I got the feeling she was wanting to talk more about her own experience of sexual assault and her need to identify as a female. She was not knocking trans people so much as defending her right to be “person who menstruates” type of female. I get a sense that most people missed the point, including the actors from her many movie adaptations.
One thing that makes me reluctant to weigh in on this most recent kerfuffle is I don’t really know if Rowling is reacting to a fringe radical minority or the trans movement in general. Her essay doesn’t make this clear to me.
Like, I also do not want “woman” to substituted with “menstruators” or “people with vulvas”. But I don’t know if these terms are being pushed in any serious way. If it’s only fringy folks calling for the use of these terms, then Rowling needs to chillax and not give their position any more gravitas than it deserves. I’m just not deep enough in the discourse to know if she’s overreacting or not.
I appreciate that she’s concerned that teenagers are being encouraged to transition before they are certain they are truly trans. That’s not a particular worry of mine, but I can appreciate that concern. Seems to me that such “oopsies” don’t HAVE to be a big deal. We choose to make them a big deal. Maybe that’s what we should address rather than the “oopsies”.
I admit to feeling frustrated over how much the discourse seems to be all over the place. It seems like one day we were all learning about how gender is a social construct. I was totally down for this message because it makes sense to me. But today the message seems to be gender is whatever an individual says it is, damn the societal millieu and the biology. And if you don’t agree with this idea, it’s not that you’re just a person who disagrees with idea. No, you’ve got to be a TERF. You think the term “woman” should mean something besides “a person who claims to feel like a woman”? TERF!!! I admit I’m not the most enlightened person on every single social issue, but I don’t think it is bigoted to want one’s identity–the one they’ve had for over 50 years–to be turned into a subjective, undefinable feeling that anyone can claim to possess for whatever reason they want, whenever they want. Rowling may be overly worried about the abuses that will result if we move to an “open door” approach to gender identity, but I don’t think that makes her hateful.
I have a feeling if Rowling and I sat down and had a talk, we would have some areas of disagreement. But I’m not “canceling” her, whatever that means.
She sure talked an awful lot about trans people for not wanting to talk about trans people.
You’re ignoring that she has a long history of transphobic tweets. This was just the most recent.
And instead of apologizing, she doubled down.
Ah, I understand. In her essay JKR mentions she tweeted in support of Maya Forstater, who lost her job due to allegedly transphobic tweets, and how she received harassment and threats from trans activists. Did you read the essay? That is the sort of treatment I’m objecting to. And this is the sort of thing I mean about preventing speaking - activists trying to stop women holding meetings to discuss a planned change in the UK law.
I got the impression the Starbucks holiday cup and Cheerios ads are current campaigns - I was asking if they are succeeding now. As for US history, I know there was open and legally enforced discrimination against blacks, and discrimination against LGBT people. But no, I don’t know specifics about banning shows or protesting ads that happened in another country before I was born. I suppose your point is that people then faced threats and risked losing their jobs for publicly opposing segregation, but… that’s obviously a bad thing. Isn’t it still bad now?
I agree with all you wrote, especially the part I quoted. Rowling’s views, to the extent I understand them, are not worth getting riled up about. Good people can disagree about things. Of course, there are hateful and ignorant views that don’t have be embraced, but short of that, we’re just have a societal conversation. It will work out.
You’re ignoring that she has a long history of transphobic tweets. This was just the most recent.
And instead of apologizing, she doubled down.
She made the very good point that if woman means “anyone who says they’re a woman” then there is no such thing as woman.
Anyone calling my wife a “menstruator” will be called “defecator”
Or maybe she’s Hitler.
Did you read Rowling’s actual remarks? She is not at all trying to say that transgender identity or the movement for transgender rights “aren’t real”, as the following excerpts make very clear:
Those are not the words of somebody who’s trying to erase transgender rights or doesn’t think transgender identity is real.
But they also don’t jibe very well with Rowling’s other, less reasonable remarks about the alleged problems with identifying transgender women as women.
In fact, the whole core of the “gender critical”/Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist/Feminism-Appropriating Radical Transphobe/whatever ideology seems to me like just a massive tempest in a teapot. For some reason, the hill they want to die on is the claim that we have to reserve the term “woman” for people who were assigned female at birth, and if we include transgender women in the category “woman” then that is somehow degrading or threatening to cisgender women. As a cisgender woman myself, my reaction to that is :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Well, yeah. Would you like to be reduced to your biological functions? And shouldn’t the people concerned get to decide how they are referred to?
Male predators are unlikely to undergo physical transition in order to gain access to single sex spaces like toilets and prisons and hospital wards. But if all they have to do is wait three months and sign a form, that’s very different. Obviously in the case of restrooms a sign on the door will not keep all predators out, but it does mean businesses etc can legally remove them without being accused of discrimination.
OK, set aside, for the moment, the question of whether transgenderism is “real” or not. Does it even matter? If someone tells me that they prefer to be referred to as “she”, is there any reason why I shouldn’t? Is there any reason I should care who’s in the bathroom stall next to me? If we can make a bunch of people happier with no negative consequences, then we should.
