Telegraph- Whenever people accuse JK Rowling of transphobia, they never quote a single word she’s said.

[MrsJackRackham]

www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/if-it-weren-t-for-jk-rowling-nicola-sturgeon-would-never-have-fallen/ar-AA17wXhl?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=fd3aec318b9242f0a6c57313e19331c3
Apologies if this has already been posted. Nice and succinct.

I like the idea that @Nellle knows what JKR is saying in, not like actual words, but you know, tone? She's too smart to say what she actually thinks, but if you invent some new meaning, you can figure it all out.

It's a pattern that repeats in the ideology.

To quote the famous Brasseye:

"There's no actual evidence, but it's still a fact".

She's a powerful billionaire voice consistently focusing on a marginalised minority, amplifying only select information to demonise that minority and thus mobilising a movement against said minority.

You can't reason with evangelicals. I live in the US where there are many irrational type believers in various religions. They want to talk at people, not with. They want to preach, not learn. They are the most incurious bunch of sanctimonious twats who lack critical thinking skills. Now that I see this behavior in TRAs it makes be wonder how much is human nature and how much is it just some personalities. Taliban, Bible thumpers, Moonies, those medieval monks who whipped themselves-extreme overvalued beliefs...

Cool! Do you extend the same courtesy to women (original sex based meaning) who think it's up to women to determine what is a sex-based threat, which services, rights and provisions need to be single sex, and indeed what the definition of woman should be, and agree that male people should not answer that for them?

Yes lets. From an actual transwoman: You know the one :) Pulls your arguments apart really..... Womens rights are for all women - most of us accept that rather than pander to fear.....

"Sex is real. I am a trans woman who knows hundreds of trans people and who is very active in the community, and I’ve never heard any trans person or expert say or imply otherwise even once. Trans people are often more keenly aware of sex characteristics than anyone else, having often spent their whole lives dealing with the dysphoria that their various sex characteristics cause them, and seeing how other people react to them. I, and almost every trans person I’ve talked to, have had to teach the doctors and nurses who aren’t experts how our biology works just to get basic healthcare. Often one of the main things that trans people want for the world is a better understanding of trans bodies and of biology.

So why did she say that? Why does anyone? This is a very common “Gender Critical” (read anti-trans) rhetorical device. It is an attempt to create a false dichotomy between supporting trans rights and just agreeing with the entire field of biology. The argument is “If we call trans women women, then we can’t discuss sexism against women or sexuality”, but in fact the truth is the exact opposite. Trans women face misogynistic sexism and sexual violence for being women every day. Trans lesbians face structural and street homophobia/lesphobia across the world. Both of those are observable facts. After all, does a sexist abuser ask to see your original birth certificate before sexually harassing you? No. And if we aren’t allowed to describe that reality then how can we address these problems?

This all revolves around the desire to label trans women as men in order to justify taking away the rights they have today. Trans women have used women’s spaces in the UK — the country JK Rowling and I live in — longer than either of us have been alive, and they have been legally protected to do so for over a decade (before that there were no laws either way. It has never been illegal). Some people have only just learned what a trans person is since the rise of trans visibility in the media, and they just don’t like it.

If those opposing trans rights were to just say “we want to take away the rights and freedoms of trans people” they know it’d sound as heinous as it is, so, just like “Race Realism”, the goal is to find something in biology that they can point to and say “see I’m not transphobic, that’s just what the science says”. And it’s so much easier to win people over to your side if it looks like you aren’t expressing an opinion and are in fact just “saying the truth”. The common argument you’ll see here is “trans women can’t be women because they have XY chromosomes” or the “wrong gametes”, or just “if you were born with a penis you are a man”. Firstly it’s not as if any of that was a good enough justification to take away their freedoms and protections, your chromosomes don’t protect you from sexual harassment for being a woman. But also importantly here, it’s scientifically wrong. There isn’t any one trait that all cis women (cis means not trans) have that no trans women do. Sex isn’t just a M/F tickbox in your DNA somewhere, it’s a hugely complicated set of characteristics that can have all kinds of variations that mean all kinds of different things to different people. It often doesn’t take more than 30 seconds on Google to find a clear set of counterexamples to any strict definition they try to give you.

Trans people, intersex people, feminists, medical professionals and experts across the world aren’t saying “sex isn’t real” they are saying “sex is more complicated than what they taught you at school”, and that is a fact. Sex is real and, like all biology, it is incredibly complicated. They are also saying “sex and sexism is more complicated than XY = privilege”. Misogynistic sexism is very real and it affects half of the world. We have to be able to talk about it, and we need the words to do that. Any attempt to define woman in a way that excludes trans and intersex women is not only futile, it’s inherently malicious. It doesn’t come from a place of following the evidence and understanding the science, nor from a place of wanting to end sexism, it is an attempted ad hoc justification for the premise “trans women are men”. Trans women being women is a conclusion of the evidence, not a premise. Please don’t fall for it.

Insisting that we treat sex as an unchangeable binary based on some invisible characteristic removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.

Katy Montgomerie on JKR

Yes lets. From an actual transwoman: You know the one :) Pulls your arguments apart really..... Womens rights are for all women

Yup, transwomen are men, so the rest of the screed is a waste of pixels.

It's pretty easy to see why people think JKR is transphobic. She is pretty much the definition of a Terf.

Asking them to prove it won't help because it doesn't matter that there is no smoking gun. No obvious trans people are awful tweet

In the world of Twaw, no debate, then anything except complete acceptance of that is transphobic.

Saying trans people should be free to live their lives without discrimination isn't enough.

