J K Rowling and the trans furore

Actually, although I’m not all the way through the book yet, ISTM that if Troubled Blood is really intended to convey any kind of anti-trans message, it completely fails in its aim.

The relevant background subplot (not a spoiler, it’s laid out at the start of the book) concerns, AFAICT, a 100% cisgender heterosexual male serial killer who occasionally crossdresses to deceive his intended victims… back in the 1970s, when transgender-rights protections were nonexistent and most cisgender people didn’t even realize that the concept of transgender identity existed.

That is, the subplot very clearly demonstrates that denying rights to transgender people doesn’t do jack-shit to prevent male predators from crossdressing for nefarious purposes. Nor does it offer any smidgen of evidence, or even assertion, that recognizing rights of transgender people in any way encourages or facilitates male predators in crossdressing for nefarious purposes.

In short, considered as any form of anti-trans-rights propaganda, Troubled Blood is the most illogical and self-defeating bunch of nonsense I’ve ever seen.

Which leads me to suspect that it is not in fact intended as any form of anti-trans-rights propaganda. I think Rowling’s tweets and essays show that she’s clinging to some pretty stupid ideas about the alleged dangers of allegedly “excessive” support for transgender rights, but I don’t think she’s anywhere near sufficiently deranged and/or virulently transphobic to believe that this book makes any kind of persuasive case against transgender rights.

Great that you get this, but count how many trans rights activists are sending out death wishes for JKR right now. Twitter is lit up with more hatred towards at her than has ever been directed at a celebrity literally ever. It’s unhinged, it’s violent, and it’s 100% misogyny. The reaction that we’re seeing points to only danger ahead.

I feel it necessary to say that no one is for denying transgender rights. Retaining single-sex accommodations is not the same thing as entitling males who identify as women to female-only locker rooms.

The question has been asked by @monstro before and I’m going to ask it again: why is the focus always on affirming male and female gender identities while its okay to ignore the >50 other recognized gender identities? Why are nonbinaries not entitled to a NB restroom? Or NB sports leagues? If this group is expected to make due with status quo provisions, how does it become a human right violation when transwomen are forced to make due with male restrooms?

I am completely opposed to anybody publicly expressing death threats or death wishes, or any other types of violent threats, against Rowling or any other law-abiding person (and even most of the non-law-abiding ones). And I’ve been very clear about that all along.

However, I think you don’t quite understand what there is to “get” here. Just because I’m not seeing a persuasive interpretation of Troubled Blood as anti-transgender propaganda, and I don’t think that even anti-transgender propaganda should be countered with violent or abusive threats, doesn’t mean that I’m giving Rowling a pass on things that she’s said that are anti-transgender.

It’s perfectly fair to criticize Rowling in a non-violent and non-abusive way for saying those things, even if they’re pretty mild when compared to some other people’s manifestations of anti-transgender prejudice and transphobia.

It depends what you think counts as “transgender rights”.

I believe that people have a right to live and present as the gender that they identify as, and that they should not be unwillingly forced into gender-specific classifications that contradict their gender identity, just because of the biological sex/chromosomes they were born with.

I’ve acknowledged and discussed at great length here the fact that that right, like all rights, is not unlimited. Transgender people are not exactly the same as cisgender people, and there are going to have to be some adjustments in social and legal recognition to take those differences into account.

But I’m strongly against the sort of biological essentialism that says it’s okay, for example, to refer to a transgender man as a “woman who thinks she’s a man”. Or to force transgender men or transgender women to use restrooms that are explicitly designated for the opposite gender from the one they identify as, just because of the genes/genitalia they were born with.

And contrary to your assertion, there are a hell of a lot of people who are passionately committed to inflicting those kinds of coercion on transgender individuals, which I consider to be denying their rights.

Maybe they are. The immediate question, though, is whether or not they’re entitled to choose whichever one of the currently available gender-restricted facilities that they feel is most appropriate for their gender identity. I think they do have that right—subject to the necessary compromises and adjustments that I mentioned above.

But I’ve said all this before, in very similar words, and you’ve likewise said all the things you’re saying before, in very similar words. Neither of us is likely to change the other’s mind on these issues.

