Can't believe I'm writing this, but disappointed in JK today

[RobynMiller]

I know she is just one person but her tweets today are really undermining the whole GC argument.

Link: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/2046948644373274709

'Nothing's changed. I was being honest about how I feel about an individual trans woman I know, who was a gay man pre-transition, and who I met for the first time post-transition. Objectively speaking, she has physical characteristics that make it fairly obvious she wasn't born female, but she's a gentle, funny person I've never referred to as anything other than 'she' and 'her'. I find it perfectly easy to reconcile my fond feelings towards her, and my experience of her as someone with very female-coded energy, with a belief that she hasn't literally changed sex (and incidentally, she doesn't believe she's literally changed sex, either).'

Basically, someone asked her about the trans identified male she mentioned in her 2020 essay and this was her response.

Does she not realise there can be NO EXCEPTIONS? Give an inch they'll take a mile and all that. It doesn't matter that he is gentle and funny or that he has very female-coded energy whatever the hell that means.

This does make it seem like when she calls TIMs out she is now doing it maliciously as she is perfectly happy to play pretend if she likes them enough.

Just so frustrating as it basically says that 'we could all play along with TRAs just fine and are choosing not to because we're such meanies 😡'

Plenty of trans people know they are not literally the opposite sex. They realise they are a separate category. Not better or worse but different. If they respect women's spaces and understand they should use either mixed or their own sex exclusive space. Or that they should campaign for a third space, then that's totally fine.

There's nothing wrong with saying that not all trans people are trying to actually 'be' the opposite sex. And that treating them socially as the sex they identify with is perfectly reasonable.

I asked a psychotherapist I know wtf "female-coded energy" meant. She has replied: " "Female-coded energy" (often referred to as feminine energy) is a concept representing a set of archetypal, typically non-physical, characteristics associated with being, receptivity, and intuition. Rooted in Eastern philosophy (yin/yang) and Jungian psychology (anima), these traits are viewed as universal forces present in all people, regardless of gender. "

I think it was a mistake on JKR's part to use language most people wouldn't understand.

My earlier point in this thread is that it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that she has transwomen friends to whom she's deferential - she's always been explicit about that.

Wouldn't it make sense that part of the reason that she's especially sympathetic to them (aside from their not believing that they're really women) is that they're highly effeminate homosexual men? (or at least this one in particular.) It would certainly explain why she has very little time for heterosexual men who 'discovered' their identity in middle age for whom it's a clear sexual interest.

That isn't to say that you should be deferential to such men or find them sympathetic. It's not even to say that JKR shouldn't reconsider her use of opposite sex pronouns because it's bad for the cause. (That's why Helen Joyce stopped using them) But in any case there should be no surprise here - if you want to make that case it would be more honest to do so without couching it as a betrayal, or lapse in judgement.

“There's nothing wrong with saying that not all trans people are trying to actually 'be' the opposite sex. And that treating them socially as the sex they identify with is perfectly reasonable.”

It is an inconsistency to treat a person socially as being the opposite sex to that which they are. It is not actually reasonable to expect someone to do so, but for some people they will agree to do it.

Describing it as perfectly reasonable is dismissive of that inconsistency / incoherent position.

Yes it's not a reasonable ask, but we do things for people we love that are not reasonable sometimes.

My children make unreasonable demands of me all the time. Sometimes I do what they ask because I love them and I'm their mother. I think they're very aware they get away with unreasonable stuff because I love them and they would never dream of being so unreasonable with anyone else or expect some random stranger / their teacher / their peers to do the same.

Whereas trans ideology demands that everyone do this thereby undermining women's language and rights and also safeguarding for children. It's very different

Yes. This is it. We choose to do things that are perhaps unreasonable for those we love.

But in doing so, we still have to acknowledge what we are doing and not minimise it with platitudes of ‘respect’, ‘kind’ and ‘reasonable’ to position anyone pointing out the incoherency as being hateful in some way.

I think this is where the heart of the problem lies for me.

