Okay, before I post what is a very long post, I want to say something to those that are reading. This was written as a way to explain in basic terms why JK Rowling's statements regarding trans people and the trans community are so harmful and misleading.
I did not go overly deep in detail as I could have, nor did I respond to every single statement she said. For anything I did get wrong, I apologize profusely. I also don't normally weigh in on topics like this in my blog, but this is something that is very important to me. It's why I cannot remain silent.
This entire post stemmed from one person saying that they didn't see what the fuss was about, that JKR's statement seemed rather reasonable. So, I offered to break it down. Enough people have told me that what I wrote helped them to really understand why JKR's words are such an issue and why it has the LGBTQIA+ community so angry.
There will be no pictures to break up the words this time. And to all my friends, no matter what anyone else says — I love you, I see you, I accept you.
Now follows my breakdown of much of what JKR posted and my responses to it. For the full text of what was posted by JKR you can read that by
clicking on this link.
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For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.
The Maya Forstater scandal began with a statement regarding the construct of gender and that, no matter how you feel, you can only be the sex you are determined to be at birth. She also infamously made the statement that trans women are only “men in dresses”.
These are messages that are central to the struggle of acceptance for trans people. It is a rhetoric often used to dismiss who they are and not only comes from outside the LGBTQIA+ community, but far too often from inside the community as well. It has been a long battle for many trans people to get their identities recognized not only by those who should love them, but from those within a community where they should feel safe and free to be themselves.
All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’.
The ‘like’ that she is referring to is liking the comment by Maya Forstater regarding trans women being “men in dresses”. Her vocal support for Maya with the #IStandWithMaya hashtag as well as her like on that comment was the tipping point in the JKR saga.
She tweeted at the time “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill”
A statement such as this once again, denies that trans women are women. That they are still nothing more than men in dresses. Despite her denial that she liked that men in dresses tweet by accident.
Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Burns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as 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 with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.
Okay, here the narrative leaves from the truth because her following Magdalen Berns (NOT BURNS) happened BEFORE the I stand with Maya Fiasco. As it stands though, Magdalen Burns was extremely vocal in her belief that trans women are not women. While many claimed this alone cemented her position as a TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist), others also claimed that she had not yet firmly declared her stance.
However, the question remains — why did JKR want to get in touch with her? Someone so opposed to a community (LGBTQIA+) that she claimed to support
What did cement her position as being a TERF was the tweet I quoted above that negated the identity of trans people everywhere.
I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.
Okay, anecdotal statements aside, people were angry after her statement. This was someone who had previously claimed support for a community where part of them were now being told by someone they admired that their identity wasn’t valid. So, yes, her statement was literally killing trans people. A huge celebrity someone so many looked up to suddenly telling you and others that your identity is lie hurts to the point that there would be those on the edge of suicide who will be pushed over the edge by things like this.
Nothing like finding out your personal hero doesn’t think you are, who you are. To have their voice lent to the many voices that are already slinging hate in your direction and telling you that you are not worthy.
What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.
Now, here’s the thing, there are people from all walks of life who are very anti-trans — both inside and outside of the LGBTQIA+ community. Though trans people have often been in the forefront of fighting for the rights of the entire community, they haven’t and still do not consistently have community support.
In terms of “socio-political concept”, what she is referring to is the difference between gender and sex. Once again, she is placing the idea of binary sex (which is not actually a binary, but I will talk about that later) being more important than gender. She is saying once again, gender doesn’t matter as it is not important. That the bits in pieces you are born with that are used to identify your sex at birth are absolute.
Okay, going to skip a bit as it doesn’t really need to be overly address or that I have already covered and go to this interesting statement of hers…
The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.
A statement like this makes her stance against transpeople seem that much more reasonable. For many people who are not trans or do not know a lot of people who are trans, this seems like a legitimate. Does it happen? Yes. Does it happen that often? Not really.
In most places to be able to transition is takes a lot of work and can be prohibitively expensive. This is not an easy process to start, and it is not the snap of the fingers change. This statement exclusively plays on the worries of the fears of those who might be on the fence regarding the legitimacy of trans people.
A lot of the stuff that follows that paragraph to support and further sway people comes from studies that take correlations as causation. A great example of correlation equals causation lines of the debunked study on vaccines causing autism. Something people still believe, but has been scientifically debunked and even retracted by the scientist who published that study.
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. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.
Holy cow. Yes, transgendered people have a lot of issues with dysphoria (duh, they are in a body that doesn’t align with their gender) and are often told that feeling this way is wrong, being told that they are not valid, having their identity being negated at every turn is going to lead to a lot of issues — more so if they grow up in a homophobic household.
Most people who are not dysphoric about their body are not going to go through everything just to be what someone else wanted them to be. If that were the case, a lot of trans people would not transition and just be the son or daughter that their parents want instead of being thrown out on the street.