I don’t approve of unhinged violent misogyny (or any other kind of unhinged violent bigotry) against anyone, but the anti-transgender-rights side of this controversy is at least as guilty of it as the pro-transgender-rights side. People who go around saying things like “trannies must die” (not to mention those who literally beat up and kill transgender people) are perpetrators, not victims.

Do you recognize that sex exists as an objective physical condition of the body, regardless of the gender that someone purports to having?

But would you be okay with restrictions that apply to members of a particular sex, regardless of the gender that someone purports to having?

What if NB’s don’t feel comfortable with any of the available options? Maybe they feel dysphoric or unsafe when they go to either restroom. Is this an issue society must solve by requiring businesses to create new spaces for them?

People who say “trannies must die” and commit murder are truly vile, I agree. It’s rather noticeable that these people haven’t been singled out for TRA hatred an eighth as much as people like JKR.

That is rather a rare phenomenon. It’s easy to find thousands of people wishing death on JK Rowling or any number of other women for allegedly being “terfs.” Damned if I ever see anyone wishing death on “trannies.”

I have said at least a half-dozen times in this thread that I recognize that the physical characteristics of biological sex (including features like genes and genitalia) objectively exist.

For most human individuals, although not for all, the combination of those characteristics permits consistent and unambiguous assignment to one of two artificially simplified binary categories of biological sex.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you think that those statements of biological fact are equivalent to the assertion that “sex exists as an objective physical condition of the body”.

I also think, based on what I understand of the still-evolving science on the subject, that it seems very likely that the phenomenon of perceived gender identity is also an “objective physical condition of the body” based on brain characteristics. So are other neurobiological phenomena like sexual orientation.

Both gender identity and sexual orientation usually, although not always, correlate with the characteristics of biological sex. That’s why large majorities of people with XX chromosomes and female reproductive systems are female-identified and sexually attracted to males, while large majorities of people with XY chromosomes and male reproductive systems are male-identified and sexually attracted to females.

But AFAIK, these characteristics can and do occur in different combinations in a minority of individuals, and no combination is objectively more “wrong” or “unnatural” than any of the others, although they may entail greater or lesser chances of reproductive fertility.

That depends what the restrictions are, and how carefully “sex” is defined. For example, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say that obstetric medical care is restricted to (a reproductively fertile subset of) people with uteruses, because the biologically female reproductive system is what obstetric medicine is about. If we’re taking “people with uteruses” to be synonymous with “people with biologically female sex”, then that’s an example of a perfectly reasonable restriction based on biological sex.

But if, for instance, we insist on using the term “women”, unqualified, as a synonym for “people with biologically female sex”, then I think that’s a disingenuous and misleading attempt to inaccurately conflate sex with gender. In the process, it contributes to the unjust erasure and/or misgendering of transgender men, which I think is some transphobic bullshit.

Insofar as I can come up with a rule that’s both general and useful for this issue, I suppose it would be something like “Don’t impose restrictions on the basis of biological sex except where it’s realistically necessary, and don’t use restrictions about sex as an excuse or stalking horse for imposing restrictions about gender.”

Then that’s something we as a society will have to address as we figure out how to reconcile the historical legacy of our previous oversimplified binary, heterosexist, patriarchal assumptions about the nature of sex, gender and sexuality with our growing understanding of the much greater complexity of sex, gender and sexuality in the real world.

My guess is that the specific issue of public restroom categories will ultimately be resolved primarily by the growing trend of individual non-gender-specific restrooms. But that’s only a guess.

:face_with_raised_eyebrow: I don’t pretend to know exactly how many eighths of hatred are allocated by exactly which groups of people categorized by some unspecified criteria as “transgender rights activists” to exactly which groups of people categorized by some unspecified criteria as “these people” versus exactly which groups of people categorized by some unspecified criteria as “people like JKR”. Or vice versa.

And I’m not at all persuaded that you have any objective quantitative answers to those questions either, as opposed to just a bunch of confirmation-bias-inspired vague rhetoric.

But I’ve said all this stuff before, in response to all this stuff that you’ve said before. I re-entered this thread recently after a long hiatus only because it seemed to me that there was some new information to discuss regarding the relevance or lack thereof of Rowling’s new book to transgender issues. Looks to me like we’ve finished discussing the new information, and are now back to arguing about the same old shit we had the previous fifty arguments about. Nothing personal, but I think I’ll pass on the next round.

