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.

Trans women are men. Their actions and sense of entitlement show that. Actual women would never display such overt disregard for other women. The end.

Ah but Sinner!…. Apparently it needs to be a specific review or study. Which of course, would have to be approved somehow and never considered transphobic to start with. Oh and apparently, it would also require an independent team to actually ascertain whether any negative discrimination factors were at play as we are assured accounts for all those male people with transgender identities being in prison in the first place.

Who the fuck is going to fund that? No transgender support group is going to ever allow such a project to be undertaken. Because to start with, every male criminal with a transgender identity needs to be vetted as to whether they are or are not gaming the system. That directly contradicts the ‘we are who we say we are’ mantra from the start.

Then you get to situation of what then happens when reality is shown and the lack of symmetry between male people with transgender identities and female people is real, measurable with conviction statistics and actually there IS a problem. What transgender support group is going to risk that?

So instead, people who declare they are the reasonable moderates, relying on false comparisons with other groups and unlikely future hopeful discoveries, say they will never believe there is an issue until there is ‘large-scale’ figures . It makes them feel better while holding a position that continues to allow female people to be harmed.

Oh yes…. It also denies that female people are harmed in other ways than reportable offences.

We have seen the arguments used by extreme transgender activists as well as those who believe that their ‘moderate’ position is workable in achieving protection for female people. And so the cycle continues.

Ask firstly if they’ve read her essay, not just the headlines that brand her as anti trans, hateful etc, then ask which parts of her essay they disagree with.

Helleofabore

every male criminal with a transgender identity needs to be vetted as to whether they are or are not gaming the system.

We should start with the assumption that they are and work from there. And it goes without saying that nary a one should be in the women's estate.

I agree. I am all for accepting any person who declares a transgender identity being part of the group.

However, if it was my project, I would want to reduce the raw numbers at the start because that would be the very thing that will keep being mentioned to discredit the work, if you know what I mean.

I agree.

The vast majority of trans-identifying men have only cosmetic surgery: they don’t harm their precious male genitals. But with or without a penis they can still intimidate, abuse and assault.

Any man using women’s facilities is threatening all women there, and actively harming women who have been traumatised by earlier sexual abuse.

Thanks very much for responding to me - much appreciated. It’s great to be able to engage in sensible discussion with thoughtful people about this.

That first link isn’t working (I’m getting a website not found message). The second one takes me to a website with screenshots of lots of tweets containing abusive/unpleasant language and slurs about so-called ‘TERFs’ (a divisive term which I really dislike). Can you please tell me if those are posts predominantly from trans women themselves, mainly from other people who for some reason think it’s ok to speak abusively to people who they disagree with, or from a mixture? I can’t see the sources specified anywhere on the website but it would be important to be clear on that before making any further comment. If these posts are significantly coming from trans women without similarly nasty provocation from the ‘other side’ then there’s clearly an issue to be dealt with and (edited to add) could be considered to constitute a secondary threat (either way content like this should be policed and dealt with). Can you please confirm if you’re able to?

What you’ve posted is absolutely alarming. It looks like what I would call ‘secondary content’ - i.e. content where abuse and slurs link to those engaged in the discourse itself, rather than content documenting the experiences of women who’ve been harmed by trans women in situations of concern like those raised by Rowling around female-only spaces. This type of content exemplifies one of my original points about how the inflammatory discourse around this has detracted from and damaged sensible, proportionate discussion like you and I are trying to engage in here.

What I was originally asking about was larger-scale evidence about the threat that some say trans women pose to women in those primary circumstances described by Rowling.
If you have any links to studies or reviews about the threat that trans women as a population pose to women, please can you post? If studies/reviews don’t exist yet (I’m sure others with more expertise may know better than me) then online sharing of anecdotal experiences of women in those situations could also form important evidence. The #MeToo movement relied a lot on women sharing their experiences of sexual harassment and was extremely powerful- if similar anecdotal evidence existed for harms caused by trans women to women in female-only spaces, taking that as just one example of concern, and women can speak out or are speaking out about that en masse on social media, then it would certainly suggest a threat posed at a population level. (To be clear taking just one example, I personally think that transgender women should be housed separately in prisons, for various reasons, but I’m not convinced that there is the population-level threat that many suggest). Naturally I wouldn’t expect there to be the same volume of anecdotes as for #MeToo because of small numbers of trans women as a percentage of the population, but anecdotal evidence of any significance of scale would be useful to see.

