To think that JK Rowling is being very unfairly treated.

[Impatiens]

For some people the name JK Rowling seems to have become a byword for 'bigot' or 'transphobe' - you only have to mention her name on twitter to cause a storm of accusations and abuse about her and I think it's really unjust.

This week it was announced that a new Harry Potter TV series is in development. Cue howls of outrage from certain people, repeating the same insults and even accusing her of being a bad influence on children. I feel so bad for her. She's always been someone who seemed to want to do good with her wealth and whose books (whether you like them or not) sent a positive message about the need to fight against evil.

A very brief recap of things Rowling has said about the trans debate that have caused anger -

1. Human biological sex can't be changed (females can't become males/vice versa) and no one should lose their job for saying that.

1. The word 'Woman' is being erased, particularly from important health messages that only affect females, and replaced with dehumanising terms like 'menstruators', 'cervix-havers' etc

1. Children/young people who have Gender Dysphoria/Identify as Transgender, shouldn't be given medication as part of any treatment because they're too young to understand the potential side effects.

YABU = JK Rowling's comments were offensive and she deserves the abuse she gets
YANBU = JK Rowling's comments were respectful opinions and she's entitled to voice them without getting abuse.

I think that there's a massive cross over between the young adults who grew up thinking they were actually magical and their Hogwarts letter was just lost in the post and those who believe that biological sex can be changed by wishful thinking.

@UntilYourNextHairBrainedScheme

midgedude Career of Evil

seriously!!! Have you read Career of Evil. Obviously you haven't. Just lies........

The verbal (written) abuse she’s, a hugely successful, wealthy person, has received demonstrate why it’s so difficult for women to seek to retain (or get back) the word, single sex facilities and services, and sports, scholarships and so on.

Women are banned from social media for making similar, factual statements, while people verbally abusing them are not.

Some official statistics, including crime, no longer record sex. Newspapers are referring to male bodied criminals who have committed violent / sexual offences as ‘she’.

The Labour Party, SNP, Lib Dems and Greens have all implied or outright stated that is ‘transphobic’ to object to these things.

There is a series of books for adults called the Vorkosigan series (written by Lois McMaster Bujold, and they are excellent) in which galactic medicine has reached the point at which it is entirely possible for a woman who is debarred from inheriting her father's title because of her sex to go to a different planet, pay for relevant surgery, and be turned in a matter of weeks and with no apparent after-effects into a man in all respects apart from genitals which are still growing to normal size. It is assumed that he will be able to breed.

It is SF. Fantasy. Not intended to be taken as true, any more than the planet where only men are allowed to live and reproduction is possible through gene manipulation and the use of uterine replicators, or the space-dwelling race of humans genetically manipulated to have four arms and no legs (Quaddies), or the race of humans genetically manipulated to have complete sets of both male and female genitals and secondary sex characteristics, and swap from one to the other at will (Herms). Quaddies and Herms breed true rather than returning to the base stock after a couple of generations, too. And that's not going into the people genetically manipulated to be water-breathers, or to be living sex-toys, or cloned so that the original rich old man has a nice new body for his brain to be transplanted into.

None of this stuff is supposed to be aspirational, is it?

@NoraEphronsNeck - it's great when people like you can challenge this stuff 'on the ground'.

It's exactly that kind of unthinking insult that I'm talking about here, the normalisation and acceptance of the idea that Rowling is a terrible bigoted person with no knowledge of what she actually said. I'm so glad you wrote that email, these small acts make a big difference!

JoodyBlue you what now? Tempest and her sidekick believe Strike had his leg voluntarily amputated.

YANBU. I want and I hope we all want trans people to like safe, dignified, respected lives, with equality of opportunity. I'll respect pronouns and recognise transwomen as transwomen. But there is nothing unreasonable in what Joanne Rowling says.

@UntilYourNextHairBrainedScheme

JoodyBlue you what now? Tempest and her sidekick believe Strike had his leg voluntarily amputated.

craziness - give us the quote - you can't can you?

@DynamoKev

I don't even like her work (not knocking it - just not my thing) but it's ridiculous how she (and anyone else) is vilified for having a considered opinion on an important issue. We should be very careful how much we try to shut people up if they say things we don't agree with.

Exactly. No one has to like her work or admire her at all to think that the reaction to her attempts to speak on an issue - in a totally reasonable, rational tone - is shocking and wrong.

@UntilYourNextHairBrainedScheme - please accept my apology. I misunderstood what you were posting. I got myself all wound up, over nothing. I am sorry

JoodyBlue I thought so - I wondered why you were attacking me! No problem - thank you for acknowledging the mix up before I felt driven to try and work out how to skim though a book I only have on my e-reader 😁

The demands for quotes are a bit insane - who on earth learns quotes from detective novels by heart? The Strike novels are fantastic, engrossing, well developed detective fiction but they aren't high literature or poetry; no matter how much readers enjoyed them I doubt many can quote sections of them!

The chapter in the cafe of the Satchi gallery would be a source of relevant quotes though I think 😉

@Dozer

The verbal (written) abuse she’s, a hugely successful, wealthy person, has received demonstrate why it’s so difficult for women to seek to retain (or get back) the word, single sex facilities and services, and sports, scholarships and so on.

Women are banned from social media for making similar, factual statements, while people verbally abusing them are not.

Some official statistics, including crime, no longer record sex. Newspapers are referring to male bodied criminals who have committed violent / sexual offences as ‘she’.

The Labour Party, SNP, Lib Dems and Greens have all implied or outright stated that is ‘transphobic’ to object to these things.

