J.K Rowling's Position

[middler]

I am not a regular on these boards but I am aware of the controversy over J K Rowling's position as I have encountered so many young people who have become very hostile with me if I do not show that I do not go along with them in their views that she is the equivalent of a racist in her attitude towards racists. I try and stay neutral and not declare my views but that is not enough for them. They want tos ee you express the same vitriol that they have so they can be assured you are on the same side. I find it so anti democratic frankly.

Privately I was relieved with the British ruling that means trans women who may well still have a penis and all the bad actors who could then take full advantage of a law that allowed transwomen into women only spaces, are not allowed to access those women spaces. I appreciate that most transwomen just want to go about leading their daily lives identifying as women and using women spaces is part of that and they have no ill intent. But many do not have bottom surgery and so yes they still have a penis as do the men who can just wake up one day and say they identify as a woman and start using those women only spaces and not have good intent? What am I missing? Why don't the younger generation see this and get that it is a huge risk to women? Do they think that there will be no bad actors? I just do not get it. The law is not to punish transwomen. It's to protect women.

I am not without sympathy for transwomen who genuinely feel uncomfortable going into male spaces. I appreciate that they identify as female but I just feel it's a conflict of rights and that you cannot sacrifice the right of women to feel safe in a women only space so that the smaller % of transwomen do not feel uncomfortable. Safety trumps comfort.

I personally would not react to a transwoman being in a female toilet but then I am aware how do I know it is a genuine transwoman and not a bad actor so I appreciate other women not being comfortable.
Maybe we need additional gender neutral toilets in this day and age.

But when this topic comes up with many younger people I can tell that the fact that I do not join in with the hatred for JK Rowling, that it puts me in the pro JK Rowling camp and I do agree with her support of ensuring that law got passed.

I am not so sure about the comments she made about kids not being trans as I think some kids as teens do seem to think they are in the wrong gender, maybe not in the large numbers that we are seeing today but clearly some people do feel they were born in the wrong gender and as a society I think we do have to support them without sacrificing the rights of an other group.

Rowling has never expressed hate for transpeople as far as I am aware. I do think she can be provocative in how she expressed her views and that is her choice but I just do not understand how the younger generation claim she is the equivalent of a racist but with trans rights? The language they use about her is so strong and I really try to avoid conversations about her because it has become so divisive- it is hard to find a millennial who does not agree with Emma Watson's viewpoint.

I am not 100% up to date with all Rowling has said but what has she said that is so bad that the younger generation have such deep hatred for her? I am just trying to understand it better and be ready to respond to the vitriol I get from younger colleagues when it comes up as it does seem to.

I suspect the OP has hightailed it back to their safe space.

But if they are interested in debating the living as a woman thing, I'll give them a starter.

Today I lived as a woman by wearing no make up, outsourcing the cooking, bellowing obscenities at the football on the TV, and drinking beer. In jeans and a t shirt. Thing is, my xx chromosomes, and every cell in my body made those womanly activities.

Would your male friends who think they live as women consider that to be living as a woman? Or would they assume I'm actually a bloke.

Maybe, but I was also accused of being a secret TRA when I first came on here. People who haven’t been around other GC people tend to be extremely cautious about what they say on the matter.

Murasaki when people are inviting each other into a conversation, tone matters and tone comes across in a forum. I found your tone pretty hostile.
I have not hightailed anywhere but I do have a deadline today that I have to meet rather than simply the liberty of time to engage in a recreational forum and jump to answer questions from someone who from the get go has proceeded into the conversation with a hostile tone towards me.

That hostile and belittling 'let me get my bingo sheet' tone, does not invite people ( including me) to respond.

You can demand my response all you want. Your tone was chosen from you in your first responses to me as you clearly found my words and expression objectionable, but know that tone matters in a conversation and you elicit a response from people, especially on the internet, from the good will you build up (or conversely do not build up), in a conversation.

That is my response Murasaki.

Fair enough. I just not buying this one as it won't engage with a basic question. Which is straight out of the playbook.

I do see your point, but do feel that's more in person where i think we are all a bit cagey to start rather than on this board.

🤣🤣 so no response then. Got it.

