J.k. Rowling & the changer of spirits
Remember if you will, the first day in a new class. Maybe you heard crazy rumors about this teacher. Maybe you never even knew they existed and you're used to your siblings being able to give you their old homework assignments. You lean over and discuss your anticipations with a classmate, and they are just as clueless as you are. The teacher walks in, looks at the roster, looks up at the new class, and asks the students if they are allowed to refer to their teachers by their first name. How long is that uncomfortable silence that follows? How many kids look around to their peers for answers or clues on how to react? How many shoot their hands up to anxiously state, “No, no that's not allowed!” How many slump into their chairs, and stew in the awkwardness that is uncertainty? And how many students sit around and just wait for a good sounding answer.
To this day, that is how it looks when the topic of gender identity comes up.
So today, class, we will be discussing the public discourse on trans identity through the years, the insecurities it unearths, and the effect of the anti trans allies leading the charge on twitter.
On the off chance that you haven’t heard, the creator of a fantastical story featuring wizards, centaurs and wolf people, J.K. Rowling does not recognize the trans experience. As I just described with my opening metaphor, it seems many people are on a different page of understanding when it comes to the topic of trans folk, and I think this is natural, it's a newer topic, people need time to process, hear all sides, form an opinion. I don’t pretend to be an authority on the subject since it’s not my experience, but in her case, she feels very passionately about her opinion on the topic.
Joanne would be the girl wagging her raised hand in the air, eager to tell the teacher they shouldn’t be posing such a silly question. She’s made her opinions clear on twitter, actively aligning herself with anti-trans people like Maya Forstater, a women actively building a case that can be summed up with one hashtag: #sexisreal. Checkmate, LGBTQ plusses, Maya and J.K. are onto you! They know biology.
Back in June of 2020 she made her first remarks, poking fun at the possibly-too-PC-conscious promotion that used the phrase “people who menstruate.” Her joke embodies her wry “oh brother” attitude towards the ultra-considerate world that we now live in.
Her comment may be tempting to laugh at, after all how could someone forget such an elementary concept? However, her knee jerk reaction to this verbiage exposes a deep misunderstanding of its intention. By making this joke, she’s asserting her knowledge of previously upheld gender roles and rejecting the possibility of a new perspective, one that is inclusive to a very real and triggering experience for trans men.
I’m sure this came as a big revelation for her, but yes, some men get periods, and some may even care about menstrual health and hygiene in other countries too. She clearly finds this fact hilarious, despite it being a humiliating experience for the people who actually have to deal with that reality. It is so funny to her in fact that she felt the need to share her joke with all her fans. In a classroom, the snickering and side comments are usually hushed and aren’t meant to be shared with the class, but here they are posted, reposted and put in the news.
This was the first, and least offensive attack in her trans twitter TERF war. (TERF meaning, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, if you’d like to learn more, J. K. has an essay on the topic entitled TERF War). Here are a few honorable mentions I don’t have time to explain the ignorance of.
Joanne K. Rowling and these anti-trans ideals all culminated in the release of her recent novel, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith (Is it noteworthy that she always chooses male pen names and feels the entitlement to speak on people’s name and pronoun switches? Who knows).
The thriller novel Troubled Blood released in September 2020 is a modern example of anti-trans literature. The main villain is a mass murderer, but the book makes it a point to prove he is scary not because he kills, but because he fetishizes women’s clothing. Her fear of biological men using a feminine performance to threaten biological females is necessary context to understand this very obvious subtext. I must admit, she does a great job of putting us into her transphobic mind and imbuing her own fears into her readers. One particular line reads “..in a wig, bit of lipstick… they think you’re harmless, odd… maybe queer.”
Lindsey Ellis in her video essay “Tracing the Roots of Pop Culture Transphobia,” shares with us the origins of this fear. Her book borrows this trope from 20th century horror films that loved to feature a murderous m-f character. Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, heck even Ace Ventura! In each of these movies the villains' real crimes all take a back seat to the even scarier crime, cross dressing! Ellis explains these films tell us a little bit about how people saw “gender confusion” as a sign of weakness and mental trauma, and transition as a form of deception. This idea permeated through almost all Hollywood depictions of gender non-conformists on screen, so unfortunately any trans people watching are forced to confront the reality of how some people, including Joanne, see them because of these movies; as liars, murderers, or at the very least the butt of the joke.
Does this fear hold any water? Well, if transwomen are out there murdering, they are the BEST at not getting caught. Are there some cases of transfeminine people committing sex crimes? Yes! Are they committed at a higher rate than their cisgender counter parts? No! Has any correlation been found between transgender identity and psychosis? No! But if there were, you just know J.K. Rowling would be there to gleefully say, “I told you so!”
No, the more prevalent trend observable in recorded data actually demonstrates the opposite is true. The rate that transfeminine people of color are murdered compared to those with a cisgender experience are a lot higher. In US prisons, people identifying as trans were ten times more likely to report being sexually assaulted. In general, according to the American Journal of Public Health, transfeminine Black or Latina individuals have a higher rate of homicide and should be considered a particularly vulnerable group. And yet, J.K. Rowling sees m-fs as the perpetrators of violence that threaten the safety of cis women.
