Katy Montgomerie response to JKR

[Hermano]

Amongst some tweets (John Cleese) I was reading through the other day was posted a link to this response to JKR.

I have to admit, I'm relatively new to this area, and I think some of KM's responses are fair enough. I'm really interested to get a MN view of this response. I did search to see if I could find a thread already on this, if I missed one please point me in the direction.

FWIW I'm broadly on JKR's side in all this, I am tolerant and happy for everyone to be who they are but not at the expense of hard won women's rights. I find the whole debate at the moment very difficult as I think there are genuine people with strongly held convictions on both sides, and both sides have people who argue well.

I think in basic terms I'm quite convinced by a lot of this reply so I'm here to hear further responses from the JKR pov

If being trans is innate , then it is clear that every generation will have had women who were actually trans

We can see that thousands of girls are currently being treated by GIDS

Which suggests that thousands of women in each previous generation went without this vital treatment

Yet any women who suspects that they were one of the thousands is shouted down

Why might that be? Where are the missing thousands?

The Newsnight feature on the Tavistock the other night I would say discredits the entire section of rambling about children NOT being over diagnosed and put on medical pathways. They quite patently are. As all the clinicians who have resigned from the Tavistock over the last three years can attest to. How many was that at a last count?

'I have a lot of friends in the gay community who are big advocates of the GRA, think JKR is a bigot, I want to be well informed and able to give reasoned responses.'

I don't see the point of trying to convince people who have so little regard for women's rights. Far better to concentrate on the work women are doing to make sure that the rights we already hold are being upheld in law and to lobby your MP so that no more are taken away.

@TheHeathenOfSuburbia

"but to just blindly assert that trans women are the same as cis men reduces their chance of getting good treatment, and even harms study potential"

Indeed.
As does blindly asserting they're exactly the same as women.
But that's the only position acceptable if you're not going to get called transphobic, apparently.

This, all day long.

Highlights once again the total illogicality, unscientific, biology denial at the heart of the TRA mantra.

Thanks, this is all really useful discussion. I wish there were more poeple irl I could discuss this with.

Midgebabe you point about trans numbers is a strong one.

The medical stuff, again I agree about everything being the male default. It's like watching TV - suddenly one day a light bulb goes off that every single program is misogynistic, the female characters are vacuous and shallow, them men have depth and character and are so much more numerous. It took me a series or two to recognise that the reason I loves The Good Wife so much is that over half the main characters are women without it being 'a big deal', they just are, which felt like a familiar and comfortable environment compared with so many programs where everyone of note is male.

I also read in the last year an article about how all equipment from the loo to an office desk, doors, etc etc were all designed with mens proportions in mind.

I think I'm diverging.

Anyway thanks for these responses

Actually on this point I've recently read Harry Potter for the first time and was really disappointed that the female characters were in general one dimensional and sappy, hermione was always the one making tea and tending to people's wounds, the mums were SAHMs etc, whereas the men had multifaceted personalities and more flaws, and there were more of them.

I'd be interested to sit down with JKR and discuss this a bit more. Only in theory of course, I'm sure she'd wipe the floor with me in a real discussiom

Even the scrubs at work are designed for men. The women find the tops baggy because they are made for broad shoulders and the bottoms tight because they don't account for hips.

I am an HCP and have worked in research. The notion that only gender ideologists are pointing out men and women also behave differently too (eg smoking) so you can't just look at sex is completely laughable. This has been recognised for donkeys years.
It doesn't make biology complicated but it can make picking apart effects from biology alone and effects from behaviour alone a bit more complicated.
The world was not rigidly ignoring everything apart from sex before gender ideology came along.
The behaviour of a transman/woman may be influenced by their gender identity sure and that's good to know, but it doesn't mean sex is somehow fluid.
It's why it would be important to note they are trans etc rather than just woman or man when collecting data for research. It's against their interests to be subsumed within another group and against the interests of the group they are subsumed into.
It particularly impacts women who are already underrepresented in medical research, as a PP said.
Pretty sure JK Rowling does not look at a female MS sufferer and think the only thing that matters to the disease or the person is the second X chromosome, but just because it's not the only thing it doesn't mean it's irrelevant and gender critical etc positions are wrong.

I’ll start by pointing out I’m not a biologist so my grasp of biology if very very basic but I cannot understand how fish and insects (neither of which are mammals and have numerous biological differences to humans) are brought up to explain any of this. Maybe fish do change sex. Some invertebrates are true hermaphrodites. But it won’t mean I will be laying a clutch of eggs anytime soon, even though I can produce them.

Not to mention the PPE doesn't fit many of the women properly including the masks

I think with the wondering if you could have been trans thing.
I know gender dysphoria and eating disorders aren't the same but I picked up my eating disorder by living with someone with anorexia. She influenced me greatly, introduced me to pro-ana websites and I came to view myself through an anorexic lens. I was in the grip of this for years then recovered.
Now another person could have lived with her and not fallen down the hole like I did but I obviously had

1. A vulnerability, then
2. An influence that triggered and perpetuated it.

I don't think people are saying they had gender dysphoria necessarily, I think they are saying they had 1. A vulnerability but factor 2. (an outside influence) was missing so they developed differently. The world for young people today can be like living under that influence.

Aren't saying

From KM:

Sometimes the difference between how men and women react to diseases can be down to chromosomes, sometimes it’s down to hormones, sometimes it’s down to particular organs, sometimes a combination of those things, sometimes it’s something else.

So for covid it is actually a receptor men have that make it easier for covid to infiltrate. They think this receptor is regulated in men from the testes, but I can't find anything to confirm that. I can't find anything about this receptor in women, even though women do have it as well, just less. So where is that then regulated? Very telling no one seems to have bothered researching that.

