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.

#bekind was the real Trojan horse.

I did not know that and I think that is absolutely horrendous regarding men in the Scottish prisons. They allowed people who claimed to be transwomen in the womens' prison. Essentially people who are very likely to still be biologically men. That is just wrong. If it comes up again I will have that as an example of why I was so glad about that legal decision.

I am just sick of the absolute dismissal of womens' concerns about being possibly harmed by transwomen when anyone can wake up one day and identify as a transwomen. It's the self identification factor.

Not down for transwomen playing in womens' sport. It's not fair. Does that make me anti trans? I do not think I am anti trans. I just think your gender dysmorphia does not trump womens' rights that have been fought so hard for.

I think children who think they have been born in the wrong gender ( and really how many people can this really be in a typical population) should wait till adulthood before they start hormones etc but I have to keep that view to myself as I know people whose kids are on that train and I just do not think at 12/13/14 you can be making that decision but it's like this sea change has happened and a significant majority of people are going along with it.

Transgenderism might be a 'small' issue, but it has a wide range of bad outcomes, including for safeguarding, data integrity, scientific knowledge, and individuals' health and well-being.

My own main objection, though, is that:

it's not true!

I think we agree re the drugs for children, it's abhorrent, and damaging. And I see that if you know people who've committed to that, it's almost impossible to say anything to them. A difficult situation as I'm sure they don't mean their kids harm, but they are doing it. It's very very sad.

I agree, my main objection to gender identity ideology is not so much is that it is misogynistic and harmful (which it is) but that it is incoherent, self-reinforcing and absurd.

Keira Bell is a cautionary tale. And a very brave woman. But what these people did to her as a vulnerable teen is appalling and will have lifelong consequences.

Essentially people who are very likely to still be biologically men.

Or, are absolutely as biologically male as they ever were.

This poster is at it.

Thank you Unintentional Archer, yes my views align a lot with yours which you articulated very well and your post is what I came on here for to try and understand my own position I think because I certainly do not hate transpeople and I don't think Rowling does either.

I don't think most transwomen are bad actors or want to harm women.Are there and that are? Yes of course as there are in every group of people because some individuals are just not good people. I think they identify not as male but as female and want to live their lives in a female identity whatever that means for them. The trans woman I knew years ago did not dress in an overly feminine way at all and I would not have known she had transitioned her identity to be a woman had she not told me. But the problem of self identification is a significant one when it comes to women only spaces and yes also women's sport where people who were born men and then 'identify as women' later in their lives will typically have a significant advantage over women born as women.

I just do not understand how people cannot see that any man can just self identify as a woman and take advantage of any laws that allow transwomen to legally be in women only spaces. It's just so perplexing to me that they cannot see this like they live in some naive world where people would 'never do that'...

I would add that the existence of people born with DSDs (0.018% of the population) is no justification for redefining the boundaries of what is normal, healthy, and desirable for humans. We can make necessary accommodations for people with DSDs without doing so.
Also there is no evidence that trans-identifying people have a higher instance of DSDs than the general population, so why is this continually being brought up?

OP, please do stick around. Don't be put off by posters who dismiss nuanced opinions as trolling. Do beware of posters who praise nuance but then go on to undermine GC arguments on spurious grounds. I sometimes feel that the consensus here is a little too narrow, but I don't think it's actually an echo chamber.

Essentially people who are very likely to still be biologically men

Well yes. They will certainly still be biologically men.

The reason for that is very simple: people cannot change sex.

Out of interest, how old are these millennials who you know that hold these views? I see this a lot but I am a millennial (born mid 80s to mid 90s) and not one of my close friend holds the view that TWAW. Even the ones that you’d expect to.

I think that there is a trap in thinking that you (this is a general ‘you’ not aimed at anyone) have a more ‘nuanced’ view to those who seem more hardline. It could also be very possible that those who have what some consider hardline views have more information at hand and have read very deeply and widely, while also robustly discussing exactly how concepts and solutions work in real life application.

For instance, we now have had people with differences of sex development introduced as a destabiliser to sex categorisation. However, even those people with DSDs can be reliably sorted into either male or female sex class categories. They are people and have been politically leveraged as a destabilising factor. And those doing this don’t even realise how they are copying this political leveraging to create a nuance that is cruel to those with this group of conditions.

So too, leveraging the different cultural groups of people who were put into cultural roles due to the oppression within their society.

The leveraging of these disparate groups to create this ‘nuanced’ view needs to be considered very carefully as to whether the way they have been leveraged is valid. I have yet to see any argument which supports their use to destabilise what we know about sex categories for humans and the impacts of being a female human in today’s society.

There is also generally a sense of ‘we just don’t know’ that is also foundational to some arguments. We do know a huge amount about human sex categories and human brains. There is not going to be a future where we can change someone’s sex unless you have a machine that changes an entire adult human body at atom level and puts that person back together so their coding is changed as well as their body parts.

