She’s the first author to become a billionaire based on her book sales as Harry Potter became the bestselling series in history. J.K. Rowling is simply too famous to cancel, no matter her Twitter tirades and in spite of the tsk-tsking from the actors she gave careers to, and she knows it. Hence, Rowling’s taking a recent and rising strain of transgender orthodoxy to task in the name of feminism, and frankly, it’s long overdue.
It’s important to start with some stipulations. Rowling is a lifelong liberal who supported and donated to the Labour Party until the ascent of Jeremy Corbyn. Since escaping poverty and an abusive marriage to become one of the most successful authors of all time, she’s become a renowned philanthropist and advocate for domestic violence victims. And to the consternation of critics, she’s spent the past few years retconning various Harry Potter characters into being gay.
I say this so you understand that Rowling breaking her silence on the recent extreme pivot of transgender activism isn’t an act of conservatism, but one of feminism.
For years, the wokest of critics have speculated whether Rowling is “transphobic,” a consensus that the entire media, from Hollywood to the nation’s top newspapers, have now reached. So, Rowling has nothing to lose. She’s not outing herself as anti-gay or even anti-transgender. But she’s opened the floodgates on explaining why the erasure of biological definitions of sex, encouraging children to embrace transgender identities rather than wait and see if they’re a part of the majority that desist, and minimizing the lived experiences of cisgender women are antithetical to feminism.
Less-famous celebrities would feel compelled to cower after a series of innocuous tweets got branded as bigoted by the mob. Rowling instead wrote a lengthy essay offering a detailed explanation of why she isn’t willing to be given into groupthink. She writes:
The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.
The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.
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.
Most people probably aren’t aware — I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly — that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.
Some of Rowling’s arguments, such as the high rate of children and teenagers with gender dysphoria usually desisting, are familiar to both scientific and conservative audiences. But the efficacy of her essay comes from Rowling’s willingness to say the part out loud that few else have: Denying the existence of biological sex erases the lived experiences of cisgender women and puts them in danger.
Rowling has made clear that she’s not anti-transgender by the former definition of the term. She respects people’s preferred pronouns and admits that accepting transgender identities is often the single best solution to gender dysphoria in adults. But the notions that biological sex is a social construct, that simply saying you’re another gender makes it so, and that womanhood is more than a feeling are now considered heretical among some activists.
“‘Woman’ is not a costume,” Rowling writes. “‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.”
For Rowling, it’s personal. Although the public has long known that her ex-husband was violently abusive toward her, Rowling has previously declined to go into detail about it. In her essay, she acknowledges having survived domestic abuse as well as sexual assault, framing her argument as such:
On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.
In practice, we know that there’s no epidemic of grown men manipulating transgender bathroom bills to abuse little girls, and even with new laws, most people implicitly understand the difference between a genuinely transgender woman and a man simply saying he is to gain access to a bathroom. But it’s a real concern for a woman who’s worked in the space of domestic violence shelters and poverty among children, society’s most vulnerable people who wouldn’t necessarily have the protection of clear-headed bystanders.
And perhaps most salient to her argument is that to grow up as a cisgender woman is its own experience, and just as that identity may be intractable to transgender women, it’s distinct and endemic to cisgender women.
The mob may come for Rowling, but clearly, she doesn’t care. Her legacy is already cemented. So, she can say what plenty of other feminists are too scared to say.