I will say that I’m going into hospital today for a period, so will endeavour to check back at in the future to have a look at anything you share, but won’t be able to read anything you post quickly.

All the best.

I think these might be useful for new posters/lurkers -

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3145470-Break-it-down-for-me

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3348290-It-will-never-happen-resource-thread

If you have any links to studies or reviews about the threat that trans women as a population pose to women, please can you post?

Most men aren't a threat to women. You might as well make an argument that men with red hair are less of a risk to women than other men, and ask women to prove that they aren't.

The onus is on you to prove that they are less of a risk, but with no clear way of defining 'trans' (see reluctance of courts, police and media to suggest that a convicted rapist might be having them on) that could be difficult.

This is helpful also -

This is it, really. We are scolded for not provided studies (which would never be funded or allowed) to prove that actually yes, trans women are just as much a threat as men. But never do TRAs explain what magic happens that removes all threat from men when they declare they are a woman. Why does saying ‘I’m a woman’ making a man less of a danger than if they don’t say that?

Here is one for you @UnintentionalArcher

committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/

If you did provide studies they would not be accepted as peer reviewed/with the right evidence/ proving anything that meant women were entitled to have some privacy away from men who claim trans identities. The harm to those women would and never will be significant enough for men to agree to grant those women any rights that would present them with inconvenient barriers to their desired use of women.

It's pointless explaining Einstein to a dog, it's pointless trying to use objective reason with someone living in an alternative reality where they all unwanted facts and evidence are invisible, and it's pointless trying to convince a misogynist to permit women any rights. Particularly when he feels that he is entitled to have them undress for him and this relies on her never having any right of escape.

It's rather like trying to convince a domestic abuser that he really should accept its wrong to go on hitting his partner and stop doing it. He won't. We all know he won't. It won't matter how much you explain that he is injuring and scaring her, that she has rights too, that she matters as much as he does, that treating her this way is wrong. He doesn't care that it's wrong; doing it meets his need, he wants to do it and he can because he has power she doesn't. The only thing you can do is LTB and have strong boundaries on the door of the refuge to prevent him marching in to continue doing to her what makes him happy. And be very clear in society that his behaviour makes him an absolute dick.

"If these posts are significantly coming from trans women without similarly nasty provocation from the ‘other side’ then there’s clearly an issue to be dealt with and (edited to add) could be considered to constitute a secondary threat (either way content like this should be policed and dealt with). Can you please confirm if you’re able to?"

yes. The screenshots on terfisaslur are from male people with transgender identities. And no, there is absolutely no symmetry with anything even half way similar that feminists are saying.

I encourage you to do your own research on this. It is really very easy. Whenever there is a trans supportive protest in the UK, look at the images of the protests and the signs will generally contain messages such as that terf is a slur site. You also don't have to look very far to find male influencers with transgender identities posting images and videos of themselves in female single sex spaces with defiant messages, some of them with messages just as threatening as those on terfisaslur.

I, personally, have been subject to such abuse merely for attending a women's event. The abuse being screamed at women at the event was just as you see on that terfisaslur site. And it happens at every single women's publicised event in the UK. There are male people with transgender identities protesting film launches, meetings, conferences, seminars shouting abuse and attempting to drown out the women.

Do you really think that women are abusing or threatening these male people in any way, other than saying 'We need single sex spaces to exclude all male people'? The worst that might happen is a woman yelling 'you are a man!' in the general direction or women singing a song about 'if a man has a willy he is a man'. Do you think that those are comparable to male people declaring that if any woman even looks at him while he is in a female single sex space expect a violent reaction? Or signs about decapitating terms? Or Sarah Baker, a male violent offender, yelling into a microphone at a protest that if 'anyone sees a terf, punch her in the fucking face'?

If you would like to see footage or other images that match the terfisaslur, just go onto twitter, bluesky and search the term 'terf' it will likely come up with results. Otherwise, some of us will be very happy to start posting links to the content.

There are years and years of content out there. This shouldn't be a surprise to any person who has kept up to date with this issue and just how feminists have been treated when they attempt to publicly discuss this issue.

@UnintentionalArcher

Perhaps you missed this post?

Reduxx has been excellent in reporting issues. “trans crimes Uk dot com” (all one word) is UK specific.

The UK has released UK transgender prisoner statistics that break down the transgender UK prisoner numbers into sex and into whether those prisoners have sex offences to their record. Someone posted some that were submitted as part of a submission to parliament up the page here but more recent numbers are out there and easy enough to find.

