What has JK Rowling said or done that’s transphobic

Ooo. It's very superficial and has nasty little sets of scare quotes (you just couldn't help yourself could you?), but it's actually better than I expected. I mean, the AI helped of course, but kudos for sort of trying.

Of course, you've missed the fundmentals out, without which it really doesn't stand up as a good representaion.

For example

The Second Wave Feminist analysis of Gender vs Sex and the repressive action of Gender upon women's social experiences and self knowledge which is critical to understanding the GC position - remember, GC isn't anti trans, it's anti gender. Trans people only get the flack because the TRA movement wants to reify Gender when really any progressive society should be challenging it as something that serves no purpose other than to limit human potential.

You've listed "fairness, service provision, accurate data collection, dignity, safety, and protections against discrimination and violence" as "sex-based rights" but completely failed to mention the historic and indeed contemporay treatment of female-bodied people by male that caused these rights to exist in the first place, leaving the impression that there is no real basis for them to exist, which is hardly accurate.

You haven't mentioned the injustice of having no name at all for the female (and indeed male) half of humanity, nor the injustice of disconnecting us from our history and from each other.

You haven't mentioned that many women simply don't see themselves as part of an identity/personality-based group of female-bodies so-called "cis" women and male-bodied so-called "trans" women, finding this to be a more sexist and reductive way to think about women than simply as female people with a full range of diversity of mind and identity, and that these women find having an identity imposed upon them for the benefit of male-bodied trans women an act of sexist aggression and marginalising of the embodied female experience.

These are all signficant foundations of the Gender Critical Feminist position. I'm quite surprised you did not realise that.

But now I know that you don't understand the GC perpsective well enough to describe it, no wonder your arguments against us are so, well, poorly made!

I don’t think it’s a question of whether something is “correct” or “incorrect”. Why are you so determined that trans people must be "wrong"?

It’s no more “incorrect” to be trans than it is to be gay or to have a disorder of sex development — they are simply varieties of human diversity.

A trans person can be fully aware of their physical anatomy while still having a persistent sense of themselves as male or female that does not correspond to the sex associated with that anatomy. That is a neurocognitive and psychological experience; it is not the same thing as being factually mistaken about what body parts they have. it's not a proposition that can meaningfully be marked as right or wrong, it's simply an cognitive reality that some people have to live with.

I’m using the examples you introduced. I presumed you thought they were relevant. They are examples of the brain telling the person something ‘incorrect’ about their body ie a limb that is theirs does not belong to them or a missing limb is in fact present. Which begs the question why is so controversial to suggest the brain of a transperson is also telling them something that isn’t true?

Well then you are not addressing the only point I was making 💁🏼‍♀️. I was trying to explain that the brain can represent the body in ways that do not necessarily map directly onto physical anatomy without the issue being mental illness.

The examples were relevant because they demonstrate that the brain’s representation of the body and self is not simply a passive read-out of anatomy ( as so many people on this thread are repeatedly insisting). That does not mean the person is “deluded” about their anatomy.

Someone with a phantom limb, or phantom limb pain, can know perfectly well that the limb has been amputated while still experiencing it / the pain as present. Someone with a disturbance of body ownership can see and understand that a limb is physically attached to them while nevertheless experiencing it as not belonging to them. These things can coexist at the same time.

Similarly a trans person can know perfectly well what physical sex characteristics they have while persistently experiencing themselves as the other sex. They are not necessarily making the factual claim “my anatomy is different from what it actually is”. Nor is that experience "wrong" , deluded or necessarily indicative of a mental illness.

But that’s the result of a brain injury, an abnormality.

Are you suggesting that trans people are produced by brain injury?

If it’s not delusional, answer me this without resorting to circularity or regressive stereotypes.

What does it mean to feel like a woman?

But how do they know they are experiencing themselves as the other sex? What criteria are they using to determine this? Not that it matters. As long as they use the spaces and facilities relevant to their sexed body, there is no problem with them “experiencing” themselves in any way they please.

I don’t think it’s a question of whether something is “correct” or “incorrect”. Why are you so determined that trans people must be "wrong"?

It’s no more “incorrect” to be trans than it is to be gay or to have a disorder of sex development — they are simply varieties of human diversity.

A trans person can be fully aware of their physical anatomy while still having a persistent sense of themselves as male or female that does not correspond to the sex associated with that anatomy. That is a neurocognitive and psychological experience; it is not the same thing as being factually mistaken about what body parts they have. it's not a proposition that can meaningfully be marked as right or wrong, it's simply an cognitive reality that some people have to live with.

How many times can I explain this? There aren’t “criteria” in the sense you keep asking for, because not every aspect of self-perception is arrived at by consciously comparing yourself with an external checklist.

Think about body ownership. How do you know your hand is your hand? You don’t examine it against a set of criteria for what “my hand” is supposed to feel like and then reach a conclusion. Your brain simply represents it as belonging to you. And we know from neurological conditions that this representation can sometimes diverge from the anatomy itself.

Or take handedness. A left-handed person does not first establish what “being left-handed feels like” by studying other left-handed people. They discover that their own nervous system has a stable preference for using one side of the body.
Even pain works this way. You don’t need an external benchmark telling you what somebody else’s pain feels like before you can know that you are in pain. It is directly experienced.

Similarly a trans woman is not working through a checklist of supposedly female traits and concluding “therefore I must be a woman”. She experiences a persistent incongruence between her sexed anatomy and her internal representation of herself as female. “What external criteria is she using?” assumes that all self-recognition must arise through comparison with other people. It simply doesn’t.

The examples were relevant because they demonstrate that the brain’s representation of the body and self is not simply a passive read-out of anatomy ( as so many people on this thread are repeatedly insisting). That does not mean the person is “deluded” about their anatomy.

