JKR poem to IW - Brilliant

[TwistedWonder]

https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1890450465063600510

I’ll get screenshots for anyone not on X but I have to love JKR for this ❤️

@ThisFluentBiscuit In these days of distorted reality I understand where you’re coming from, but I find Dr Bell quietly impresses with his approach, not to mention his years of experience, he also doesn’t appear to me to have an axe to grind.

Absolutely this. Going through puberty can be traumatic at the best of times, I fully remember loathing getting my periods and the restrictions I felt that put on me, not to mention the awkwardness and embarrassment once I realised that my group of friends, which were almost exclusively boys, started looking at, and treating me differently, and the feeling that I was no longer a girl but I certainly didn’t feel like a woman. All children should be allowed the time to literally grow up, and what they should be told is that the feeling that you don’t recognise or can’t come to terms with your changing body is completely normal and WILL pass, not to be put on a horrific medicalised pathway that is irreversible and nothing short of butchery.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Blue painted roses
Are still roses too

Do you consider the voices of the gender clinicians or independent researchers who are raising alarms to be biased?

Because we can help you with links. Most of us have read the words of those clinicians. The majority of them now talk about exploratory therapy to discover if there are causes for the dysphoria and making a person resilient about their reality.

No suffers don't think their bodies don't function. That's my point. That the "wrong brain" story doesn't match the actual situation.

As to "feel better living as the opposite sex" I do sympathise and in theory that sounds like it shouldn't be a problem, right? As long as when it matters, like anything that is supposed to be women only, like sports or prisons or women's officerships or woman-only networking events, the people who are only "living as" understand they are not included, it should be fine, right?

But these are the problems with that.

Firstly, that is not how the genderist movement has framed trans people's needs. The demand has been to accept that someone wanting to "live as" the opposite sex is proof that person truly is the opposite sex in a way that is unphysical and undefinable but nevertheless more fundamental than mere body sex, and therefore such people cannot morally be excluded from any provisions or protections based on sex.

Secondly, let's say the TRA demands and Stonewall Law are rolled back to the sort of compassionate compromise you envision. What happens when our GD sufferer hits one of those hard boundaries? Now they have to say "Ah, actually I'm not, in fact, a woman. I only live as one", maybe in front of people who didn't know. That's going to be incredibly triggering for them. And of course those people should be accepting and compassionate, but there's still going to be a sense of betrayal or distrust that this friend has through lies or ommission mislead them about something so fundamental. And when I say it's fundamental, it's not the arrangement of the body itself so much as the difference in life experience and opportunities, the shared frustrations and common bonds that will have been assumed. No one likes to feel like they have been fooled. Knowing the person you thought you knew and could trust has been misrepresenting themself means knowing they held themself always a little bit back behind a character they were playing. It's setting trans people up for pain and rejection.

Thirdly, it places the friends who do know in the uncomfortable position of having to support the deception. Imagine you had a friend who wanted everyone to believe they were French. Seems harmless enough, right? But wouldn't you feel a little embarrassed knowing their French accent was put on? Knowing their memories of maman's crepes never happened? Wouldn't you feel a little uncomfortable introducing them to an actual French friend? Not because their desire to be seen as French is anything perverse or malicious but because they are nevertheless deceiving people and because they are living by stereotypes of something they have never truly experienced.

I believe the better path is to create more space in society for "feminine" (which should be renamed to remove it from female) personalities, preferences, desires and interests in men and "masculine" (same point) personalities, preferences, desires and interests in women so there is less genderised difference between the sexes for GD to arise in the first place.

And in that world, those men who still claim their GD means they need to be in women's private spaces, well their motives are pretty clear.

I really understand where you are coming from. I was born in the mid 80s and had a continual struggle with my parents over my secondary education. My parents told me to challenge everything and to explore alternative explanations. My teachers told me to resist looking under the covers and just accept the stock answer in order to get maximum points.

My parents were right but it has been a hard road to re-teach my brain to query everything and be critical. Pick a contentious subject, any contentious subject, read the commentary from 5 respected sources (within their own community) on each side of the argument and then do the "on the one hand but then on the other" and decide which argument is best evidenced, has the least leaps of logic and is the most coherent. Then revisit your first choice over time to check that new facts haven't shifted the paradigm.

Roses are red,
Except when they're not.
Born with a cock?
Then a woman you're not!

Roses are red
Though sometimes they're yellow.
If you were born with a cock
Then you're a fellow.

Prefer the one India made in retaliation myself.
It's just nasty fucking bullying on JKR's part in my view.
It's like being in the school playground.

Gosh! A woman who has been subject to a long history of abuse by Willoughby writes a poem about her male abuser and you label the woman as being the abuser. Again.

It just tells us that you still cannot recognise the abuser and the victim in the abuse cycle. After all this time.

And that you still don’t seem to recognise DARVO.

And the original bullying of a woman?

Is that given a free pass?

She deserves to be called names?

Did you ignore that?

Or do you think she deserved it for failing to agreeing to be bullied into changing beside a man?

IW has an ongoing campaign of goading, abusing, threatening and attacking JKR. Since the poems IW has posted more spite against her on X

IW loves poking the bear then playing the victim when the bear bites every now and again. There’s only one bully and it’s not JKR but then you know that really don’t you?

I'm shocked.

Like when I chose electronics GCSE as one of my options but they gave me child development instead

I love JK Rowling. She is a wonderful woman and has, and continues to, stand up for women in every way that matters.

I wish she would grey rock this abusive man though, and all the other abusive men she gives publicity to.