Here is a response for a FOI request to the NZ prison authority.

https://fyi.org.nz/request/10726/response/38463/attach/html/2/C110191%20Response.pdf.html

Similar findings in Canada

https://torontosun.com/news/national/study-finds-nearly-45-of-trans-women-inmates-convicted-of-sex-crimes

There was a review done for the Wisconsin transgender prisoners too that show very similar trends.

The results are looking similar around the globe.

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 is no evidence at all that that group of male people in the UK with transgender identities have any lower risk profile of committing sex offences than UK male people in general. None at all.

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?

My number is zero! And in the UK, we are already well and truly past this.

Protest coverage. This is a very small selection, every month there are multiple women's events that are protested in similar ways.

https://sex-matters.org/about-us/what-we-are-up-against/transactivist-violence-a-timeline/

The list:

sex-matters.org/about-us/what-we-are-up-against/intimidation-threats-and-violence-by-trans-rights-activists/

Sex Matters has compiled a list and there might be some cross over with the following but I have added these as well:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4772051-film-of-protest-outside-the-lesbian-project-meeting

This is describing the Filia feminist conferences in Portsmouth and the header has a picture of the sign. Later today (or others might find it) I will track down images of other signage on the day. There were young male people with transgender identities yelling 'suck my dick' during an outdoor part of the conference where rape victims were speaking to the women and remembering those women and girls who had died due to VAWAG if I remember correctly.

https://unherd.com/newsroom/the-misogyny-of-trans-activists/

Here is a female activist screaming in a baby's face in Brighton. Not a transgender person, but a woman, Carly May Kavanagh, who at the time was working for the MP (Russell Moyle) of the area.

Sarah Baker

Now. @UnintentionalArcher Would you like to know how many protests supporting transgender people get interrupted or counter protested by feminists? I don't know of any in the UK at all. Maybe someone will post incidents that will prove my understanding to be incorrect. I would welcome the correction. But there is no symmetry here.

Here is the Brighton WPUK

Plus a meeting in Grenache where Labour Party women had met to discuss what the priorities were as far as they were concerned for the Labour Party. The protestors let off smoke bombs! In Grenache! After the horrific Grenache tower fire! Apparently, women in the Labour Party should not be meeting to discuss their needs.

https://x.com/AjaTheEmpress/status/1237140747289272325

So, if male people with transgender identities have been intimidating women on-line and at women's events, and there are MoJ statistics that show that male people with transgender identities are being convicted for sex offences at rates that do not come anywhere near being the same or at rates lower than female people in the UK, why do we need to prove that male people, ALL male people, should be kept out of female single sex spaces.

Particularly since we also know that even with testosterone suppressed for any length of time, that even the weakest male strength and power remains higher than the highest decile of female strength. We have the performance studies that we can link up and shows this.

Gellman did a calculation of the % of the estimated transgender population of UK being in prison for sex offences, that Howseitgoin posted last month.

-start quote-

"According to Google, the UK’s adult population is 54 million, give or take some change. The best estimates of the trans population is just under 1%, with a more or less 50/50 split between genetic males and genetic females (I use these terms here to disambiguate the necessity to divide the adult population in half for the purpose of estimating trans vs cis population).

That makes around 270,000 trans women in the UK. I’m not going to consider trans kids here because…. that’s just creepy to even think about.

So we have 129 trans women out of 270,000 in prison. That’s 0.047% of the entire trans woman population in prison… at all.

76 are there for sex offences, so that’s 0.028% of the entire trans woman population in prison for sex offences.

Now let’s check that against the cis figures:

3812 cis women equals 0.014% of all cis women. 125 is 0.0005% of all cis women in prison for sex offences.

78781 cis men equals 0.2% of all cis men. 13234 is 0.049% of all cis men in prison for sex offences."

-end quote-

This was based on very generous estimate of how many male people with transgender identities were in the UK at the time, of course.

This above was supposed to convince us that because of the very tiny numbers of male people with transgender identities, that it is disproportionate to continue to treat them like other male people in the UK.

However, these figures do not show that male people with a transgender identity have the same risk profile or lower than female people in the UK.

Let's compare 0.028% male people with transgender identities vs 0.0005% of female people in the UK.

The figures for sex offences for male people with transgender identities is proportionately higher in the last release of MoJ transgender prison statistics. The % of the male people with transgender identities with sex offences that are in the UK prisons is very disproportionate to male prison population and for the female prison population. I will let you look up the latest figures from the MoJ.

