We are allowed to talk about it. You and me, in a safe space over a cup of tea. Because we are women. We have been womaning for a while now and we know that it is not easy. You can’t just… become part of it, like book club. We have fought, every inch of our lives, and it doesn’t feel fair – that this could be co-opted, or devalued.
We are allowed to have this conversation. I, and the other cis women of my acquaintance, are allowed to have these thoughts.
But we need to remember that this experience we have, of being women, born as women, with every intention of dying as women (probably sooner than we should, thanks to the many “female troubles” that medical research has so far failed to care sufficiently about): is not universal.
I do not – I cannot – have any idea what it feels like to be born into the wrong body. I cannot, in point of fact, fundamentally understand any experience of living that is not my own.
But. I can try. For what it's worth. Read books, listen to podcasts, listen. I can leave a space where that understanding might be, and I can fill it with the lived experiences of other people, who do have it.
This is what it comes down to: It’s not up to me, or your mom, or the president of the United States, or JKR. It is up to you. If you say you are a woman, you are a woman.
My understanding or lack thereof is – and I cannot stress this enough – entirely irrelevant, and should have no bearing on anyone else's identity or access to whatever it is they need to access.
JKR has trouble with this. And if she were almost anyone else, I wouldn’t care. And if she didn’t donate – what I can only imagine are substantial amounts of – money to “gender-based rights” groups, I wouldn’t care. And if she didn’t double down and down and down… Well, people have been wrong on the internet before.
But as Rowan rounds her sixth listen of Harry Potter, and well-meaning friends wonder, quietly, if maybe JKR doesn’t actually have a bit of a point, and isn’t it awful how she’s been attacked, well. I need to know where I stand. I need to be very, very clear.
I listened to The Witch Trials recently. It’s the kind of thing that make me miss high school debate, with its clearly signposted arguments, unforgiving cross examination, clear winner and loser, and utter absence of real-world policy-making. There is nothing more frustrating than an interview where the interviewer cannot treat the interviewee as an “opponent,” no matter how much you suspect they would like to.
And people get so muddled when they’re not bound by debate rules. I felt a bit like a college judge at a local novice tournament: forced to be the one who turned a featureless mush into a sensible flow chart just so that I could begin to get some kind of handle on the situation before turning in my ballot.
As far as I can tell, JKR has three main issues:
- Children.
- Men who “identify” as women but have not completed or perhaps even begun a physical transition.
- “Women” who are not, definitionally, women (in her words, not capable of menstruation).
Let’s take them, as 16-year-old me said on more than one occasion, one at a time.
Children.
Interviewer: Now, you've said that you've been immersing yourself in a lot of reading – memoirs and philosophy and academic literature all around the subject. And I know that one thing that's made this conversation about minors medically transitioning so contentious is that because it's quite new, there aren't a lot of authoritative studies. And so with the studies that are out there, the assertion is that people on all sides are cherry-picking to fit their arguments. What evidence are you seeing that makes you think that you are right to be worried?
JKR: I haven't yet found a study that hasn't found that the majority of young people, children and adolescents, experiencing gender dysphoria, will grow out of it. Now, I haven't found a single study that contradicts that and I have gone looking. The majority of children will, if allowed to go through adolescence, many of them will grow up, not all, but many will grow up to be gay and their gender dysphoria will resolve. Why then, if that's the evidence, are we immediately putting children onto an affirmative path? Can we follow the science? There's activism, and all activism isn't equal.I genuinely think that we are watching one of the worst medical scandals in a century. And I believe that those who should have known better, and I'm talking here, not God knows, about trans people, gender dysphoric people, distressed young people. I'm certainly not talking about them. I am talking about medics and those who have cheered this on unquestioningly, creating a climate in which many people trying to raise red flags have been intimidated and silenced. And I would ask proponents of gender identity ideology who are so militant, who are so determined on no debate, I would ask them, what if you are wrong? If I'm wrong, honestly, hallelujah. If I'm wrong, great. People aren't being harmed. But if you are wrong, you have cheered on, you have created a climate, quite a threatening climate in which whistleblowers and young people themselves are being intimidated out of raising concerns.