Once again, she saying that trans people are not valid, that it is only a whim. This is something that she doubles down, relating the struggles of many women to finding their own voice and the disconnect of strong feminine voices (mentally sexless) to being the same thing as being dysphoric.
The important thing to remember here is that the dysphoria of trans people isn’t that they simply feel like another sex for a period time or, as JKR put it mentally sexless, but their entire identity is at such odds with their physical and assigned identity at birth, that they are unable feel comfortable within their own bodies. (See above comments for the mental health issues that can stem for these things, especially in repressive or homophobic environments).
As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.
This statement sums up to the fact that she is comparing the societal message fo what a woman should be as the same thing as dysphoria. These are not the same. A lot of women do struggle with the societal ideal of what a woman should be compared to who they are and how they present themselves. Being a trans person, having that dysphoria has nothing to do with “feeling like you are more feminine or masculine” compared to a societal belief of how men and women should behave, believe and look like. Yet again, here she treats sex/sexuality and gender as the same thing. They are NOT the same thing.
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.
Breaking up this next bit because there is a lot to unpack in this paragraph. First off, if dysphoria persists past puberty (ie - TEENS) then it is likely permanent. You can find stats to support anything and a lot of people aren’t going to question numbers that authority figures throw out, especially if they are in agreeance with what is being talked about.
There are two different classifications for gender dysphoria as per the DSM and ICD, one for children and one for teens and adults, which would apply after puberty. Not all children have dysphoria that continues into puberty, this may be where the stats she pulled are based on, but I am unable to find any reliable, unbiased sources to support her claims.
Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass.
Okay, next part, she is throwing the fact that she isn’t anti-trans since she has trans friends. Much in the way someone cannot be racist because they have black friends. However, notice she puts in qualifiers for why this person counts, but other people with dysphoria and who are working transitioning are not valid in her mind. Their identity must not be real by those qualifications. It’s fine for some, but most people are totally not dysphoric.
A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.
This is a UK thing. You can find more about the qualifications for it here (
https://www.gov.uk/apply-gender-recognition-certificate), but it is not a “fill out the paperwork and you can walk around pretending you are another sex” simply as pie thing. It’s a lot more complicated and that statement is HIGHLY misleading.
Okay, not copy the next few paragraphs, but the intention of these are to bring the reader who might be teetering on the edge whether or not she is being reasonable or not back into the belief that she is being perfectly reasonable. Yes, this is still a rather misogynistic world, more so in some countries than others. Not many can disagree with that.
Then she follows that up with a statement, not for pity she says, but so that you understand how terrible things have been and why she must believe as she does. Despite her words, this is designed to gain sympathy for her, if not pity. Feeling sympathetic towards someone makes you more receptive to their message — whether or not you fully agree with them.
What follows is more claiming of support for trans people and a plea of “see how reasonable I am?” a simple thing to bring the entire article to a soft and gentle close. It’s honestly a great tactic because ending anything like this on a soft note also leaves the reader feeling more sympathetic to what is being asked of them.
However, the biggest thing to note is she NEVER once takes back her statements regarding sex being the ultimate decider of who you are. She doubles down in multiple ways on gender being a mostly fake construct and that dysphoria is not a real thing for the majority of people. There is no apology, no sympathy or understanding from her on the pain she caused to those are hurt by being told that they are not who they are.
In fact, everything is focused on making you agree with her and feel sympathy for her. As an author she should know, and most likely does, the power of words and how to use them. This also means that if a community says, “Whoa there, that is really a horrible thing to say or do for those who are still actively fighting for recognition in their own community”, and she refuses to listen or apologize knowing the power of her words, but instead only focuses on herself and making an argument for her POV — then you know that her heart and sympathies are likely not with the community.
Also, she did not address her most recent controversial tweet in response to the comment “people who menstruate” in which she appeared to mock it by responding “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
This statement really reduces being a women as only a biological process. So trans men who have not had a hysterectomy are still women, trans women cannot be women because they cannot menstruate, and of course a statement like this excludes those with genetic issues that prevent them from menstruating as well.
Okay, final comment. I mentioned early I would address the binary sex that has been a long-held opinion of people when it comes to humans. We have two sexes. Male and female. This is not true and never has been true even if you only at phenotype instead of the genetic classifications.
Sex is actually a sliding scale. While there are extreme outliers that are wholly male or wholly female, and those who fall directly in the middle (known as intersex), most of us appear as a part of the sex binary but carry the genetic aspects of the opposite sex to varying degrees as well. It’s something that really shows up strongly when looking at reactions to medications that tend to affect women and men differently.
Anyway, the result is the same. Sex is not a binary, gender is not a binary and is not the same as sex.
Hopefully, this makes sense and helps you understand why JKR is facing the sort of backlash regarding her comments that she is and why those in the community are still hurt and angry about her comments and opinion.