I will admit this is partly personal. Family members are shunning me for objecting to men in women’s spaces and saying women who do that are being unnecessarily cruel and, while I recognise the violence and rape threats from the other side are incomparably worse, I was more comfortable when JK Rowling was word perfect on this and absolutely the voice of reason.

I very much enjoy, and have no problem with her humourous interludes with Dr Dame Katy Denise, but I feel the way to deal with narcissistic abusers of all stripes is not to get sucked in. Even if she is powerful enough to win, I’d rather she didn’t.

BUT! I recognise she is her own woman and must listen to her own conscience and not mine. I still thing she is wonderful and I am grateful to her very day for fighting alongside us to stop this madness.

@PriOn1 That sounds a little bit like you expect a higher standard of what you deem to be acceptable behaviour from JKR because she’s a woman. It feeds back into the ‘oh just be kind, after all they only want to pee’ mantra. Taking the moral high ground is all well and good, but sometimes these revolting men just need to get it with both barrels and I personally applaud her when she reduces them to exactly what they are, pathetic little men.

Let’s see:

Reporting her to the police for a hate crime was applauded by certain posters, iirc. And declared righteous, not abusive.

Now a poem is abusive.

Wasn’t a woman in a robe reporting a male sex offender getting into a spa naked with a semi aroused penis in front of a 9 year old girl acting more ‘egregiously’ than the male sex offender? But apparently some posters think they can recognise abuse and end up labelling women’s behaviour that is to bring that abuse to other’s attention as being worthy of being called out while the abuser’s behaviour is dismissed.

But apparently, those posters are on the right side of history.

@ThisFluentBiscuit I was just surprised to see JK insisting that a trans woman is a man

An act of courage so quickly forgotten? https://www.rowlingindex.org/work/afd/ In April last year, on the day that the Scottish Hate Crime and Public Order Act finally came into effect (April 1st!) JKR posted a set of tweets explicitly pointing out that a bunch of different transwomen (including India Willoughby) are all men. She also offered to retweet any other posts by women making the same claims. And challenged the police to arrest her.

By doing this JKR laid out some boundaries within which Scottish women could safely point out that transwomen are men without expecting a call from the police. Anyone could complain, but if the police went after JKR they'd find her public profile and her posse of human rights lawyers in the way, and if they went after other women without going after JKR they'd have to explain why and they'd likely have JKR (and her lawyers and profile) after them too.

The transwomen JKR listed as men included a sportsman who had taken a woman's place by identifying as female, various male rapists and sex criminals who had committed crimes against women and girls that only men commit and yet insisted on being considered as women, and transwomen who have been given public roles speaking for women and jobs supposedly open only to women. JKR needn't really have bothered with Willoughby but since Willoughby goes after many less powerful women I guess JKR feels the need to draw Willoughby's fire.

Roses are red
You don't get a pass
Just because you're a bloke
Who thinks he's a lass

PriOn1. Up your standards, anybody (family or not) should be in the FRO class of dangerous people to be around if they think you should not be allowed a single sex space. She was pointing out that bullying women in an ET is not nice and if JKR posted the original tweet with the photos she would have been attacked as being transphobic.

“JKR needn't really have bothered with Willoughby but since Willoughby goes after many less powerful women I guess JKR feels the need to draw Willoughby's fire.”

Very much so, Amaryllis.

Joanne Rowling provided an amplifier to women’s voices since she tweeted that now famous tweet of years ago. And she still continues to do that.

That she drew the attention for the hate crime law was an act of bravery.

So here's the thing..... As a society we train girls and boys differently. From birth boys are encouraged to be louder, more physical and to play with toys that encourage them to orient themselves in space. Girls are encouraged to be more verbal and social. None of this is rocket science or unknown. There are multiple studies showing how we do this unintentionally from birth. As a consequence, because babies brains are incredibly plastic, boys tend to be better at things like manipulating objects in three dimensional space. (See the map reading example above).

NOW.... Society values the things that we train boys to be good at. Engineering, map reading, agression, mentally manipulating objects in three dimensional space etc. So much so that even IQ tests have a huge sex bias. This was noticed fairly early on in their use and you will find that IQ tests are scored differently for females. Depending on the level of sex bias in the test, a girl may score significantly less than a boy to achieve the same IQ. It's not that girls are dumber than boys, it's just that the tests are designed to sort for skills and traits that society deems more important, the ones we train boys for.

So if you are a girl who, for example, grew up with brothers and parents who couldn't afford the time to train for girl traits or buy girl centered toys, you may well find that girl is very good at boy coded skills. If you then took a highly sex biased IQ test, for example Raven's Matricies you may well find, once the adjusted femal scoring is applied, that this particular girl will be in the genius IQ range. (163 from memory, but it was a long time ago )

I just wanted to say @ThisFluentBiscuit that you’ve had a lot of people disagreeing with you on this thread and I’m really impressed how respectful it’s been on all sides. Respectful disagreement and open minds are how progress is made.

For me, the clincher in this “debate” was reading something JKR wrote and thinking about myself when I was, oh, anywhere between 7 and 14. I so, SO wanted to be a boy. From my perspective, everything about being a boy way easier. I didn’t like any stereotypically female things. (I’ve now been diagnosed as autistic.) If trans ideology had been around then, I might have made some hideous life ruining decisions. It wasn’t until I was older that I realised that it’s the femaleness of my body that makes me a woman, not my brain, or what I like, or that I’m attracted to men. The lived experience of having a female body IS (for me) what being a woman means.