It helps to clarify things for me if I think about other situations where people are pretending or claiming to be something they are not. It is not perfectly reasonable to go along with it in any other situation. Whether it's a bank robber pretending to be a security guard, white people "identifying" as black, people being fraudelent about their age, someone claiming to havea disability they don't have, even someone with anorexia insisting they are fat or someone with Schizophrenia thinking they are Jesus – with varying degrees of understanding and tolerance, we do not actually as a society think it's perfectly reasonable to go along with any of these, and we understand that doing so can be damaging, either to the person themselves, or to someone else, and is not harmless at all.

And that's despite things like age, ethnicity and disability sometimes being a lot more difficult to prove/be sure of and actually being on a spectrum, unlike sex.

The idea that it's fine and harmless to go along with an untruthful "identity" claim to be polite is not normal for a reason - it's bad for social cohesion and the rights of various groups, for our sense of reality, for safeguarding, for mental health etc. It's ONLY with sex that this has been overridden, and IMO that's largely because of the way GI has force-teamed itself with homosexuality and made it seem as if tolerance of false identities is akin to tolerance of people being LGB, when that's a completely different thing with far fewer effects on anyone else.

Society is complex and there are many situations where we suspend disbelief and go along with a pretence, so I can see how this is sometimes a grey area. But seen in context, it's an anomaly to go along with an pander to a false identity only in the case of sex – and to me it has a strong whiff of misogyny.

Exactly this.

I don't mind calling people what they ask to be called, it doesn't cost me anything and there's no reason not to.

I do mind changes to policies on collection of accurate crime statistics, access to female only spaces and women's sports, sex based quotas being undermined and biological men in women's prisons, because that does cost us all something.

This.

No one person is responsible for the whole movement, not even JKR. She hasn't undermined anything. She's not a figurehead and can have her own opinions, as we all can.

But the danger here lies in the suggestion that the 'coding' of your behaviour influences your sex (or 'gender') rather than the other way round.

That is: 'likes make-up, pink clothes and fluffy bunnies' = is feminine.

Rather than: "Is female, so is more likely to like make-up, pink clothes and fluffy bunnies"

This gives the reverse of: 'likes football, going down the pub and heavy metal' = masculine, so if you like those things, as a woman, you are being 'unfeminine'.

Essentially making certain preferences and attitudes the preserve of one sex or another, which is how we got into the whole mess in the first place - because we couldn't allow that a bloke might like fluffy bunnies and a woman might like football, without it signalling they were in the 'wrong gender'.

Sorry, I’m not following you. How am I not being honest?

I suspect that JKR is trying to justify behaviour (using 'gender-based' pronouns for a friend) which started before she thought about the issues, and continues by habit and because it is very difficult to back out of without being offensive to a friend. So I don't think she is being entirely rational in her thought processes, because emotion and self-justification are at play, as they sometimes are for the rest of us.

I don't accept 'female-coded energy' as a valid defence. It's muddled thinking, and influenced by the genderists. But we are trying to deal with the mess that has been created by elevating 'marginalised minorities' above everyone not deemed to be marginalised. That tangle is very difficult to unravel, and unfortunately pulling on the thread labelled 'sex reality' isn't sufficient.

Long live disagreement, argument, discussion, debate, difference and dissent.

Also error, mistake, accident, and changing your mind.

I think "female-coded energy" is a weird turn of phrase and unfortunate as it serves to bolster the notion of a fantastical "female essence".

"Stereotypically feminine behaviour" works better as an objective observation of another person, expressing that observation with reference to societal norms and expectations.

Once upon a time, "effeminate" would have been the go-to word but it seems to have negative connotations these days and has fallen out of use. Now it would come over as just a posh way of slurring a man or boy as a "sissy" or "a big girl's blouse" or as a way of hinting at (shameful?) homosexuality.

The "energy" part of "female-coded energy" seems to express JKR's subjective experience of her interactions and relationship with her male friend. That "energy" cannot be measured as something radiated by him: it exists entirely within JKR's perceptions, her psyche and self-awareness and is a product of the relationship.

I might have missed something in the thread but I don't think the word "groomed" has appeared yet? This does not have to be a deliberate, deceitful, manipulative process.

JKR seems to have found a mental compromise that works for her without creating cognitive dissonance.

While some people will take from her words that perhaps some men have "magical female essence", others will use them as a stick to beat women into submitting to demands that they be "re-educated" and rearrange their thinking - just stop being bigots and #bekind like JKR.