You have to fully accept their right to be women even if that means trampling on women's rights and safety

So she will always be viewed as transphobic.

Women's rights are for females, regardless how they identify.

Transwomen are male, hence their exclusion.

And using Katy Montgomery as an argument is laughable. Born a man, has no concept of what it's like to be a woman beyond the stereotypes.

Insisting that we treat sex as an unchangeable binary based on some invisible characteristic removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.

Fundamentally, the important question, the one that the word salad above, and the weaponisation of "transphobia" to mean "any instance of differentating between female people and trans women" are thrown up to hide, is not "does sex exist?".

Nor is it "who can lay claim to the word Woman by some convoluted redefinition of the criteria?"

it is "Given that we all agree sex exists, is it reasonable that people in some circumstances want protections, rights and spaces based on sex? And in particular, is it reasonable that the female sex, who have historically been disadvantaged because of the sex and still suffer the systemic consequences today, should be allowed to have a political identity and voice based on that sex to counter those consequences? And is it reasonable that the provisions set up under the name Woman when it did mean female sex continue to be reserved for the female sex even if the definition of woman changes?"

I say yes. Yes sex exists, yes it is reasonable to say sex sometimes matters, and hell Yes transwomen have no moral claim on female resources just because they demanded the name Woman be shared.

The charge that she's a transphobe doesn't square with her actual views - The New York Times are now rowing back on something many of us have been saying all along..

If sex can't be defined, if the characteristic required to define sex is invisible, how do trans people know they're trans?

How do they know they're not the sex they were born as and need to 'change' sex to live as a different one?

As far as I can tell, it boils down to if you don't believe that trans women are literally women in all circumstances (except when they don't want to be women - no they won't tell you when that is you bigot), you are transphobic. And being transphobic means that you want all trans people to die horrible deaths. Not just for them stay out of the single-sex spaces that don't align with their sex.

This is of course very very stupid, but here we are.

Apologies for being a bit dim, but what's a trans lesbian? I ask because lesbians are same sex attracted, you know, biological women attracted to other biological women.

Intersex is an outdated term for people with DSD - disorders of sex development - but even they will be either biologically male or female.

As a biological woman I feel changing language I use to describe my lived experience and denying that allowing men access to my space puts me at an increased risk, pretty harmful also.

What you have provided is not transphobia examples.

Trans people, intersex people, feminists, medical professionals and experts across the world aren’t saying “sex isn’t real” they are saying “sex is more complicated than what they taught you at school”, and that is a fact. Sex is real and, like all biology, it is incredibly complicated.

Amazing how the Taliban didn't need to consult any of these experts when they removed the rights of every member of the female sex overnight. They didn't seem to find it complicated at all.

We are now expected to pretend that men who identify as women are oppressed in the same way as the half of the population who have been denied the right to vote, own property, gain a degree, join professions etc etc for the vast majority of human history. That when Eddie Izzard does "girl mode" his experience is literally and exactly the same as girls (leading global cause of mortality in 13-19 year old girls being pregnancy and birth).

Thanks JK for standing up to this utter shite.

Insisting that we treat sex as an unchangeable binary based on some invisible characteristic removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.

I often wonder how the human race has managed to get to the year 2023.

@MishyJDI I see where you've gone wrong:

Sex isn’t just a M/F tickbox in your DNA somewhere

Yes it is. Sex is binary.

Honestly, even if sex really is some unfathomably complex thing that humans have misunderstood for millenia, that's not the point.

The historic understanding of sex, flawed or not, is the basis on which women were oppressed, and therefore when it comes to the woman-only rights and provisions that exist to mitigate that oppression, the right definition to use is the one under which those people were oppressed, because that's the group of people who suffered the oppression and so that's the group that need the mitigation.

JKR is an intelligent person who has trans friends & has helped trans people.

Just because she will not capitulate & say that her own sex should be subjugated to pander to a small but powerful lobby group who mainly represent the issues of men doesn't make her a bad person.

One of the ways you can tell a genuine marginalised minority is the way they don't have their flags flying, endless parades, months dedicated to wanging on about them, exposure on tv & radio, media pieces, laws that disadvantage others even suggested or mentioned in parliament.

That's definitely not the gender ideology movement, their issues are all over the place & loudly proclaimed on mainstream media.
They receive funding from govt & business.
Nothing marginalised about them.

Which so called marginalised people are you referring to?

@FlirtsWithRhinos
Brilliant posts again today! Hat-tip.

@oldwhyno
Exactly. Sex is binary

Those who feel that this means that they cannot therefore talk meaningfully about their lives will have to find a way to do so which acknowledges this fact.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone can talk about their own life any way they choose. The problem for me is when they want me to talk about my life in line with their preferences too. I'm just not into it.

I go on about this all the time, but I watch real life crime programmes, some being historical cases. Even in the very early days of DNA testing, they were able to profile the killer from the smallest fragment of matter, be that a drop of blood, skin cells from under the victim's fingernails or a small length of hair.

It's strange I watch these programs and am amazed at the absolute detail that can be built from the DNA profile yet here we have others with their thought going backwards.

Idiocracy is real.

No way. I could name two incidents immediately that give me the very strong opinion that Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic.

I think when I've asked for evidence it comes in the form of "she once liked a tweet by a person who said something transphobic" or I get redirected to watch a two hour YouTube video about it (like I have the time for that).

I think I will just respond in future with "do you not like her because she reminds you of your mother?".

My experience exactly, @WhiteFire My 16 yr old DD was convinced by TikTok that JKR is a transphobe, until we had a similar conversation. Then I sent her the article to read. Very different opinion now.