Does this mean she is more accepting of trans males? Nope! She claims they are the most concrete reason for her anti-trans activism. In J.K.’s essay, “TERF Wars” she excuses her fervor on the topic by dressing it up as concern for all the women who are being forced to transition should they exhibit non-conforming behaviors. (Who?) She writes off the wave of women in the UK seeking hormonal treatment to be silly girls grappling with same-sex urges and following a trend. (Really?) J.K. believes that trans advocates are homophobic in nature, and are trying to rectify their preferential status by bowing out of the female role entirely, insisting that they will come to regret it later.
Okay Joanne, let me help you through this point. The actual statistics show that roughly 1% of those who sought gender reassignment (of any kind, hormonal or surgical) have re-transitioned to their birth sex. That's not nobody, and I’m sure the handful of them are impressed you are thinking of them, but I’m not sure they would champion you for belittling their decisions to mere whimsey.
I understand you grew up in the generation that thinks women are more easily influenced, and you might even identify with feelings of prosecution, so why make it harder for them once they’ve made their decision? Elliot Page can probably attest to this phenomenon as he received backlash from an unlikely source after he transitioned. The Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists immediately took his transition personally, and claimed it to be a major loss for the lesbian community. Influencers dragged him for being “compulsively heteronormative,” implying that he is perpetuating misogyny because he revoked his status as a lesbian female for being a now straight male. It's as if they are scared they might run out of suitable options for lesbian mates! Needless to say, to argue over which letter in the LGBTQ+ family someone is advocating for is both selfish and short sighted, and invalidates the actual individual’s experience. If you’ve met any true allies or members of the LGBTQ+ community, you’d know they’re often pretty supportive of each other.
Her claim that trans people are homophobic is actually a nonsense in itself, and demonstrates the same lack of understanding she shows in all her other points. It misses the point that trans activists are making; trans men are not confused on their sexual orientation, they aren’t confused at all, they are extremely confident that they were born as the wrong sex.
The woman has an amazing imagination, but she can’t stretch it far enough to include a reality that someone isn’t transitioning out of insecurity, but instead bravery and sureness in their decision.
A lot of this confusion is just proof of how uninformed and disconnected someone can become when they spend time reading propaganda and the writings on the bathroom wall. Rather than use her skills of empathy and insight for this marginalized community, she chooses instead to rely on what she was told as a child and as a young woman: that transgender women are spooky and gross while trans men are laughable and a degradation of the purity of womanhood. J.K. Rowling has a lot of insecurities surrounding women. She’s unsure of their safety, she’s unsure of their identity, and she’s really unsure about how to live her life knowing this new and unnatural community is gaining traction. She is trapped in the dissonance of being a woman forced into the strict gender roles of the 1960 and 70s and being a heavily influential person in this new accepting world that features non-binary people.
Must be hard, almost as hard as finding out your favorite fiction writer doesn't believe you exist. But her remarks couldn’t possibly be dangerous, could they?
2020, the year she made her little twitter joke, saw a substantial increase in the number of trans people being murdered than the previous year. A fifth of them were murdered inside their own homes. Much to my chagrin, J.K. and her new novel has exhumed this idea that trans women are predators and liars, with the ultimate goal of doing violence against cis women, while trans men are frivolous fakes challenging the sanctity of womanhood.
The depiction of trans characters throughout the decades has come a long way. Back in the 1960s, when society still saw trans women as murderers with mommy issues, people’s insecurities about gender identity were much higher than they are now. Black and white education videos meant for school children showcased the most traditional performance of gender as the only acceptable one.
In the past decade, the trans experience has finally begun to be represented as more than a threat to society. The nomenclature alone has had an evolution, from tranny to sweet transvestite from transexual Transylvania to trans individual. On screen portrayals are more likely to be nuanced and sympathetic while capturing the vulnerability of these people in dangerous situations.
Pose, a Netflix original, speaks to the real life experience of prosecution and systematic neglect of trans people in the 1980s. Euphoria features a character who is transgender, a teenager, and a sex worker; a reality for some but a shocking perversion of American principals to others.
My message to J.K. Rowling and all of you students is this: never stop learning. Never stop looking for new perspectives, and always consider them with open minds. Free yourself, Joanne, free yourself from the oppression of so many pushy students and sticklers that came before you, and open yourself up to the possibilities. It’s possible you’re actually a victim here, but your oppressors are not and never have been trans people. The perpetrators are and always have been those who impose a strict and limiting binary system that we all now see for what it is. Arbitrary.
Thank you for your contribution to the class, but next time, keep the chit chat to a minimum. It's distracting for people who are trying to learn.
Kay is a composer of stories, songs and screenplays. This Los Angeles copywriter is a renaissance woman, classically trained with a cosmopolitan focus. She is a lifelong scrapbooker and has a knack for rendering images on an Etch-a-sketch.