Is that likely to happen? Should we be making societal changes based on this remote future? I think if you are someone who thinks, yes, we should, then you are not someone who understands how laws need to be developed.

I think @middler that many people on this board understand there are people who do believe they are not the sex they materially are. Their presence in the world doesn’t change the human sex categories.

An argument we regularly see is one where people declare there ‘must be ‘ some way to give a group of male people what they want without causing harm to female people. That we as a society just hasn’t found the way yet. This is sounds comforting but it is, to be blunt, a lazy position. Because, it calls for female people to then be part of a societal wide experiment while those who want to reorganise society to be this wonderful ideal civilisation, feel good about themselves.

Sport is an excellent example of what I am talking about. How many women and girls been irreversibly harmed in the live experiment that was the inclusion of two groups of male athletes in the female sports category? Even more than 25 years on, female people are still being harmed and those who demand that there must be a way are still desperately trying to find a way. But the issue is they used philosophical theory to categorise humans where it could never remove the physical aspects to make that philosophical theory work, if you see what I mean.

So too with this discussion about ‘genuine’ people with transgender identities. Yes, of course there are people who believe they are something in they are not. It happens for many immutable aspects that form someone’s identity.

How helpful is it really to have a person who is not materially the sex they say they are, be treated only some of the time as if they could be the sex they claim, rather than the sex they materially are? To me, this is the unkindness of those who believe that their solutions are kind and manageable. Because how kind is it that a male person can be treated as being female for only part of their life and not others.

How kind is it to treat someone who is a male person as being female and allowing them to use the female toilets at your venue, where all the female people have democratically and free from any coercion agreed that he can do so, then be expected to act according to his material sex at another venue?

How kind is it that for most of the week, someone is affirmed in their identity yet is denied access to female sports teams on the weekend because actually they are not female?

How kind is it that a male person is constantly reminded that they are not really what they believe they are or want to be and that some people also may be feeling coerced into acting as if that male person is who they say they are? By the way, that doesn’t include what we have seen from self published content that this coerced superficial acceptance is attractive for some of those group, but there is no way of knowing unless you know the person extremely well.

And on the other hand, whether it is kind for female people to have those male people included is given a scant thought. And very often those who desperately need the single sex provisions are dismissed by people who have decided that even though they too have experienced abuse from male people, they don’t need this group of male people excluded so those other women and girls, they are over stating their need. Those women and girls are either making up their distress, are hateful or just ignorant or they need to seek help to just deal with it or any number of other reasons for being dismissed.

While the male people are to be centred.

There is no way around this in the way that some people almost plead for when they declare that it is
‘nuanced and others don’t see that nuance’ or that ‘there must be a way we just haven’t found it yet’ and so on. So, when people say that others are so extreme and can’t see nuance etc, it is often more that actually those people have already worked through the solutions from so many different aspects that they realise these pleaded for solutions are not really workable and not even that kind at all.

I recommend OP that you do stick around and read past threads. Last week on this board there were at least three threads specifically about JK Rowling / Emma Watson. But there are so many threads on this single board where these issues are debated. It is not an echo chamber despite people’s derisive accusations. If a concept cannot be debated with evidence provided, is it supported only by emotional reasoning ? Should we, as a society, be prioritising this emotional reasoning?

Some of the issues with the ‘genuine transwomen’ argument have been mentioned. Part of that also comes down to the issue with who is and isn’t genuine.

How is it kind to the person in question that some people believe they are ‘genuine’ while others don’t? Again it comes down to this issue of the ‘sometimes zone’. I don’t believe it is healthy for anyone to be in the ‘sometimes’ zone in regards to accessing single sex provisions.

It is also very poor safeguarding that access to single sex provisions is left up to someone to arbitrate whether another person is ‘transgender’ enough or ‘genuine’ . There is a reason all male people above 8 years old were excluded in the first place. It is very poor safeguarding to allow any sub group in based on whether they can be assessed as having the potential to harm or not.

And yet, why is society being pushed to lower safeguarding principles in this way? When did this ever work previously, why is this group of male people getting this special treatment?

Robust safeguarding principles do not mean that an identified group of male people gets special access until enough data is collected of physical harm to exclude them again. That is not the way safeguarding female people works.

Evidence of harm was mentioned by a poster upthread. Importantly, what was said was that there was no ‘“large” quantities of data collected. Who the fuck thinks robust safeguarding should allow experimentation of a previously excluded group having access to women and girls until enough women and girls have been harmed in quantifiable ways to exclude that group again?

That is a philosophical theory experiment.

The comparator for making a general safeguarding policy is not whether that sub group of male people have a lower risk of committing harm to female people compared to other UK male people It is whether that sub group of male people have the same or lower risk of committing harm to female people as the general female UK population.