So it looks like it is a male organ, which is why giving a man female hormones will mean he has less of this receptor as the testes will be less productive and a chance to fight off covid.
KM's argument falls apart here, sex differences is the whole reason female hormones might work when given to men but it won't make a slightest difference when given to women. So her example actually confirms Jk's argument men and women are biologically different and should medically be treated as such.

Most trans people don't have hormone therapy though.

The subset of trans people on hormone therapy that she worries about, but gives no suggestions to help, are a tiny number of people.

And the fact they are not given higher priority in medical research seems to be subtly blamed on women rather than the pharmaceutical companies etc. Women who still have to push and push to get the fact that the 50% of the global population who are female will not be best served by researchers seeing them as the same as men but with 'boobs and tubes' (to steal a phrase from an awesome woman in the medical profession really making inroads into this issue. )

I know most don't. The argument KM has is that transwomen are women because their risk is low as female hormones lower the risk of covid.
My argument is that giving hormones to lower the risk only works on male bodies as the receptor in women is not influenced by giving more female hormones. So that therapy will only work on males, not females. Destroying the argument KM has and enforcing JKs.

Ok this is just ridiculous

'Incels, and in fact the entire “manosphere”, generally have the same views of trans people and trans rights as Gender Critical people. They will regularly be seen allying together in arguments online, and sometimes you can’t even tell them apart. This is why so often you see “TERFs are Nazis” being thrown around online, because they have the same views on trans rights.'

Feminists who are GC are allies with incels etc.

Does this person know that incels have murdered women, due to their ideology? I presume yes? And they think that GC feminists are happily collaborating with men who believe in compulsory marriage of young girls, rape should be legalised, women should be beaten and murdered, and have carried out attacks where multiple women were killed? I mean, seriously?

And of course we're literal Nazis, meaning we'd like to gas to death millions of people.

These claims and words that get flung around. Are they even thinking of what they're saying?

Those arent rebuttals at all

Sex is a strict binary. She doesnt acrually rebutt JKRs statement that MS behaves differently in men and women, its just a load of irrelevent waffle. Yes of course sex is one of many factors that affects how a disease behaves, but that doesnt mean you ignore sex as a factor? Does she think drs are stupid? Does she think medical researchers dont take into account why something may affect men differently to women? I mean ffs.

JKR:
I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition

KM:
No. You wouldn’t have. This is a very common GC claim, the argument usually goes “when I was little I played with barbie/action man, therefore today I would have transitioned, but I am happy as I am today, so that would be bad, therefore we should ban everyone

That is such bullshit.

When ever have GC Feminists said we want to ban people transitioning. It pisses me off. We are asking for caution, and an evidence based approach to medicalisation.

It is even worse because the chant of the TRA is ‘stay in your lane‘ but if boring cunty kind say, actually this IS my lane. That is EXACTLY how I felt.. we get told to shut up, cos we are nasty, old and out of touch. Oh, yes, and because were women.

Also we have no idea if JKR would have transitioned

As JKR says, we suddenly have lots more girls transitioning. Logically there are therefore lots of women who would have transitioned had they been born now.

I love the way that everyone gets to self ID apart from older women who get told they are 'cis' especially if GC.

While in fact according to stonewall definition which includes gender nonconformity under the trans umbrella, hardly anyone on the planet is 'cis'.

I was listening to the radio the other day, I cant remember what the problem was but there was a dr on their talking about an medical problem that seemed to have 2 very different outcomes. And for years no one had been able to work out what led to the 2 different outcomes, until they looked at the data and realised it affected men and women very differently.

I wish I could remember what the medical problem was. But at the time I thought why did it take so long to consider sex? Sex is a really important factor in medicine, to pretend otherwise is ridiculous.

Its a bit like saying smoking causes lung cancer, but people who worked in building sites with asbestos also have higher rates of lung cancer. Because some people with lung cancer dont snoke lets just ignore the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Montgomerie is hideous. I've watched KM sexually harass men on Twitter a few times, refusing to stop when asked politely.

KM’s arguments are specious twaddle.
I ploughed through that article and it was full of half-truths and distortions.

It's too long.
The fact that some animal species are hard to sex reliably, and that some are able to change sex is totally irrelevant to humans (and the ability to change sex is irrelevant to reptiles and mammals too).

Gay conversion therapy is not at all the same as counselling to accept the healthy body you were born in (this totally winds me up). In gay conversion therapy horrible things were done to people to stop them being gay (electric shocks, chemicals to reduce libido etc). In so called trans conversion therapy, it's reversed so the therapy involves no drugs, just talking. In fact the more invasive treatments are part of transitioning.

Montgomery is talking utter arse about "taking away facilities" at the end and must be wilfully misunderstanding women's concerns. I haven't heard anyone on here or anywhere else say trans women should not be allowed to use womens loos. We want to be able to safeguard women from predatory men, is all, but that point is never ever addressed by trans bloggers.

As for "the only press is gender critical". Seriously? What planet is this person on?

I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women
KM's response to this doesn't really make any sense.
She acknowledges that men and women react differently to diseases because of their biological sex.
Her argument about trans people is based on the fact that they already are undergoing a medical intervention. It is not their trans biology which may cause a different reaction, in other words, but the medical intervention they receive. It is well established that medical interventions have side effects/ contra -indications.

I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition
When you hear regular stories of four year olds being socially transitioned by their parents because say, a boy likes to play with 'girls' toys and says, 'I want to be a girl' and the parents don't consider whether this is a small child's way of starting to understand that he is not 'supposed' to play with girls toys, but instead start to socially transition him. Then yes, she is right to be concerned.