Is JK Rowling transphobic?

This stuff is really complicated. I personally think that a lot of what’s going on is that second-wave feminists and trans activists see a lot of the same gender-related injustices in the world, but have different models for how to make the world a fairer place, and their models are in some ways mutually exclusive–even though their ultimate goals are the same.

This stuff is really complicated. I fuck up too, as I embarrassingly did this morning.

But I figure that for me–a cismale who doesn’t care about gender and who could probably wake up tomorrow as a woman and have no identity crisis–I have a lot more to learn from listening than I do from opining. I try to limit my participation in threads like this to disputing badly-formed arguments and ill-provided cites, rather than venture forth in a gender theory discussion that’s not a life-or-death issue to me.

I just read the rest of the opinion and now better understand the significance of the phrase “it must be worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

My understanding: Forstater’s claim would have been upheld if the judge had held that her belief was philosophical.

Now that I understand it better, I find his opinion even more chilling. This framework allows a judge to declare that 1) a belief is not worthy of respect and 2) you can be fired for having it whether you act on that belief or not.

I think that is a very unfair assessment of me. I think my posting history shows that I really do try to understand the discourse and push against my programming. Just because I am not afraid to express my discomfort and confusion about certain parts of the discourse doesn’t mean I am intentionally trying to be confused. Nothing I have posted here supports your characterization of me.

Black people fought for the right to live as first class citizens. They did not fight for the right to be able to define themselves racially however they see fit. If civil rights leadership had made that their platform then I would not blame white folks for being hella confused.

Transgendered folks have made great strides in securing rights for themselves, and I am glad for it. But I don’t think anyone has the right to be free from negative criticism about how they use those rights. I am concerned that the discourse has become so charged that the any negative judgment is now taboo. If a person doesn’t buy that gender is 100% self-identification, then that means they will be lumped in with obstinate transphobes rather than viewed as someone who just hasn’t been sold on the concept but is amenable to changing their mind. I don’t like this.

I am trying to figure how people can talk about this without being accused of transphobia. Telling me I shouldn’t say I am confused about the topic because it makes me sound like a transphobe makes me feel like there is no point in trying anymore.

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I don’t see it. Her whole tweet would seem to show that Rowling has some very deep misunderstandings about gender dysphoria.

It’s not nearly so simple as men wearing dresses, calling themselves she, and sleeping with other guys.

I hope either that that’s not what she meant or that it’s something that education can fix.
Her tweet had one good line:

which is undercut by the very person she’s defending, who wants neither peace nor security for transpeople (transwomen, at least).

Hermione would be pleased.

My understanding of the problem some people had with Racheal Doleazal and the concept of transrace is that to them being black has good and bad things associated with it. The bad is getting followed and around in shops, getting shot by cops, Madea movies, etc. The good is the tight knit community that being oppressed for so long engendered amongst other things. By growing up white and then transitioning to black Doleazal got to have white privilege and then got to have black privilege and she can go back to having white privilege whenever she wants. I imagine advocates of Affirmative Action would have a huge problem with a white kid identifying as a black kid when filling out college applications and then going back to identifying as white upon college graduation.

One of the people the women in question criticized on Twitter was a gender fluid person who won an award designated for women in her industry. Being a feminist Mara thought this was unfair because the gender fluid person got to have all the advantages of being a man and then got something that was supposed to go to a woman. If you agree with Mara that women are a persecuted minority it seems unfair that the gender fluid person gets to win awards for women and then can take off a wig and go back to being a man whenever he wants.

Both of them confuse me, but gender confuses me a lot more. Like, when I call a person a “man” or “woman”, I am not just thinking about their clothing or perceived masculinity/femininity. If I am honest, I gotta admit that I also think about how they present biologically. A butch woman is still a woman to me even though she dresses and acts in a masculine manner. I don’t think to myself, “I wonder if she is a man.” If she were to ask me to use masculine pronouns, I would out of respect. But in my mind, he would still be “woman” to me. And I don’t think I would be able to get that concept out of my mind.