To paraphrase what I just said to YWTF, I don’t have much faith in your personal impression of what you think you “see”, or consider “easy to find”, as an objective quantitative measure of how “rare” something actually is.

Or maybe they feel fine using either restroom, even if the other people there don’t.

No. Read the context of that part of the exchange. I wasn’t talking about sports (since whacking people with sharpened stones isn’t a sport code I’m aware of, unless curling has gotten really vicious since last I checked). I happily acknowledge that men and women have average physical differences that affect their sports performance.

BTW, @YWTF, since you’ve not apologized for insinuating I’m an abuser of women, and doubled down by tacking not-at-all subtle accusations of general misogyny on top of it, I won’t be interacting with you any more. Enjoy the echo chamber.

Only if you consider transwomen to actually be transwomen, and not just men pretending to be women. So to you, that (cis-men dressed up to victimize women) is clearly not what any transwomen are.

To Rowling, based on her social media posting? I’m not so sure. To some TERFs? I have no doubts at all that’s how they see most transwomen, especially lesbian transwomen who choose not to surgically transition.

Thank you for a considered review that avoids the hysteria we’ve been seeing. Too many people these days seem to believe that any disagreement with their views means you’re a baby eating satanist, or at least morally equivalent to Trump. The most obvious conclusion is indeed that the book isn’t intended as propaganda. And most probably JKR does not hate trans people either, she’s just worried about the side effects of their campaigns on women’s rights and on children, as she says.

The fact that in the past women spent a large portion of their lives pregnant and/or caring for small children is also a very significant factor. Isn’t that the whole point of a lot of patriarchy? Providing men with genetic descendants and enabling them to ensure their paternity.

The reason I asked whether you believe sex exists is because of your comment about not forcing transgender people to live as certain gender.

Sex and gender are two different concepts that should not be conflated with one another. A trans person is free to identity however they want, but treating their identity as legally equivalent to biological sex essentially means sex ceases to exist as a meaningful thing in the eyes of the law. This is a threat to sex-based rights.

We have single-sex accommodations solely because of sex-based differences between males and females. Not gender as defined by ideologists. We are millions of pages in this thread and no one still has competently explained why having certain gender feelings necessitates undressing in a room or competing in sports with people who have bodies belonging to the opposite sex.

That is actually fine by me.

Sure, I think it definitely was significant. You’re not calling pregnancy or childrearing a disability, though, are you?

Seen this yet @YWTF?

More recently, a woman told me she knew that staff would never do anything about the man who follows her around the shelter, watching her; who stands by her bed, watching her. Sometimes this man wears a wig. He asks that we call him by a feminine name. The woman he is harassing is an incest victim with severe PTSD from years of abuse. This woman told me that because of our prioritization of what she termed “the gender thing,” staff refuse to intervene in the situation. The man could therefore torment her with impunity.

Time out before I was to edit this in.

@MrDibble

It if matters, I am sorry you thought I insinuated you were an abuser. But I’m not sorry for drawing parallels between your comments and the philosophies of abusive men. Minimizing the physical differences between males and females is a rationalization that removes the moral weight attached to a stronger person attacking a much weaker one. Maybe if more people could see women in the same light physically disabled people are seen in—instead of whiny Karens who are selfishly just trying to win—they wouldn’t feel it necessary to downplay the unfairness of transwomen competing against them.

No need to think I’m calling you out specifically unless you admit you are among those who are doing this minimization. Same with the Floyd Mayweather thing. My contempt is reserved only for those who think Floyd has the inalienable right to punch women in the face should he decide to self-ID. Not for those who don’t. If you’re offended by that, then yes maybe not responding to me is for the best.

Yes I did. Glad you posted it. None of it suprises me (and it shouldn’t surprise anyone…every so often I flit over to the catcalling thread and see who is posting to it…yeah, right). We already know the kind of world we live in. We know what the reality is for women and girls. And yet, in spite of this understanding and common sense awareness, we’re now supposed to have faith that taking a man’s word that he’s actually a woman is a risk-neutral proposition.

I look forward to seeing the responses (if any) to this article.

Even a healthy, uncomplicated pregnancy required lots of medical appointments and time off work to go to them, and birth involved a stay in hospital and more time off to recover. It also meant I was unable to do many common activities and some jobs would be impossible. So I’d say there are some resemblances, yeah.