(I’m singling out a point because I agree mostly with the rest::worrying about bathrooms doesn’t quite pass the sniff-test)
I’m the first to defer to anyone who can make make a good argument that calling women “menstruators” is a good thing. But I haven’t seen that argument yet.
I think most women I know would prefer “bitches” or “cunts”. (Sarcasm smilie)
I know I’m not calling my mother/wife/daughter that. Ever.
Predators, man!
Didn’t you know that a full 30% of straight men are going to head straight into the women’s bathrooms and start assaulting people if all they have to do is sign away their masculinity? And once they’ve done so they’ll be immune from prosecution, even if they carry out their nefarious deeds right in front of everybody with cameras watching them go in beforehand and out wearing a smug grin afterwards. Women are immune to legal prosecution, don’t you know.
And also, have you forgotten how when gay marriage was legalized, all straight marriages were disbanded? Cis women just don’t want a repeat of that happening to them.
On preview: I do agree that calling cis women “menstruators” is stupid and intended to be deliberately insulting. Who came up with that shit? It sounds like the sort of thing conservatives would strawman up to give themselves something to complain about. If an actual liberal came up with it they should be ashamed of themselves.
How is that a good point? Many identities are fundamentally based just on the claims of the identifiers. Since “Christian” ultimately means “anyone who says they’re a Christian”, does that mean there is no such thing as “Christian”?
Sure, there are widely shared specific features of Christian belief, just as there are widely shared specific features of female identity, and there are small minorities in each case who don’t share those features. But we don’t have to strictly police adherence to those features in order to keep the term “Christian” or the term “woman” from losing all meaning.
:rolleyes: AFAICT nobody is suggesting that anybody call anybody else a “menstruator” except in contexts where the fact of menstruation is relevant. It seems both delusionally paranoid and ridiculously squeamish to object to your wife being included in a category called “menstruators” in contexts that are specifically about the experience of menstruation.
You don’t think it’s a big deal if teenagers are given irreversible hormone treatment and surgery to remove parts of their bodies due to a faulty diagnosis?
Sounds like a good description of what’s going on.
I get the impression that the concerns by Rowling and others is that the wolves will dress as sheep to get into the hen house (if you’ll allow the crossed metaphor); Male predators will only pretend to be women to victimize women. There seems to be a concern that transwomen will seize control of the feminist movement or have too much power within it.
Aren’t those concerns reminiscent of when the Boy Scouts was considering admitting gay people and some feared that gay leaders would use being boy scout leaders as an opportunity to abuse children? To the fears that gays, the homosexual agenda, are gaining too much power within society? Is there any more reason to think Rowling’s fears are more grounded in actual danger than the fears of allowing gay people to be teachers or youth leaders? How much evidence is there of transwomen seizing power within general feminist organizations or used their status as women to abuse female-born/XX women? It’s possible but I’ve not heard of it although that may solely be because of my ignorance.
I repeat, with slight paraphrase, my remark from my preceding post:
Remember, this whole “menstruator” kerfuffle got started because Rowling made a silly snide joke about a perfectly reasonable and relevant use of the phrase “people who menstruate” to refer to, you know, people who menstruate, specifically with respect to experiences involving menstruation.
Here is the article using that phrase:
And here is Rowling’s dumbass comment on that article:
Hyuk hyuk. :rolleyes: In fact, of course, “women” is not a particularly useful real-world synonym for “people who menstruate”. A very large percentage of cisgender women are post-menopausal, and thus are not impacted by the difficulties of maintaining menstruation hygiene during a pandemic. On the other hand, a very large percentage of girls do menstruate but are not yet officially categorized as “women”. And, of course, there’s also the small minority of people who menstruate who identify as transgender men or non-binary.
So gosh, what sort of term could we use to refer specifically and only to those people who currently experience menstruation, and thus have to cope with the challenges of maintaining menstruation hygiene in our COVID-19 world? “Someone help me out”…
Wait, I know! How about we refer to them as “people who menstruate”, or “menstruators” for short? It’s specific, precise, and biologically factual. Surely there’s nobody dumb enough to regard such a descriptive clinical nomenclature as somehow offensive to women.
…As it turns out, though, there were plenty of people dumb enough to jump to the conclusion that trans-rights activists are somehow advocating the use of “menstruators” as a shorthand term for “cisgender women” in all contexts, the way some gay people call straight people “breeders” or misogynists call women “holes”. So a great clutching of pearls ensued.
How about “women”?
Or if we are in a context where more precision is required: “cis-women”?
“Menstruators” is a studied insult in any context.
There have been several cases in the UK of transwomen moved into women’s prisons who went on the sexually assault other inmates. Most of the other sexual assaults were committed by (male) prison staff.
We’re not talking about what normal men will do. Don’t you think the kind of men who take upskirt photos would love an effectively unisex bathroom where they can stick their phone under the cubical wall to video women? And the kind who flashes women in parks will ‘forget’ to close the door…
Read my post #37 just before yours to understand how this whole kerfuffle about the term “menstruators” got launched by Rowling’s dumb pissypants reaction to a perfectly reasonable and appropriate use of the term “people who menstruate”, and why this whole kerfuffle is ridiculous.