JKR, a consummate world builder, here gives us a very clear picture of how any child with slight gender dysphoria is immediately “cheered on” to transition without delay, while all conflicting opinions are “intimidated and silenced.” It is expertly done – full speaker points – but she has -- and I heard her do this again and again -- created an enemy for the sole purpose of fighting it.
If that threatening climate exists, she’s right that it shouldn’t. But she’s so busy proving herself right she completely fails to address the central question, which is whether children should have access to certain drugs and procedures. At what age can a person make this kind of decision? 12? 13? 16? 18? 25? Not just to wear different clothes or use the pronoun of their choice, but to physically transition? That is literally the only actual question here.
I don’t have an answer yet. Partly that may be another debate holdover – it’s my job to argue for an ideal world, not come up with real-world solutions. But partly too I think this is not a question that can have a blanket answer, because JKR is also wrong about the harms all being one-sided. The reason this is even an issue in the first place is because waiting to transition until after puberty can make it a far more difficult and traumatic experience, both physically and mentally. Puberty fucks ya up, and even more so if it’s the wrong puberty. “A majority” may end up one way or the other, but this is an intensely personal experience, which can perhaps only be dealt with on a personal, individual level.
I tend to come down on the side of listening to people, and trusting them, and letting them lead their own lives. An adult’s job is not to protect a child from all pain, but to be there while they navigate it, and help them turn into a decent human being. A child dealing with gender dysphoria needs support – and, to a certain extent in this day and age, cheerleading. The issue has existed in darkness and shame and confusion for so long that maybe we do need a finger on the scales now, to help balance things out. In the same way that saying Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean all lives don’t; it just means that right now, these ones need a little extra attention. And if someone tells JKR to butt out, consider that it is perhaps not a question of “silencing” those who have tried to “raise red flags” so much as it is telling them to mind their own goddam business, and let the individual and their family and their friends and their doctor get on with it.
Eliminate the danger, the threats, the shouting down, the trolls, and it becomes very simple: Do we provide access or do we not?
2. Men who “identify as women.” And, you know what,
3. “Women.” My argument here covers both these points, which may actually be the same point after all.
Interviewer: You have said that you respect trans people. You said that you would march with them. That you think the transition is right for some people. But you also say that there's a real difference between biological women and trans women and a meaningful distinction between the two in their experiences.
And I think some of your critics point to that and say, you're essentially making trans women second-class women, you know, like you're almost women, that despite all of their efforts to live in the world as women, as what feels right and authentic to them, you are essentially saying, I'll treat you as a woman, you are an honorary woman, but this distinction that you are emphasizing, the biological distinction that you see as being so important, it can feel hurtful to them. They are almost a thing, but not quite. Something is being held back. Can you understand the pain that that could cause?
JKR: Yes, is the short answer. Yes, I can understand that hurt. The thing is, women are the only group to my knowledge that are being asked to embrace members of their oppressor class unquestioningly with no caveat. Now, on an individual basis, and I think many people new to this argument would see it on that level, because many people of my generation particularly think that we're talking about old school transexuals, people who have been through full sex reassignment because of profound gender dysphoria. And I feel 100% compassion for such people, and I would absolutely respect their pronouns always have, always will, and would want, as I say, them to have comfortable, easy lives. This movement, though, is pressing for something different, very different. This movement has argued, continues to argue, that a man may have had no surgery whatsoever. But if he feels himself to be a woman, the door of every woman's bathroom, changing room, rape centre should be open to him. I say no, I'm afraid I say no.
