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.

😆
Well, if the shoe fits... As Howse said.
Bit harsh, IMO, but since he is the arbiter of everything, I suppose we have to accept it as true. Sad times.

Yes, it’s useful.

If you make it explicitly legal for men to be in womens toilets and changing rooms, the fact that police call outs didn't go up should not be a surprise, they should go down. The fact they stayed level is concerning.

Not read the full thread so apologies if this has been posted already.

Discussion with student about JKR and critical thinking.

Lol. Cool name….😆

Obvious. If all men who want to assault women are explicitly told that they can do so without hindrance if only they say they are women, and if we pretend males are never women, and that therefore when a man becomes a woman he ceases to be male, then we can, I'm sure, get male violence down significantly.

Once the magic word 'trans' comes into play they go through all sorts of trickery to actively avoid recording male sexual violence against women.

One trick is to stop calling it 'male sexual violence' and call it 'peer on peer violence' because it is two women right?

As evidenced when to her shame, during a Mumsnet 'Chat', Stella Creasey told a mother of a girl who had been sexually assaulted by a boy in school that it was 'just peer on peer violence'.

That's why reports don't go up. Indeed in many countries they just stopped recording it at all, after all who even knows what a man or woman is any more so there's no point.

But it is not really, or primarily, about overt criminal offending. For most of the part it is the voyeurism of knowingly intruding upon a private space which was designed and intended for female people. I've experienced this myself at very close quarters and i know exactly how that feels, and how it looks.

Men are not women; they are 'other' no matter how they present or even how well they think they pass.

'TW' are male people..not a unique category of human being that somehow transcends the sex binary...which does exist and is, in fact, one of the fundamental organisational principles/vectors of life on earth; and as such is instinctively noted.

Exactly...no one supported Rachel Dolezal just because she genuinely wanted to be/felt that she was another race.

We are in the same boat @Mischance
it is heartbreaking to watch our lovely young person descend further and further into despair despite social transition. They see medical transition as the road to happiness. Friends and medics alike refer to them as the opposite sex. Surely it is important that a person’s biological sex matters in their medical notes.

Safety is but one aspect of the safeguarding needs for female people.

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.

This. It’s a matter of privacy and dignity, and freedom from sexual harassment by men.

any laws that allow transwomen to legally be in women only spaces

As the supreme court has clarified, there are no such laws.

Transwomen are men. There could not be a law that allowed men to legally be in women only spaces because they would instantly cease to be women only spaces.

Part of the reason for women only spaces is safety - we can't tell which men will hurt us and which are harmless so they must all stay out - but that's not the only reason. Our privacy and dignity matter too.

I know lots of lovely men who wouldn't dream of harming a woman but I don't want to get undressed in front of them, or share a toilet, women's hostel, prison or refuge with them.

There is a law that says it is prohibited conduct for a service provider, employer etc. to violate our dignity or create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for us, related to our sex.

If people like your young friends want to change the law and make harassment related to sex lawful then they will need to campaign openly for it and persuade people that it's a good idea. They can't do things under the radar any more because #NoDebate has been dead for quite a while now. From following recent court hearings I don't fancy their chances.

“So target trans women for what the greater part of the population is responsible for? Makes sense….🤪”

No one is ‘targeting’ that group of male people by applying the same safeguarding rules to them as they do to all other male people in the population.

The use of the word ‘targeting’ is part of the emotionally manipulative language being used. This time with the mocking and derisive “Makes sense”. Complete with the mocking and derisive emoji.

I think that the sentence though of “So target trans women for what the greater part of the population is responsible for?” is the indication that the poster doesn’t understand how safeguarding policy is developed. Or does and really resents safeguarding measures.

Safeguarding for use of female single sex provisions is a blanket policy. The only fair way is to apply it equally using a specific characteristic to exclude all of that group. It is male people in general who cause female people the greatest harm in situations where female people are vulnerable and may be alone.

It is all male people who need to be treated equally and excluded, regardless of identity and regardless of surgical status. Because it is unfair to female people to expect them to assess every male person who comes into their spaces as to whether that person will cause them distresss. Just seeing that it is a male person may be the trigger as many women have told us with their personal testimonies.

It is also unfair to those male people to be subject to assessment as to their ‘validity’ of access to the provision. No male person should have to comply with anyone else’s expectation of passing to meet the criteria for safeguarding.

Either all male people are excluded or some male people are treated unfairly.