Yes thank you for clarifying that, I did not follow it closely as it went to the Law courts but I was aware of the outcome. And grateful for the outcome too.

And you may find my tone hostile, and that's fine, it's in the eye of the beholder after all, but I find yours evasive and disingenuous, so there we go.

Even if I'd asked nicely, you still wouldn't have answered the question, and I wasn't the only one to ask it.

A tad righteous perhaps?

I forgot patronising, the last line with its deliberate spacing from the rest was definitely that.

Yes I hope you did get my response Muraki.

No one is entitled to a response in this world, even you.

I tend not to engage with people when they are rude to be honest whether it be online or in the real world. Something to think about if you engage like that a lot in the world perhaps? Maybe it's just an online thing you do. It closes conversation down.

The other thing is that people encounter the bits of the trans jigsaw in different orders. My own journey into gender criticism started with hearing about Kathleen Stock's ordeal and the realisation that gender activism was negatively impacting academic freedom and affecting trade unions. Sitting down and thinking about the concept of transness itself came later.

It's almost like we've met @middler before.

I see what you are saying and note that you close conversation down by not engaging. If you had a point surely you'd make It?

I am not without sympathy for transwomen who genuinely feel uncomfortable going into male spaces

If men feel uncomfortable going into their own spaces because they dress completely inappropriately then maybe the issue is their clothes and behaviours. And maybe toning down the ridiculousness and just putting slacks and a normal top on might make them feel comfortable again. And we can all then just get on with our days. Most women aren't dressed like Kenny Everett doing Cupid Stunt so why they think that is 'living as a woman' whatever the fuck that is, I'll never understand.

What's wrong with JKR?

JKR doesn’t like to get her hands dirty so its not obvious. She shrewdly incites her hand maidens/useful idiots/simps to do that for her via plausibly deniable dog whistles. The evidence? Take a geez at the little shop o horrors on this thread for starters….

Now come on we've done you a favour. You've not had to do all the gender identity, living as a woman, intersex, chromosome stuff. Instead you've been able to skip straight to us being rude and unkind.

Still waiting for the transphobe stuff though.

It’s great to see someone expressing nuanced views about this and asking questions. When I consider my own circles - professional, friends etc - I’ve been shocked at the strength and seeming homogeneity of the views I often see expressed on Mumsnet. Despite agreeing with elements of those views, there seems to be an astoundingly monolithic way of thinking here about the ‘trans issue’. I’m not sure that some posters always fully understand the limits of the Supreme Court ruling, or where even JK Rowling would caveat or circumscribe her own arguments.

I’m an older millennial - a little bit older than Emma Watson. What I will say first is that I don’t align myself with one individual or think it’s helpful for anyone to be seen or positioned as any kind of ‘spokesperson’ on these matters. These are my views:

