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'm afraid I don't think any man who requires a non consenting woman to either take her clothes off and shut up or (if she can) cede the resource to him is absolutely not a lovely person.

Obvs without the double negative. sigh.

No worries, FortheloveofPetethePlumber - non-consenting women having to take off their clothes in front of a man deserves all the negatives you can throw at it - six of them would be an appropriately-named sextuple negative😁

It's totally immaterial how lovely or not lovely these men are.

They are men, they shouldn't be in women's spaces. That's all there is to it.

@middler asked the question, why do her young colleagues think JKR is evil, rather than just someone with arguable opinions with which they disagree?

And the thread filled up with posts supporting, or opposing, those opinions. Which misses the point - why is this situation asymmetrical? JKR doesn't think transgenderists are intrinsically evil, only that they are wrong about some things, for sound reasons.

Short answer: it's a cult; a religion; an unfalsifiable metaphysical belief system. It cannot defend itself with reason because it's not reasonable in the first place. The only option is to treat demurral as an expression of hatred.

I suggest that, if she can do it without too much detriment, OP does not bother to debate with her young colleagues, but simply tells them she doesn't believe in gender identity theory. Just say NO, in other words.

And robust and equally applied general safeguarding, of course, doesn't rely on whether someone seems to be nice, lovely or not. That is why case by case is unworkable, despite all the assurances that it is the 'kindest' and 'fairest'. No, it fucking is not kind or fair to judge if a male person as an individual may be a good enough person to access a space that they have no right to be accessing.

Who is that 'fair' to? Women and girls? No! Those male people who are judged to not qualify? I don't think so. Considering how many ways there are to hide pasts and considering the very long history we have of male people who will present themselves as being the most respectable person who have caused horrific harm. So, NO!

Please read this, it addresses your false claims about antisemitism: https://www.thehelenjoyce.com/p/a-wild-ride

It is true that the OP asked the question, however, I think that the thread has turned into a live demonstration of just how people think when they either support JK Rowling or demonise her and just how wary women have become of being called 'extreme' when they support her.

It has shown just how many women expect to be called 'extreme' for supporting the very things that JK Rowling discusses and supports with her activism and how they act because of those repeated falsehoods.

These societies force effeminate males out of society and into prostitution under the guise of a 3rd gender. Misogyny & homophobia.

young homosexual males would be forced into this by their families abandoning them and this being the only “accepting” community. Homosexual females experience forced marriage and corrective rapes and beatings, their value being in marriage to a male. Should the girl object further then she will be silenced, usually permanently.

This is what “trans has always existed” means. And it’s sick. Societies with this 3rd gender (for males) all treat women and homosexuals like shit. It is not a practice one should seek to emulate if male violence against women and girls is to be prevented. It sticks “real” men right at the top of the hierarchy and enforces it with violence and destitution for those who are non-conforming or object. Not progressive in the slightest.

This is just it though.

Those people who use the 'but third genders have always existed' never have scratched beyond that trite superficial statement. Even the female people who were forced into these groups, or felt they had no better option, in the rare cultures that othered the female people were actually oppressed, even if someone has tried to spin it that they were empowered and revered. When you start researching it, no, they were oppressed. And people lazily using those statements don't ever acknowledge that.

Yes it boils my blood. These othered peoples are oppressed and are living within the confines of an often brutal society. To say these societies deal with their trans populations well is obscene. Their “trans” populations are forced to be the 3rd gender. It’s the only way they’re allowed to live. It’s not innate or a choice.

Not to divert more, but it is like those who try to leverage James Barry and at least one or two female soldiers in the USA civil war. They declare that they were transgender. No... they were women who were fighting against negative sexism to be able to be treated with respect and have equality of opportunity.

The very lazy leveraging of those women is denying those women their story and politically modifying their life to suit someone else's agenda.

Totally. And for a community that stands by 'you are who you say you are', to leverage women who by dint of being dead can't say anything, is revolting.

I wasn't claiming that those societies are "progressive" and don't stigmatise gender-nonconforming men. Merely that they are doing one thing right, namely not conflating feminine men with actual women and forcing everyone to pretend that there is no significant difference between the two categories. That's where the West has gone wrong. 'Trans women "are" women' is an extremist position.

Yes. I remember the comment from
the Samoan PM, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, about Hubbard

"This fa'afafine or man should have never been allowed by the Pacific Games Council president to lift with the women. I was shocked when I first heard about it,"

His comment really did contradict so many activist statements that leveraged Samoan culture. I saw a lot less posters posting about the fa'afafine with the view to leveraging their situation to score political points after that.

Also the fa'afafine rugby player. Played for the male Samoan team not the female team.

Sorry HeggettyPeg, I wasn’t intending to say you were implying anything progressive about said cultures. You are completely correct in saying that they did not consider that their 3rd genders were the same as women and that they are not sharing the same spaces.

However, I was pointing out that these cultures enforce a certain role on homosexuals. A homosexual male is lesser than a man and so is woman-adjacent (their opinion not mine), and basically that homosexual females do not exist.

My point being it is unlikely these 3rd genders would exist without the misogynistic practices and beliefs in these cultures.

Sorry for not explaining myself properly, I only dealt with the first part of your post and should have commented on the correctness of your post overall too.

Thanks for clarifying. I think you raised an important point that joining those third groups is not always a voluntary act by the individual concerned. Whereas transwomen here are the ones saying "we are not men and shouldn't be treated as men".

So there isn't an exact equivalence, and heaven forbid that the stigma should be replicated. But it's a useful reminder that "not a man in the usual sense" can be socially expressed in ways other than "actually a woman".

I suspect the "actually a woman" narrative may up the ante in other ways besides the obvious invasion of women's spaces and appropriation of language. It may increase the pressure to "pass", and the temptation to be less than honest when sex matters. Which then tends to make a holy grail of preventing puberty and transitioning early so as to pass better.