Brilliant of her, isn’t it? To say that after all this she is not actually talking about transexuals at all. Nope, she loves ‘em. So long as they’re, you know, those comfortable ones from the 1950s, preferably still in black and white, and they come at her individually rather than en masse. (She did the same with the children, “certainly not talking about them.”) Wow.
And yes, she can even understand the hurt. Okay. Take a beat.
…
She understands it… and does. not. give. a. single. fuck. She causes pain with the language she chooses and she will absolutely go on choosing it. But if she isn’t talking about transexuals, who is she talking about? Aha: a man who “may have had no surgery whatsoever” but still “feels himself to be a woman.”
This is the threat she’s fighting: Men who are going to say they’re women and thus gain access to all the women stuff. Like we’ll all just be stuck at that point, hoist on our own petards. Oop, well, we did say we’d trust people so even though these ones are clearly violating that trust and lying through their teeth and taking advantage, we’ll just have to let them get away with it because after all it would be hypocritical otherwise. I… what?
You know why Order of the Phoenix is my favorite Harry Potter book? Because Dolores Umbridge is not a Death Eater. She is a far better villain than Voldemort. No red eyes, no talking to snakes, no black cloak. She isn’t doing all this because she selfishly wants to live forever; she is doing it for the good of the children. (Okay, she enjoys a little pain, but you know, layers.) The best bad guys are the ones who don’t think they are.
So to convince herself that she’s the good guy, JKR builds these straw men, builds this world where she is so obviously the reasonable one here. She’s Umbridge, convinced that Dumbledore wants Fudge’s job. She’s on defense people, not offense! Everyone is out to get her and she’s just trying to protect people! She is protecting women, real women, from that man who is obviously a man, can’t you see, is she the only one with eyes?
It is so, so clear to her. She hasn’t yet realized that not only is that clarity gone, it was never here, and the illusion of it should go, and good riddance.
Let me ask you, JKR, when does a man who feels himself to be a woman become enough of a woman for you? How many drugs, how many surgeries? Does it only count when they put on lipstick and a dress? Are they allowed to have short hair? Do they need full fake boobs or is stuffing acceptable, and is a B enough or would you rather a C or D to be on the safe side? Could you provide a checklist please?
JKR sees a world divided down the middle. Two sides, female and male. For her, to accept transgender women is to “embrace our oppressors.” There is no room for nuance. It’s us against them, forever. Her imagination, shockingly, fails her. She’s stuck on defense and cannot imagine her way forward – not into offense, but out of the game entirely. She’s so focused on maintaining “an accurate definition of sex difference” (and building a world where those who question this need are no better than a pitchfork-wielding mob), she cannot see how problematic that is.
For one thing, no matter how hard she tries, there will never be one single way to define what a woman is. I have not, by choice, menstruated in eight years. Not every woman can conceive and carry a child. Not all of us have only two X chromosomes. We do not all have a cervix and uterus.
For another thing, even if you can find that one shining defining feature… It is still absolutely none of my business.
I don’t want to live in a world of clarity, where every person is only one thing or the other. I don’t want to live in a world where the first thing you need to know about somebody, the first question you ask is What are you? I don’t want to live in a world where I am immediately concerned by the genitals of whomever I’m talking to.
My final lesson from debate: You don’t win by competing; you win by not needing to compete. JKR cannot make the leap. If she hasn’t by this point, I don’t think she’s going to. I’ve listened to other podcasts too, listened to Potterhead trans activists grappling with this, the open letters they’ve written her, the space they’ve given her, the dying hope that if they can just explain it to her properly, she’ll understand. I don’t think she will, but at least now I know where I stand.
Everyone gets to be who they are. It has nothing to do with me. They can share as much or as little with the world as they like. They can wear what they like, cut their hair how they like, modify their bodies how they like. My only obligation is to treat them as who they are, as the person they present to the world. Not the person I secretly believe them to be, or think they should be, and not as a category; an individual.
Thus, I affirm the resolution. JKR has gone over to the dark side. I stand ready for cross examination. Thank you.