Despite all the pleas to be kind, you cannot have some male people access female single sex provisions because they pass some type of made up critieria and the other male people who are still part of the same group don’t meet the threshold for access.

What exactly is a ‘genuine trans woman?’ Whether they’ve had surgery or not is irrelevant, men don’t need a penis to attack women. They’re men, whatever they subject themselves to and they need to stay out of women’s single sex spaces.

And (I think correctly) The ECHR has ruled that rights cannot not be dependent on having surgery that causes sterility.

It's a non starter to suggest that a distinction should be made between those who have or haven't had surgery to remove their penis.

I think the human rights aspect is irrelevant.

Unless you're actually proposing we have bouncers on the doors of every single sex space actually checking peoples genitals, we have no way of telling who has had surgery and who has not.

It's a completely irrelevant consideration.

Which includes being used as a validation tool - and I think that is an extremely generous way to put it in many situations - by men.

Women's bodies are not a resource for use by men.

It does not matter if the men are entirely safe.
It does not matter if the men have had their penises removed.
It does not matter how much medication they've taken.
It does not matter how lovely they are (although frankly any man wanting to use non consenting women is NOT lovely)

This is merely a discussion on how much men can use and break women before other men will agree it's a bit of a problem and women might be allowed a bit of space to say no.

Its predicated on the idea of women being a separate and subordinate species who are not entitled to anything but the crumbs men choose to hand them generously (and on loan) once they've had everything they feel they 'need'.

Are we into women's equality or not?

The human rights argument also doesn’t work because in the provision of public spaces by organisations, there is no human right that states that someone has the right to privacy from a person of the same sex.

Meaning in the provision of publicly accessible single sex spaces, no one can be excluded from that sex that the space is designated as being accessible for. If a male person rejects the male single sex space provided by an organisation, they can ask for an alternative. The organisation doesn’t have to provide that alternative space though. That could be considered an unreasonable request.

A male person rejecting a provided single sex provision does not get to access the opposite sex single sex space just because that person has a belief that they are not a male person when they materially are. When the term human rights is introduced, it is all too often misused. It is used falsely as an appeal to authority.

These are such tired, tired conversations.

We've been going around on this for years now. The men who say if 100 or so women are murdered in the name of self ID then it's no biggie. The men who tell us that our assaults don't matter, the life changing damage they did isn't important, that the statistics don't prove enough yet to permit the massive horror of depriving a man from gratifying his own needs using non consenting women -

they don't care about the horror for women, it's not relevant. You will never get such men to agree there is ever a point at which a woman matters or has a right to say no. Never. It'll be dressed up in a lot of lovely bullshit and statistics and probably a rainbow. But it's stinking misogyny and based on some idea that women need permission from men and to have evidenced to the point of agreement to be permitted any autonomy over their own bodies and lives. Fuck that.

And it doesn't matter anyway. It's irrelevant.

Women have the right to single sex spaces, regardless of how this affects men. Because women's single sex spaces are the one thing that is NOT ALL ABOUT MEN. It's not up for negotiation any more, the law is clear. No, a lot of wailing about 'it's complicated' because saying no to men is baaaaaaad can get to fuck too. It's clear. And my God all this wangling demonstrates exactly why that law is needed. Because too many people - women included - seriously believe that women shouldn't be permitted equality or to avoid use by the more valuable humans with penises. And that privilege is never lost, even though apparently no one can tell what sex anyone is and chromosomes are complicated and medication and surgery. That binary power never shifts. And neither does reality.

Human Rights argument relates to Gender recognition and the idea that it might be possible to draw a line that differentiates between genuine/non-genuine trans people by insisting on surgery - but I agree that as confirmed by the SC possession of a GRC does not actually confer right of access to an opposite sex single sex space.

indeed. The concept of privacy is also often posited as a blunt human right where others are said to have no right to know the sex of someone. Whereas, there is a provision to that where it is possible that this right will be dependent on issues relating to safety of others.

Again, it is a right that gets misused in arguments and often a statement of rights is posted without the paragraph/s right after that statement with the limitations.

Indeed.

I agree with this 💯 up until the NOT LOVELY comment.

After this, I agree in part, but I think there are wider ranging motivations at play than just this one.

I not saying this because I think hypothesising about motivation shouldn’t happen. I am saying it because when discussing the issues of SSS, as in the case of this thread, arguments attributing ‘good/benign’ v ‘bad/sinister’ motivations for including transwomen in female only provision tend to distract from objective information that holds true irrespective of attributions made about motivation.