Absolutely excellently put. Yes it is good that there are ways of saying that ‘not a man’ does not immediately mean ‘a woman’. But we need to be careful about saying that anyone is not a male or female or is a lesser version of either as that allows those ‘proper’ men to justify hierarchy and their place at the top.

I hadn’t even considered the increased pressure to pass and what that could do to a person. Also, lying by omission. It’s quite scary the path that they are trying to pull us down. It can’t be good for anyone’s wellbeing.

@middler

I was rereading your thread and came back to this post.

This is perhaps a classic example of what you are talking about in your OP in the way some people will dismiss the concerns of women and girls.

It starts off supporting a previous poster's post by using a false 'nuanced' description for the post. That previous post when you go through it carefully, is actually unworkable in real life and relies on flawed understanding of people with DSDs, historical groups and future potential discoveries that a poster feels 'must' be discovered eventually. Of course, they are most welcome to express their opinion and to come onto the board to discuss it. I would actually encourage the poster to do so and drill further into those concepts expressed.

This quoted poster though amplifies that opinion as 'nuanced' and those based on established science and experience in listening to other female people and their needs while also considering the real life application limits of an 'inclusive' model as 'over simplistic'. That too is fine and that poster's opinion which is equally poorly informed from weeks of previous experience.

Then the poster seeks to shame feminists by completely misrepresenting the breadth of feminist action in the UK. By the way, the poster is not even in the UK and has very poor knowledge of feminism (I encourage you to use the advanced search function and read their many posts on the topic). Either way, this is a false representation of feminist action, because feminist groups are doing all the things that this poster has decided should be every feminist's priority AS WELL as campaigning and working towards ensuring that female people's needs are met through single sex provisions and safeguarding policies.

According to this poster, this must be impossible to do and that women just aren't putting enough focus in fixing male pattern behaviour towards female people. This is actually a misogynistic approach and it is a tactic of Men's Rights Activists who feel they should be able to shame women for their failure to stop men from abusing them. Over the past 6 weeks, this poster has posted almost daily versions of this particular accusation towards feminists on this board.

However, those wider focused actions have been diminished, derided and dismissed by this poster with the sentence: "but alas its loos & 'men in dresses' that dominate public attention"

While then falsely accusing UK feminists of playing into the hands of the 'far right patriarchial interests'. UK feminists are rather solidly left wing politically and this has not changed over the past decade.

Again, this is ignorance and it is a tired old tactic. False alignments such as this is meant to make feminists fear discussing female people's needs of single sex provisions and safeguarding. This poster does this repeatedly on every thread. It is not true and most UK feminists who were the very early groups trying to raise the alarm are still very much active and they are certainly not 'far right' and not playing into the hands of the 'far right'.

The desired outcome of this poster is that feminists in the UK focus their attention on this person's personal political aims, and those are that any male person who says they are female should have access to female single sex provisions.

This post that I am quoting uses very common tactics seen on MN. It is a daily occurrence on this board and it would explain why women are highly suspicious. This post seeks to demonise and vilify women who disagree with this poster.

I hope this might help you to sort through your own thoughts about the topic @middler and see the tactics that people are using and perhaps why you posted here in the first place.

"In my book I demonstrate that mainstream transactivism is not a grassroots movement, but a top-down one. One part of the evidence is that rich individuals and foundations make large donations to campaign groups that, among other things, lobby to erase biological sex from law and to enshrine gender identity in its place. Some of that money is tied to campaigns for gender self-ID. I discuss the ACLU, HRC and Stonewall in most detail, but there are many others. And I give a sense of the funding that comes from rich individuals by discussing three examples: George Soros via the Open Societies Foundation; Jennifer Pritzker via the Tawani Foundation; and Jon Stryker via the Arcus Foundation.
This is in no sense “dark money”, and I don’t say it is. The information is readily available because all such American foundations and charities are legally required to publish details of where they get their money and what they spend it on. I found the information on their websites. This makes a nonsense of Bilek’s claim that I plagiarised her: that these foundations donate heavily to campaign groups that press for gender self-ID is publicly available information, and she and I are not the only ones to have pointed it out.
I didn’t deliberately select three Jewish donors; it never occurred to me to think about their religions. Two of the three, it turns out, are indeed Jewish, though that is not something I mention in my book because it is utterly irrelevant. Judging by the tenor of conversation on Twitter, Jon Stryker may or may not be Jewish: his religion appears not to be a matter of public record. I have not sought to ascertain it, because—again—I think it’s irrelevant. I also think it’s interesting that the people accusing me of antisemitic dog-whistles are speculating about someone’s religion, when I did not even speculate about it."

'I just happen to only mention jewish donors one of which just happened to be the far right's go to man for 'white great replacement theory'…

George Soros really?🤥

Please. That you believe this is any sort of adequate rebuttal or 'coincidence' is only another example of GC denial of reality.

& while your'e at it special agent @middler, this might help you 'process' Hell's 'tip off'…

And howseitgoin’s latest post, @middler , is the type of DARVO tactic that is illustrates what I was referring to.

Yes dear. Very good. Now remember it’s time to change typing hand and antibac your keyboard and mouse. Don’t want any germs or RSI. I am not sure why you are on a feminism board arguing with women as to what feminism is, but I’m really glad you’re learning from the well read, articulate women on these boards. And the useful life tips. 😃

I'd still like to know who the young people are who want to dictate what the OP thinks about a topic and that she isn't allowed to express an opinion that differs from their's. Her children?

As I understand it, there is no large-scale or robust evidence that transwomen as a population pose a risk to biological women.

I suggest an hour or two of browsing

www.terfcrime.co.uk

and

www.terfisaslur.com