I have pasted it here to spare anyone the click:
Dear J.K. Rowling,
We would like to begin by offering our solidarity with you as a survivor of domestic and sexual abuse. Reading your moving and honest account, we felt a connection to your pain. That connection exists between us, regardless of any differences we may have around gender identity. Writing those passages must have been very difficult for you and the subsequent front-page headline in a tabloid newspaper was nothing short of deplorable. As a trans charity, our staff and volunteers deal with cases of domestic abuse regularly and we hold unquestioning solidarity with all survivors of domestic violence. No victim or vulnerable group should be used to sell newspapers.
You are doubtless aware that your blog was also difficult for many trans people and their families to read. Only a short while ago, we might confidently have hoped to count you alongside the many respected authors and public figures who help to support and inspire trans lives. This week, we have witnessed trans young people expressing shock and dismay on finding themselves at odds with the author of the beloved Harry Potter stories. Many of these children and teenagers grew up feeling trapped and afraid in their daily lives, and found in your stories a promise that the most fearsome of foes might be overcome with the understanding and kindness of close friends and benevolent adults. As our non-binary staff member Jake Edwards wrote yesterday:
To me, Harry Potter meant that no matter who you are or how you were born or how different or difficult your life was, if you fought against oppression with love, you would win. At 24 I’m realising that might not be true. And wow, it hurts.
This open letter is not an attack on you personally. Nor is it a call for those who support us to send you abusive messages or make unfounded allegations. We deplore any such behaviour, and renew our longstanding call for a calm and reasonable conversation away from social media, where all people can listen respectfully to one another and trans people will be treated as valid.
To state our overriding message:
“If you haven’t listened to trans children, don’t speak about them.”
We would now like to address some of the points raised in your blog. Firstly, we gratefully acknowledge that you accept transition will be a solution in cases of dysphoria and you acknowledge that trans people need and deserve protection.
However, you also write that you share the concerns of people who are:
“…worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.”
Surely it is clear, looking across LGBT+ organisations and taking a cursory glance at the response to your blog that the overwhelming majority of young people and LGB people support trans rights and feel huge discomfort around the way trans people are being misrepresented by figures of authority. The modern gay rights movement was, after all, sparked by a protest led by trans women of colour.
To address the core of your point, trans rights do not come at the expense of women’s rights. We see no evidence that trans girls are a threat to other girls in any way. Indeed, it is transgender children who often suffer horrific bullying at school and at home. And, as you will have seen, it is transgender adults who are made to feel afraid in modern British society, by those who would seek to characterise them as a threat without any evidence or justification and in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary.
Your objection to trans rights seems to be based on reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which indeed has the potential to allow trans people to identify in their gender without having to go through a lengthy process. You write:
“…When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.”
It is not simple and it is most certainly not the truth to state that under the current Gender Recognition Act 2004 (which still requires a complicated, medicalised and lengthy process) “any man who believes or feels he’s a woman” can be legally recognised in that gender. Furthermore, access to bathrooms and changing rooms is generally not controlled or restricted on the basis of legal gender, so the argument that gender recognition certificates “throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms” is disingenuous…as well as smelly. While you offer no evidence to back up your suggestion that most women oppose changes around trans access to women’s toilets, we can offer evidence to the contrary. In one study of social media comments from men and women around this issue, US research found that:
‘The observations in this paper do not support the belief that most women are against transgender females using female bathrooms: we find that, in the sampled population, about 70% of cisgender female users post non-negative comments, and about a half of the negative comments by cisgender females are incidental.’
The claim that simpler gender recognition will lead to unsafe changing rooms and toilets is further undermined by a strange and ignominious chapter in North Carolina’s history where, in 2016, these exact concerns led to the introduction of a law demanding people only use toilets which correspond to the gender stated on their birth certificate. The new law not only caused a rise in transphobia, it also opened up the possibility of increased harassment of women in public restrooms who weren’t transgender but who didn’t dress or present in a ‘feminine’ way. It also meant that transgender men were being forced to use women’s toilets. In the end, a federal judge got rid of the dangerous and unworkable legislation in 2019.
A subsequent US review of ‘Evidence Regarding Safety and Privacy in Public Restrooms, Locker Rooms, and Changing Rooms’ stated that people opposed to trans rights:
“…often cite fear of safety and privacy violations in public restrooms if such laws are passed…No empirical evidence has been gathered to test such laws’ effects…This study finds that the passage of such laws is not related to the number or frequency of criminal incidents in these spaces. Additionally, the study finds that reports of privacy and safety violations in public restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms are exceedingly rare. This study provides evidence that fears of increased safety and privacy violations as a result of nondiscrimination laws are not empirically grounded.”
You have used your considerable talent as a writer to build in the mind of your audience a scenario where women’s toilets are ‘thrown open’ to the outside world, allowing any predator to enter unchallenged and commit nefarious acts.
But wait. Trans women are already entitled to use the facilities that align with their gender identity, and those protections have been in place since the Equality Act 2010. The Gender Recognition Act is about changing your birth certificate only, and nobody has to produce a birth certificate to use the bathroom or a changing room.
Since 2010, If predators have used the provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to gain access to women’s spaces, we are not aware of it, nor has evidence of such a pattern ever been cited by those who would dearly love to consolidate one of their most common attacks on trans rights. Neither has self-identification, adopted in many nations worldwide, led to abuse of systems.