This bears repeating.

@Until I can't remember it, which book, I might revisit. I did enjoy them. Thanks for being gracious :)

What I actually came on to post is that Troubled Blood is a novel about people not being what they seem and misjudging people who hide behind stereotypes and use type casting to their advantage. Its hard to avoid spoilers though!

I’m really enjoying the theory that this was a calculated move to increase her sales by slipping into a tombstone sized book a couple of paragraphs with a reference to a serial killer sometimes wearing a woman’s coat and a wig, and legions of middle aged women decoding that this was permission for them to unleash their hitherto undiscovered transphobia and support her by buying her book, and that was an epic get rich quick scheme for a multi millionaire.

But she somehow was simultaneously completely oblivious to the teeming hordes of her slash writing, pronoun declaring, trans and non binary uber stans and fans who gave her fair warning that if she turned out to be remotely thinking about being gender critical they would definitely institute a mass boycott of every book, play, theme park or product line she’s ever written, produced or been associated with, while threatening her with rape and violence on every social media platform in existence.

I think what offends me most about this theory is that she’d be that stupid

Seriously though, she’s bonkers rich. She doesn’t have to write a word again ever to make her crust. She really doesn’t need to whip up controversy to sell her books.

In Career of Evil - the scene in the Satchi gallery Café is the one with Tempest and her hanger-on (I can't remember his name), where they ask whether he got his leg amputated because he wanted to be an amputee rather than because he was blown up by an IED/ land mine.

@SophocIestheFox

I’m really enjoying the theory that this was a calculated move to increase her sales by slipping into a tombstone sized book a couple of paragraphs with a reference to a serial killer sometimes wearing a woman’s coat and a wig, and legions of middle aged women decoding that this was permission for them to unleash their hitherto undiscovered transphobia and support her by buying her book, and that was an epic get rich quick scheme for a multi millionaire.

But she somehow was simultaneously completely oblivious to the teeming hordes of her slash writing, pronoun declaring, trans and non binary uber stans and fans who gave her fair warning that if she turned out to be remotely thinking about being gender critical they would definitely institute a mass boycott of every book, play, theme park or product line she’s ever written, produced or been associated with, while threatening her with rape and violence on every social media platform in existence.

I think what offends me most about this theory is that she’d be that stupid

Seriously though, she’s bonkers rich. She doesn’t have to write a word again ever to make her crust. She really doesn’t need to whip up controversy to sell her books.

It’s great to see a woman gain so much power and then use it for making things better for women. She and her next 7 generations are set for life.

So you are accusing her of releasing the book to some trans right activists so that they could complain

So that they could post obscene pictures of their bits under children's drawings on Twitter, more accurately.

YANBU
JKR is being demonised for stating biology is real.....crazy world we live in.

If all she wants is money and self advancement, why does she give so much away to charity?

You can only disagree with what JKR said if you hate women. Funny how “misogynist” doesn’t have the same power to make people fall into line as “transphobe”. But most oppressed minority ever, obviously.

Re puberty blockers: the problem with the approach advocated for by a PP, whereupon a small number of children who have “lived their lives as the opposite sex” should be prescribed them, is twofold. 1) is that at the point such drugs are an option, it is impossible to distinguish the 15-20% who will persist in their gender presentation into adulthood from the 80-85% who will desist and reconcile with their birth sex. Yes, robust psychological counselling should weed out those who are autistic, those who are trying to identify out of trauma or abuse, those who are confused about their sexuality, those who are simply uncomfortable with the bodily changes brought about by puberty especially girls experiencing the male gaze for the first time, and I think I’m on the same page as that PP in recognising that the current affirmation-only model isn’t doing that job. But that still leaves a cohort of children who will include some with persistent gender dysphoria and some for whom it is a temporary condition, and no way of telling one from t’other. Do you really sentence the latter to the lifelong adverse affects of PBs just so that the former will “pass” better in a dress in later life??

The second problem is, what does living as the opposite sex actually mean, especially at that age, and how do you know it’s not a result of being brought up by homophobic or über-woke parents? How can it be based on anything more than stereotypes? If a child says “I don’t feel like a boy”, what are they basing that on? What do they think feeling like a boy should feel like, and what makes them feel differently? I’m in my 50s and I don’t know what it means to “feel like a woman” (I am one because of my biology but what’s in my head is my personality, not a gender identity) and discussions on this topic show I’m far from alone. So when there is no definitive measure of “feeling like a boy/girl” that doesn’t rely on stereotypes, how can it ever be ethical to medicate children and permanently affect their development based on something so amorphous and impossible to define?

I've always seen being trans as a decision solely for the benefit of the individual. A trans woman on the radio still sounds like a man and in person, 99% of the time will look like a man dressed as a woman. In other words, going through with the change won't fool the majority of people, so the only reason for doing it is for themselves and their own comfort/ peace of mind. This is fine; I have no problem with it & why would anybody?

I agree though that JK Rowling is right to speak up when it comes to granting trans rights that are unfair to people born as women, e.g. enabling trans women to compete in women-only sports events. The cells of that person will still contain an X and Y chromosome and they'll still have characteristics - such as muscle density - that give them advantages over people born as women. To object to that is not about being transphobic, it is about upholding the rights of biological women. Why should something that is a CHOICE disadvantage 50% of the population, who cannot help their physiology?

Agree, thewithesarehere

I admire her tremendously- her books, her charitable work, her grace under fire.

And 95% of mumsnet voters agree. Hope she’s reading

Barbara of Kent stands with JKR.