• I agree with the Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of ‘sex’ in the 2010 Equality Act; the nature and provisions of the act made this ruling inevitable.
• I agree that biological sex is at present immutable, and that it is coded at a genetic level.
• One area where I think there is more nuance than many views expressed on here, however, is that there are known exceptions to absolute biological sex categorisation. There is research to support this and it has long been established that what are now called ‘intersex’ conditions exist. The role of epigenetics in the expression of genetic code is also only just beginning to be understood, and I believe that in future this will help us to understand sex and gender identity much better.
• The above means that, in principle, I cannot wholly support absolutist arguments on biological sex, which many of posters seem to make, although I agree that the overwhelming majority of people are either biologically male or female. For this and other reasons, I also cannot support absolutist arguments about gender (which I will come to).
• What also seems to be missing, to me, from most discussions on Mumsnet is that the judges clearly stated that the ruling did not have reach into wider societal and cultural discussions about what it means to be and live as a woman. To me, the ruling was very far from definitive in its views on gender. Rather than doing away with that debate, it very clearly signposted that there was no simple answer to those questions and that biological sex was only one element of that discussion.
• While my views on biological sex are as outlined above, I do not hold that sex and gender are necessarily the same thing. What I will say is that I cannot definitively say what gender is - I acknowledge that it’s an ephemeral concept - and I do not know what proportion of gender identity (whether one feels male or female regardless of biological sex) might be culturally constructed and what might be somehow innate or biological. Neither, however, does anyone else - this is an area where I believe science and research will one day catch up to some degree and we will all become more enlightened as a result.
• Nonetheless, where I find myself strongly disagreeing with many posters who might fall into the JK Rowling-supporter camp is that just because it’s an ephemeral concept, I don’t think that means therefore that it doesn’t exist, or is ‘all in their head’, as I saw one poster claim of trans women’s feelings about their gender. Looking at historical record, for example, people who feel that they have a gender identity misaligned with their apparent biological sex have always existed. I do not think that the vast majority of these people have invented their feelings or experiences in order to commit crimes against women.
• What strikes and troubles me about many of the views expressed is the bundling together of valid if narrow areas of the debate about spaces like female prisons with the denial of trans identities. This, of course, is not everyone, but I believe we need to separate out valid debate from the frequently sweeping denials of the experiences of a minority group who are themselves vulnerable, and which so often seem to accompany these discussions.
• Next, while I believe that discussions about female spaces have validity - I speak as someone who has been a victim of violent male physical and sexual assault, for example - I believe that the vast majority of trans women are not, to use your helpful term, ‘bad actors’. There are of course a small number of examples of individual bad actors, including some from prisons. While I agree that is problematic and a solution is needed, I believe these examples to be the absolute exception and not the rule, as in any walk of life.
• I believe, therefore, that this aspect of the discussion, while important, has become overblown and in many places so emotive that it is damaging wider rational debate about these two groups. As I understand it, there is no large-scale or robust evidence that transwomen as a population pose a risk to biological women. Until there is, I will hold my view that the overwhelming majority of threats to women come from outside this group, and that most trans people are sincere in how they experience gender orientation. Some people my age and younger may agree more readily with these views because they have grown up with more open discussion about trans identities.
• Where I think the above creates the largest risk is in its potential to pit two oppressed groups against one another. I fully understand, from personal experience, the visceral fear that women have of violent men and the anger about them. That threat and anger should never be ignored or minimised. However (and here we come to the potential sources of some of the views you’ve mentioned likening it to racism), a bit like when politicians like Farage pit the most vulnerable in our society against the most vulnerable from others (e.g. many immigrants) anything that sets biological women up in opposition to trans women (most of whom are ‘good actors’) is to me a potentially dangerous straw man which detracts from a far greater threat posed by still-prevalent patriarchal structures which permit widespread male violence and oppression of women. Trans women do not conform to traditional ideas of masculinity or fit within approved patriarchal categories - far from it - and while they are different from biological females, they are also inevitably generally disadvantaged within patriarchal structures, and hence are vulnerable.
• Taking Rowling’s belief that Gender Recognition Certificates were the biggest threat to female rights in her lifetime, for example, to my mind hugely overestimates the population-level threat posed by trans women, risks demonising them as a group and sidelines much more serious (and very significantly evidence-based threats) like low rape reporting and conviction rates.

TLDR: I think lots of millennials (and other women) would agree that issues like female spaces matter but would feel that the threat many argue is posed by trans rights (e.g. Rowling’s belief that GRC’s were the biggest threat to women’s rights in her lifetime) is overstated and potentially even dangerous for both women and trans women.

One area where I think there is more nuance than many views expressed on here, however, is that there are known exceptions to absolute biological sex categorisation. There is research to support this and it has long been established that what are now called ‘intersex’ conditions exist. The role of epigenetics in the expression of genetic code is also only just beginning to be understood, and I believe that in future this will help us to understand sex and gender identity much better.

Gosh, intersex. That's a new one!

Meanwhile, @UnintentionalArcher I can help you with understanding sex and gender identity.

There are two gametes and humans are genetically programmed down one or the other route to production. Sometimes things go wrong. But that doesn't mean there are more than two sexes.

Gender identity is utter nonsense. If you want to pin it down, it is clothes, hair and behaviours, possibly make up and what sort of welly boots you own. If these two words were never uttered again nothing about any human would change one iota.

Those who have disorders of sexual development (DSD), often erroneously referred to as 'intersex' conditions, are either male or female. There is no third sex. Neither is it possible to change sex. There is no 'spectrum'.