There doesn’t need to be any ‘large’ data collection done to prove there are issues either. Because the ‘harm’ is not only about reportable physical harm. There will be a large amount of harm that will never be reported and only partly because women and girls don’t bother reporting crimes where they are the victim to any authority.

However, safety is but one aspect of the safeguarding needs for female people. There are numerous harms.

Harms include:
-Rape and sexual assault.

-Violence.

-Sexual abuse that is not rape or sexual assault.

-Sexual abuse that also includes solo sexual acts or using the experience in future sexual acts.

-Any other abuse that may include verbal abuse, intimidation in any way etc.

-A male person's presence where female people need privacy and dignity.

-A male person's presence where female people need to feel safe from any male person's presence (over the age of about 8 years old).

-Female people self-excluding knowing that there may be a male person accessing that provision.

Narrowing the discussion to sex and violence offences does not remove these other harms from consideration for single sex spaces.

The point is, why should any female person be subject to higher risk of any of these harms just to allow a group of male people with a philosophical belief about their identity that doesn't reflect material reality access?

It also comes down to asking this question.

How many additional women and girls being attacked or harmed in anyway in female single sex spaces are acceptable to you before we can expect to exclude ALL male people above the age of 8 years old?

We have been given answers such as ‘35’ and ‘over 100 each year’. If you are someone who has dismissed excluding male people because you haven’t seen enough proof that including male people in female spaces is causing harm, what is your number?

If you're so weak that you can't handle robust debate with strong women without resorting to insults then FWR isn't the place for you.

Absolutely pathetic.

Essentially people who are very likely to still be biologically men

They are ALL always going to be biologically men, because they are men.

I don't understand what you think happens when men say 'Im a lady'. Because nothing happens. It doesn't matter how many times they say it.

As far as large data sets being required for proof of safety or not, how many records need to be collected for an accurate review.

How about this. There is a growing bank of reported incidents. There are only some

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/3348290-It-will-never-happen-resource-thread?latest=0

There is also https://reduxx.info and a site that MN blocks which is “trans crimes Uk dot com” (all one word)

There are UK prisoner statistics broken down into sex offences, there are Canadian, NZ and some USA state statistics. All showing similar patterns. That male people with transgender identities do not commit sex offences at the same rates or lower than the female prisoner population in that country.

What more data and incident repeats are needed by those declaring there is not enough to say there is an issue and we should maintain strong safeguarding where male people are excluded no matter how they identify?

There are also already reports too of female people coming face to face with their male abuser / assaulter in what they expected to be female only spaces. This includes girls. Those female people are being told they have to accept these male people in the spaces they are vulnerable in, dismissed by others.

Even if it is not their abuser specifically, seeing any male person in that space may distress them.

And for those who claim to not be able to reliably identify the correct sex of a human using body cues that cannot be changed, please don’t assume your experience is the universal experience. It is not. For every single male person who ‘transitions’ in real life and with interaction (even if that interaction is limited to observation of movement) there will be atleast one girl or woman who will correctly identify that person’s sex.

Are these young people your children and their friends or YP you work with, OP?

I actually have never seen a coherent and logically or factually consistent detailing as to exactly what changes when a male person says this.

Just like there is this factually incorrect that a male person without testes miraculously never sexually abuses another person again. There was a useful study that I might dig up again that showed that castrated male people still sexually abused. They found other ways to do so.

A question I have never seen answered is :

What is the difference between a male person who has lost their penis and testes due to injury or disease and one that voluntarily has them removed to fit their identity? Why is one excluded from female single sex provisions and one considered female enough to be included?

So much of this is emotionally driven philosophical reasoning that lacks coherence, evidence and even logic. It is all based on the postmodernist and other theories that prop up ‘something is what I describe it as’.

Once you strip away the emotionally obscuring language, it does become clearer. Unfortunately, it is also considered extreme to use precise and accurate language. And to be considered extreme is something that someone are desperately uncomfortable with so they may not even realise the emotionally manipulative language they use.

Thank you for sharing. Despite following these issues for quite a while I’d never seen that essay. As always it’s very clear, well drafted and persuasive

I've always found it wild that women's fight against an ideology which tells them to 'shut your face or I'll shut it for you' is framed as a right wing issue.

Or that fighting for the dignity and safety of rape survivors and women in prisons is seen as not worthy. There was literally a double rapist designated to be placed in a women's prison, following actual policy.

Or that protesting that alien face hugging colonising male trans activists trying to control how women actually do their activism (the TRA's who tried to take over the protests in Edinburgh against the overturning of reproductive rights in America, for their own agenda being one such example) is women being pushed out of their own social activism movement.

Or the total institutional capture in Scotland in which women were literally told by their elected representatives to wheesht.

'Feminism. Only men can do feminism right'.

Honestly, absolutely wild.

It's not even remotely right wing

@Howseitgoin knows this. He just thinks it's a great tactic for getting you to STFU and giving the men what they want.