Someone with a phantom limb, or phantom limb pain, can know perfectly well that the limb has been amputated while still experiencing it / the pain as present. Someone with a disturbance of body ownership can see and understand that a limb is physically attached to them while nevertheless experiencing it as not belonging to them. These things can coexist at the same time.

Similarly a trans person can know perfectly well what physical sex characteristics they have while persistently experiencing themselves as the other sex. They are not necessarily making the factual claim “my anatomy is different from what it actually is”. Nor is that experience "wrong" , deluded or necessarily indicative of a mental illness.

Hmmm
actually your use of these words is doing more work than you acknowledge.

“Correct” can mean factually accurate, but when you apply it to a person’s identity or way of being it also easily takes on a normative — even moral or religious — sense of being the “right” or “proper” kind of person.

My point is that being trans is not usefully understood as either a factual mistake or a moral error. A trans person can understand their physical anatomy perfectly well while still recognised/ perceive themselves as the other sex.

That experience is not a false proposition about anatomy; it is a neurocognitive reality that they have to live with everyday. So I don’t think that whether a trans person is “correct” or “incorrect” about who they are is a meaningful or relevant question.

Does no one else have an innate feeling that they are a woman? I know I’m a woman because I menstruate, get pregnant, have the anatomy etc. I adhere to some of the female stereotypes in that i occasionally wear make up, take care of my appearance etc. But I genuinely “feel like a woman” aside from that. If I woke up tomorrow with a penis and no memory I still think I would feel like a woman. I suppose it’s possible that it’s just so ingrained in me from the physical and social attributes. I can’t really verbalise why I have that feeling or what makes me feel that way (besides the obvious).

So you are saying that there is some as yet missing piece of science that will prove that transgender women are women and that I am a man in denial ?

edit even though I act like a female ( the result of decade of training ) and most transgender males don’t ?

Your examples demonstrate that the brain’s representation of the body can be false. The brain can tell the person something that is patently untrue. The person may truly believe it, but it still doesn’t make it true. Very few people would argue that there are no people who experience gender dysphoria (although trans activists have attempted to decouple the notion of gd from ‘being trans’). You could characterise that as the brain telling them something that is untrue, and them believing it.

What trans activists (and possibly you) are suggesting though is that rather than acknowledging that the brain is misrepresenting the body, we should give primacy to the ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ or ‘identity’ or whatever you want to call it that the brain is presenting as reality. As you have amply demonstrated, we don’t do that with any other disconnect between the brain and the body. Which brings us back to why does this uniquely apply to sex?

Rowling holds gender-critical beliefs under which sex is immutable and trans women remain male, campaigns to ensure that law and institutions treat sex rather than gender identity as decisive in all contexts, and repeatedly has used language that portrays trans female identity as false, performative or male intrusion. People who define transphobia as including systematic invalidation or denigration of transgender identities therefore have substantial direct evidence for calling her transphobic.

No — this is the same leap again.

The examples demonstrate that the brain’s representation of the body is not simply a passive readout from anatomy. They do not demonstrate that every divergence between that representation and anatomy is therefore a “false belief”, still less a delusion or mental illness.

You are also assuming that whenever internal experience and anatomy diverge, medicine must give primacy to anatomy and somehow train the brain out of the experience. But that is not a general principle of medicine at all. Treatment depends on the nature of the phenomenon and on what actually reduces distress and improves functioning. Different conditions are treated differently.

Indeed, modern diagnostic medicine specifically does not classify transgender identity as a mental disorder. The WHO moved gender incongruence out of the mental-disorders chapter of ICD-11 because the evidence does not support understanding trans identity itself as mental illness.

So the question “why does this uniquely apply to sex?” has a fairly straightforward answer: because different neuropsychological phenomena are different phenomena. We do not decide how to understand or treat one condition by analogy alone; we look at its actual characteristics and the empirical evidence about what helps.

No — this is the same leap again.

The examples demonstrate that the brain’s representation of the body is not simply a passive readout from anatomy. They do not demonstrate that every divergence between that representation and anatomy is therefore a “false belief”, still less a delusion or mental illness.

You are also assuming that whenever internal experience and anatomy diverge, medicine must give primacy to anatomy and somehow train the brain out of the experience. But that is not a general principle of medicine at all. Treatment depends on the nature of the phenomenon and on what actually reduces distress and improves functioning. Different conditions are treated differently.

Indeed, modern diagnostic medicine specifically does not classify transgender identity as a mental disorder. The WHO moved gender incongruence out of the mental-disorders chapter of ICD-11 because the evidence does not support understanding trans identity itself as mental illness.

So the question “why does this uniquely apply to sex?” has a fairly straightforward answer: because different neuropsychological phenomena are different phenomena. We do not decide how to understand or treat one condition by analogy alone; we look at its actual characteristics and the empirical evidence about what helps.

No — this is the same leap again.

The examples demonstrate that the brain’s representation of the body is not simply a passive readout from anatomy. They do not demonstrate that every divergence between that representation and anatomy is therefore a “false belief”, still less a delusion or mental illness.

You are also assuming that whenever internal experience and anatomy diverge, medicine must give primacy to anatomy and somehow train the brain out of the experience. But that is not a general principle of medicine at all. Treatment depends on the nature of the phenomenon and on what actually reduces distress and improves functioning. Different conditions are treated differently.

Indeed, modern diagnostic medicine specifically does not classify transgender identity as a mental disorder. The WHO moved gender incongruence out of the mental-disorders chapter of ICD-11 because the evidence does not support understanding trans identity itself as mental illness.

So the question “why does this uniquely apply to sex?” has a fairly straightforward answer: because different neuropsychological phenomena are different phenomena. We do not decide how to understand or treat one condition by analogy alone; we look at its actual characteristics and the empirical evidence about what helps.