And the existence of such individuals with complex medical conditions does not have any correlation with the insistence by TRA's that men, without such conditions, be allowed to self identify into services and spaces which are for females simply because they want to.

As I recall, a lot of people who were previously called intersex but are now known to have DSDs, were quite adamant they didn't want to be used, for that is what it is, as a 'gotcha' in this debate.

Other societies faced the issue of gender-nonconforming men and dealt with it by acknowledging a third category, with names meaning things like "in the manner of a woman."

What they don't seem to have done is insist that transwomen "are" women, and hound anyone who questions that statement in any way, or try to insert transwomen into any and every space set aside for women.

In other words, the conflict of interest here was created by trans activist insistence on a strategy of appropriation and colonisation of womanhood and women's rights. If they had gone for a third category- third spaces approach this would have been avoided and I suspect most women would have supported them.

And re: prisons - up until this year, the Scottish Prison System placed violent male sex offenders into the female prison estate, following their own policy of self id.

Only after public outcry following the Isla Bryson case, did they concede only to place violent male offenders into the female prison estate. With meant that offenders such as 'Tiffany' Scott, deemed the most violent offender in both the male and female Scottish prison estates, could be placed in with vulnerable women. Again, under their (current) self id policy.

It seems to the SPS that the safety and dignity of vulnerable women (80% of whom have suffered a previous head injury) pales in comparison to the delicate feelings of men.

I completely agree with this. It would have been fine to have a group of people in a third group. One thing that really infuriates me is the insistance that transwomen are womanning (whatever that means) better than women. It is colonisation. A third group with their own spaces, sure, no problem at all.

And re transmen, I'm deeply concerned re teenage girls trying to identify out of the shit bits of being female. I get it. I wanted a hysterectomy at 15. It was all horrible. And there is a co morbidity with autism. And testosterone does damage to their bodies, as do binders. We need a world where they don't feel sexualised and want to run from that.

@middler

From what you say, it seems you are like the at least 80% of British people who think of trans people simply as an actually existing phenomenon (never mind why), for whom laws have been made, that formally acknowledge their existence, and ban discrimination against them, but which don't actually change their sex (because laws can't do that!). So when sex matters, it's their birth sex that matters, not what they wish they were.

Your young colleagues believe something different. They think that everyone has a gender identity, and that if it's different from their birth sex, the law should force everyone to treat them as if they literally were the opposite sex, by concealing their birth sex, enabling medical 'transition' (including that of children), and giving them the sex-based rights of the opposite sex.

For this to hold water, the state would have to treat gender identity theory as factually correct, teach it in schools, and punish non-believers, agnostics, and askers of questions under the criminal law (for harassment and victimisation of trans people) and also (under the civil law) by withholding from them the protection of the law from illegal belief-based discrimination. Which is pretty well where we ended up.

Rowling asks questions, 'misgenders', and funds women's single-sex services, as well as supporting court cases against illegal belief-based discrimination, and against the interpretation of equality law that would have given trans people the sex-based rights of the opposite sex.

This means that, axiomatically, she hates trans people, and this is not open to debate. Because debate is transphobic. At the LibDem conference, a debate on how to respond to the Supreme Court ruling was deemed too transphobic to be allowed to happen. Even debating whether to have the debate was transphobic. It's a fractal landscape!

Thank for that very thorough nuanced take. It's refreshing to have MN posters who aren't over simplistic in their analyses that seems confined to the feminism threads for some odd reason.

TLDR: I think lots of millennials (and other women) would agree that issues like female spaces matter but would feel that the threat many argue is posed by trans rights (e.g. Rowling’s belief that GRC’s were the biggest threat to women’s rights in her lifetime) is overstated and potentially even dangerous for both women and trans women.

This has been a concern of mine given the media space is finite. You would think the enormous political power the gender critical movement has amassed would be directed at bread & butter feminist issues of male violence (Domestic & sexual violence epidemics) but alas its loos & 'men in dresses' that dominate public attention which plays right into the hands of far right patriarchal interests by diverting attention from public responsibility & as a gateway to far right politics given their 'alliance'.

In an ironic way transgenderism is the "biggest threat to women’s rights in her lifetime" If we can't recognise the trojan horse gender critical politics is that enables the real barbarians into the gates…