However, as so many PP have already pointed out: JKR's position is not new. Anyone who is "disappointed" has not been paying attention.

The way the OP has expressed their disappointment says a lot more about them than about JKR:

JKR: "I find it perfectly easy to reconcile my fond feelings towards her, and my experience of her as someone with very female-coded energy"

OP: This does make it seem like when she calls TIMs out she is now doing it maliciously as she is perfectly happy to play pretend if she likes them enough.

This reaction has the same "narcissistic energy" (!) as that of a TiM who would have been be infuriated to have been "called out" by JKR and now has had his nose rubbed in it by her clear indication that she finds him deficient in "female-coded energy".

(Terrible, terrible, wicked JKR - so full of malice! As for those awful bootlickers she hangs out with, who get all the precious, precious pronouns. [Shudders!])

I am not saying the OP is a TRA, just that it strikes me, as it has struck some PP, that they are giving off "TRA-coded energy", IYKWIM.

OP you have prompted some really thoughtful and interesting discussion but FFS OP, cool your jets!

I agree, but if JKR feels she has made a mistake, then she should admit this rather than using nonsense-speak such as 'female coded behaviour makes everything OK'.

If she were to say "I think I have been too hardline in the past, while my position remains that a literal sex-change is impossible, I now believe that people behaving in a stereotypically female way should be referred to by female pronouns if that's what they want' that would be a clear and honest message which people could respect even if they disagreed with it.

As long as they're acknowledging that they are not female and staying out of women's spaces, I'll call them whatever nickname and pronouns they like. Its not about their choices of pronouns, it's about their boundaries.

Sure she's pretty capable of saying what she thinks!

its authoritarian to police women's speech which is what is being done to Rowling here. authoritarianism is closely associated to right wing politics.

'police' is working hard here. People can disagree, and discuss why.

If we solve all the problems of transgenderism, and it is reduced, in the name of individual freedom, to something that deserves from society only a bare formal acknowledgement and a promise of non-discrimination (and I for one don't think it requires even that, for trans people to live a good life), then pronouns will be literally all they've got left.

It's not inconceivable that wrong-sex pronouns for trans people could then become (or continue to be) widespread without leading to error as to their actual sex. In that scenario, a refusenik would be seen as unreasonable – because rude – rather than a principled truth-teller.

Sadly, at this rate I don't think I'll live long enough to see the experiment play out.

ETA – because its going to take too long, not because I'm at death's door!

Unless you're suggesting any disagreement is rightwing and authoritarian. I disagree.

That is what gender identity theory does, yes. But you can acknowledge that in some ways you/someone conforms to such 'coding' ( I for example I like creating a home and like shopping for home furnishings, and I paint my toe nails ( coded 'feminine'), but I also have short hair, never wear high heels, enjoy male company generally and like to photograph building sites ( coded masculine).

JK Rowling is saying that her friend conforms to 'feminine' coding in certain ways; but that doesn't mean that she thinks her friend is actually female. She doesn't feel compromised in any way by accepting her friend's self presentation or defintion because they both know he is merely playing with gender and doesn't think/claim to be female.

There are some basic differences at biological and physical level and at a population level between males and females ( which is where the stereotypes emerge from), and I'm not sure what is to be gained from denying that. These differences and the consequences of these differences are why we have single sex categories, facilities and services in the first place.

I wonder if you can imagine a world where everyone respects trans people's pronouns - and nothing bad happens.

Because that world already exists.

Some schools have 1-2 trans children. Teachers use their preferred names and pronouns...and nothing happens.

The sky remains intact.

I have rung school at 8am, given my son's name and asked for him to be excused PE because he has a period. The receptionist writes it down, says bye...and the Earth keeps circling the big star at the centre of our vast solar system.

In this world which already exists, teachers, health professionals and work colleagues use trans people's names & pronouns because everyone does.

I'm afraid refusing to use someone's pronouns is petty and ignorant. It just makes someone appear disrespectful and bad at detail, comparable with forgetting someone's changed their name on marriage.

Language evolves, so does society. What used to be called politically correct language is now mainstream. Where parents in the playground once shunned my mum for being divorced, it's now unremarkable.

Modern inclusive language is just basic respect, and using it has - I'm so sorry to tell you - become completely normal. You'd have more luck protesting the tide coming in.