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 failed to care about): is not universal.
I know what it is to be me. I have absolutely no idea what it is to feel like I was born in the wrong body. None. Whatsoever. I cannot even begin to fathom it. It is not real -- to me.
Nor do I know what it is to move through the world as a Black person, as someone who doesn’t speak English, as a non-American, as a million other things that are not, exactly, me. I cannot, on a fundamental level, 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 experience of other people, who do have it.
This is what it comes down to: It’s not up to me, or your mom, or your mom’s OB, 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. Because I do not get it I have no option but to accept this truth from anyone who does.
My understanding or lack thereof is – and I cannot stress this enough – entirely irrelevant, and should have no bearing on anyone else's access to whatever it is they need to access.
This is a difficult thing to talk about on the internet. Because what I am saying is that I am committing a kind of doublethink, which is easy to take out of context and/or deliberately misunderstand. Easier to keep it all between friends; definitely stay away from Twitter.
But JKR, no, she keeps going. She has nothing against trans women, she has trans friends… She’s just very, very concerned about the “real,” “biological” women. What about them? Have we forgotten how much they still need fighting for?
No, thank you, I have not. I am still a woman. I know. We all bloody know. (If you don’t, try biking down a shared pathway. The women will immediately get out of the way. The gay men and black men will get out of the way. Straight white men will stand their ground. Because straight white men have no concept of their bodies as under threat. They move through the world as if they have every right to take up space. The rest of us have no such illusions.)
Women have so few safe spaces. JKR knows the fear is real. She wants to protect women. This is good. This is also where it all goes wrong.
JKR says one of the things we need to protect women from are men-who-say-they-are-women. Biological women need their safety, she says. They are under threat, she says, which is true, from trans women, she implies, which is not.
The solution to taking care of one vulnerable group is not to throw another, perhaps even more vulnerable group, under the bus.
“But,” say some of my friends, trying so hard to do the right thing, “what about a person who’s been abused?” They paint visions of someone coming into the women’s changing room in a dress, swinging their dick around. It’s an image JKR has worked hard to make real, so when she’s accused of TERFiness she can hold up this straw man and say, No, look, I’m not hating those people; I’m just protecting these other people!
As if there is a conflict. As if we all need to choose between the abused woman and the trans woman; we cannot possibly accept the reality of both.
What trans woman in this world, conscious every second of the fragility of their body, would walk into a women’s changing room at any stage of their transition and make it obvious they had been born a man? (If someone does show up in a dress, swinging their dick around, guess what! That’s a man. They’re not allowed. Treat them accordingly.)
Women are marginalized. Trans women are marginalized. All are in danger and in need of protection. I do not understand the experiences of all women, and frankly most of them are none of my fucking business. But I can hold the space, just as I do for Black Lives Matter, to Protect the Dolls.
When JKR comes down on the side of women – by pretending there is a side with other women against them, she is not helping. By funding “sex-based rights” she is not helping. She is under the mistaken impression that she gets to say who is a woman and who isn’t, and it. is. not. helping.
Think what you want. Say what you think in private. Talk to your friends. Write on a blog that no one reads. But remember that your private misgivings, anchored as they are in your non-definitive experience of living, should never be allowed to threaten or endanger other humans. Especially not other women.
Recipe: Richard is very excited about making an absurd amount of these for Lunar New Year. I'm letting him.