It would be safeguarding failure to change policies based on figures like this.

It is not a valid statement to say that male people with transgender identities do not pose a risk to female people in the UK. It is valid to say that they pose greater risk to female people than other female people in the UK. It is probably valid to say that they pose as much a risk to female people as the rest of general male population of the UK.

Can you tell us @UnintentionalArcher what more information do women need to produce to show that a group of male people with transgender identities have not lost their risk of causing female people harm with the aim that we can exclude them from all female single sex spaces?

Keeping in mind that narrowing the discussion to sex and violence offences does not remove these other harms mentioned upthread from consideration for single sex spaces.

We can get more. Plus if you need the punch power and grip strength figures of male people with suppressed testosterone that show just how more powerful a male person is compared to most female people, just ask. We have that.

https://womansplaceuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/A-record-of-the-meetings-organised-by-WPUK.pdf

https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/furious-edinburgh-local-screams-witch-21487432.amp (hint, the screamer was not a woman)

The balaclava-d melts at women's rallies, the piss protests outside the EHRC, the spitting in faces and kettling attempts at no less than 3 attempts to screen a film at UoE, the 'decapitate terfs' signs endorsed by Scotland's elected representatives, the shrugs from Police Scotland as a single wanker was allowed to drown out women with his sound system set at a decibel level which actually damaged women's hearing, screaming fascist into a baby's face, repent mother fucker tambourine bullshite,

...etc etc etc

And there's no equivalent. Despite the desperate attempts to 'both sides' the whole thing.

It is helpful.

I have been abused by male people with transgender identities at an event, and I was concerned by the prospect of potentially using the toilet with one of my abusers. I cannot imagine what women and children who are being subjected to domestic abuse or have been attacked by a male person feel if they have any chance of encountering them in any female single sex space because that male person feels they can righteously use that space and no one can say otherwise.

Incidentally Aja has the video somewhere on her social media, taken the day she and other women supported a lesbian meeting happening in London. As it was an actual lesbian only meeting that did not include men with gender identities, there was of course a large group of activists outside behaving as expected. The police watched the screaming and shouting and abusive messages without intervening. Aja recieved if I remember at least one if not two racially abusive messages, I seem to remember 'monkey' was involved, from activists present which she had evidence of on her phone. Actual hate crime never mind 'I felt offended' crime, and Aja would have at least 3 protected characteristics involved.

The police shrugged. She has this on film.

Did you even read what you quoted?

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.

If studies/reviews don’t exist yet (I’m sure others with more expertise may know better than me) then online sharing of anecdotal experiences of women in those situations could also form important evidence. The #MeToo movement relied a lot on women sharing their experiences of sexual harassment and was extremely powerful- if similar anecdotal evidence existed for harms caused by trans women to women in female-only spaces, taking that as just one example of concern, and women can speak out or are speaking out about that en masse on social media, then it would certainly suggest a threat posed at a population level. (To be clear taking just one example, I personally think that transgender women should be housed separately in prisons, for various reasons, but I’m not convinced that there is the population-level threat that many suggest). Naturally I wouldn’t expect there to be the same volume of anecdotes as for #MeToo because of small numbers of trans women as a percentage of the population, but anecdotal evidence of any significance of scale would be useful to see.

No, women should not have to continuously show our wounds and scars and prove we're vulnerable in order to have our rights respected. We should not have to tell the world the most intimate details of what has happened to us, for our accounts to be picked apart and judged - was it really that serious? Is she just making a fuss? Why didn't she just ...? It's not like #MeToo solved anything is it? It was a cathartic moment but sexual violence and coercion and abuse continue unabated.

Sandy Peggie and the Darlington Nurses should not have had to disclose details of their previous abuse in order for their basic rights to be upheld. Peggie and Maria Kelly should not have had to describe the lurid details of their perimenopausal symptoms.

I find it so offensive that women are expected to do this over and over again when the law is on our side:

Allowing men into women only spaces violates our dignity and creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive environment for us, related to our sex.

It's unlawful. Why isn't that enough?

Exactly.

Men need to keep out of women's spaces because they aren't men's to access. Men have their own spaces.

End of discussion

Absolutely Pencils.

And even when we finally discuss our trauma and abuse, it is dismissed as being ‘not significant enough’ for us to have single sex spaces that excludes all male people over the age of about 8 years old. Because it is just an anecdote and also not reported or recorded anywhere.