Leaf Arbuthnot in the Times

While I agree that JKR is not "fixated on trans issues" but is fiercely supportive on women's issues. It seems this is something that confuses many people.

The thing that confuses me is the insistence that in countries where self ID is legal there have been no impacts on women and girls.
If Self ID has no impact then whats the point of it?
How do we record the harms of self ID on women and girls if the person doing the harm is recorded as a woman?
Its a kind of Catch 22 situation I can't get my head around.

I think that's a decent article. Accurate in its facts and including a range of voices. I'm quite clear at the end what the writer thinks but they've given space to a range of views. I would choose a bit more focus on first principles but it's understandable why not (because they're inarguable in themselves, you end up buried in paragraphs about chromosomes and I guess they want to be able to argue it). I clearly see at the end that for the author it's about which team you want to be part of, but they're reasonable about the other team.

Leaf, daughter of a Tory Baronet

Ah. That pretty much explains everything.

Yet she hasn't, at a very fundamental level, understood what's going on. That this isn't about the so-called tiny minority of trans people, but about the fact that any man can identify as a woman, and that women are being forced to go along with it, to the extent that a rape victim has to refer to her rapist as "she" in court. It's telling that Leaf doesn't once mention Rowling's latest intervention about the Scottish police's decision to refer to rapists as women if they identify as such.

She also doesn't seem to have understood that the Maya Forstater case was not about being nasty to trans people but the fact that a woman was sacked for stating the truth, namely that it's not possible to change sex.

It seems extraordinary to me that someone with such a high-powered education could be so slow to understand the basic facts of the subject she's writing about.

Womens not womenswear tho thete are finês in anti womenswear too

imagine the number of trans women who have been abused in changing rooms because if what she said

we have to imagine it because it’s not happened

Leaf, daughter of a Tory Baronet, already has ab established career as a journalist, authors & critic but publishing is fickle so one must always keen up one’s pro trans anti womenswear rights stance amirite?

I read it as a tad disingenuous too. Our Leaf (Leaf???) wants to get published in the Times and knows it's take on these issues but also wants to ram in a few pro trans claims, hence the focus on countless trans women being harassed in changing rooms entirely because of JKR but no mention of women and children being assaulted, fearing assault or having unwanted penises waved in their faces because that never happens

"Tiny community".

So we're rewriting guidance everywhere, changing the legal definition of women, removing the word woman whenever we can, and letting men into women's sports and prisons across the world, why? Since it's such a tiny little itsy bitsy harmless community?

I’m a little bemused by her fixation on trans rights, given the tiny size of the community and the hell that trans people often go through.

Bizarrely, this quote comes from towards the end of the article, after the author mapped it all out: Rowling’s essay, the loss of the word “woman”, the treatment of Maya, Kathleen Stock, the abuse. Why “bemused” ? Kathleen her self says:

“It’s just really comforting to know that someone like her has your back,” she says. Rowling has “moved the needle” on the subject of women’s rights, she adds. “Most of the world can only interpret what she’s said as transphobic, but she’s willing to be misunderstood as she accepts it as a by-product of what she wants to do — which is stand up for women, girls and lesbians.”

But the author is still bemused?! A tad disingenuous methinks.

Brava, Ms Forstater!

Absolutely

"Imagine the amount of trans women who have suffered abuse in changing rooms because of what she’s said"

So zero, then?

I ask Forstater about the view that the books are about tolerance and love; that they celebrate difference, so Rowling’s wish to exclude trans women from some women’s spaces seems odd. “I see it the other way,” Forstater says. “I think the books are a story about an authoritarian capture of institutions and about the fightback of the truth.”

LOVE this quote from Maya. It’s a predictably shite question, a question that obfuscates as usual that the issue is about excluding male people from women’s spaces because they’re male, not because they’re trans. And Maya’s response is just excellent. She just doesn’t entertain the bullshit, and absolutely nails it.

Brava, Ms Forstater!

I thought this was an interesting sentence in the article.
Like many millennials, I’m a little bemused by her fixation on trans rights, given the tiny size of the community and the hell that trans people often go through.
She sees it as centring trans people rather than women. I guess she's quite young, has no children, and has led a sheltered life.

Trans people are harmless people who suffer much

Supporting woman's rights is naturally transphobic

That still doesn't mean you should cancel JK