Now maybe I am wrong about this, and I just have to try harder to push back against my caveman programming. But it frustrates me that just talking about how hard it is to do this is treated as evidence of transphobia. Why can’t it just be an acknowlegement that gender is more complicated than “men are people who think they are men, women are people who think they are women”.

What do you think is the difference between sex and gender?

If I change my name and style of dress so that I appear masculine and I tell people I am a female man, it seems to me I am using the correct nomenclature to pinpoint my sex and gender. (AHunter gets credit for helping me see this.)

My area of confusion: The “correctness” of identifying as a “male man” even if ones anatomy and mien strongly signal to others “female woman”. If we believe that “sex is real” (like JK does apparently), then it should be OK to object to the male label in this case…or at least probe deeper for an explanation. And thus, it seems to me it should also be OK to at least wonder why “man” makes sense as well.

I am not talking about forbidding someone from identifying however they want to define themselves, legally or otherwise. I am just wondering if it is inherently icky to judge the meaning of and motives behind a given sex/gender label.

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Thanks for making me feel I am not the only one who is confused sometimes.

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What the actual fuck?

Do you think I am a transphobe?

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I genuinely don’t know what to think about the stuff you’ve been posting here.

Cite?

Seems to be the case.

Another strawman. Nobody’s made that claim.

Generally speaking, only women are TERFs. It’s not a philosophy that’s particularly welcoming to men.

OK.

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Someone should chill the fuck out.

Do you think gender has social importance? Because it seems to me that if it is socially important, people are naturally going to have positive and negative emotions about it (whether they want to or not) seeing as how people are social creatures. It seems contradictory to me to call gender a social construct but in the same breath tell people to not have negative reactions to a specific gender identity or label.

I am chilled the fuck out as much as I can possibly be right now. Let’s make that clear.

I am OK with the idea that gender isn’t socially important or at least shouldn’t be. I know personally I have never felt very “womanly”, so my gender identity doesn’t feel very important to me. But it is clear to me that gender is important to lots of people. I don’t think all of these people are transphobes or TERFs.

It seems to me there has got to be a way for someone to talk about their confusion and struggle with gender classification and identity without being treated like a crazy or hateful person. In other words, how is saying “chill the fuck out” promoting understanding? I don’t think it does, but maybe that isn’t your intention.

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Thanks for doing the digging on this. I suspected as much, but did not feel like doing the research.

I think people are confusing TERF’s with feminists in general. Most feminists–especially those under 40–are not TERF’s. There’s more to being a TERF than transphobia. There’s a sex-negative tendency, for one thing. Also a dislike of sex-workers and a dislike of men in general, including gay men. It’s astonishing how much their POV dovetails with far-right Christianity.

That’s enough right there.

Everyone, be nice or I’ll shut this thing down.

You may have the same issue I have. Since gender isn’t very important to me, transgenderism has always been difficult for me to grok. I don’t really identify with my gender more than I identify with my handedness (less, since I clearly don’t make my gender part of my username on some random messageboard). It’s hard for me to feel what gender dysphoria would be like, and when I try to imagine it, it’s like imagining being upset over being misidentified as right-handed.

But that’s okay. It ain’t about me. And some basic morality is, you let people live their best life without giving them shit over it. I don’t have to feel what gender feels like to other people; I just have to recognize that it’s important to them.

But there are two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ways to have gender be important to you:

  1. You can feel your gender very strongly and want others to respect it.
  2. You can have strong feelings about other people’s gender and want them to conform to your feelings.

Transgender people fall in the first category. Transphobes fall in the second.

I suspect that, a hundred years from now, gender identities in our culture will look as different from today as today’s identities look from 1920. That’s fine. We’re a bunch of social primates figuring these messy bodies and chaotic brains out as best we can. The best we can do is to respect other folks and let them live their best life*.

And that means not giving transgender folks shit, and extra-specially not giving them some passive aggressive “BUT ITS THE TROOOOOF!!!” bullshit like what that researcher did.

  • Exceptions granted when someone’s best life means fucking it up for others

1-Gregor Murray does NOT identify as a woman. They identify as gender fluid.

2-In Rowling’s Robert Galbraith book The Silkworm, there are transphobic themes. Though it’s a dangerous slope to claim that an author’s work reveals their true feelings.