website with anti-trans merchandise and intention radfem terminology in the URL seems pretty disingenuous to me. I don’t believe that JK Rowling cares so little about her brand and image that she’d pin a website to the top of her twitter without first at least glancing at the contents.
DISCLAIMER:
As a cis lesbian, I feel a personal responsibility to combat trans-exclusionary feminist ideology not only because of its prevalence within lesbian spaces but because of the ways in which my sexual and gender identity are inappropriately weaponised against trans people.
While I have an academic background in Gender and Queer Studies, I cannot and won’t pretend that I can speak to trans experience, and if there is anything in this essay that I have somehow gotten incorrect, I invite comments and corrections from the trans community.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES:
Brie Hanrahan’s Guide to JK Rowling’s Essay covers a lot of the same ground that I do but also brings up different articles, evidence and points to back a lot of my arguments, and I highly recommend giving their paper a read!
