Who would have thought that the Left would get NASCAR and the Right would get Harry Potter?
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When I was in college, I joined my school’s lgbtq activist group and it was my major social outlet. I identified as genderqueer for a while while I was examining my relationship with my body. I no longer do, and you know what? It was a positive experience in which I learned about myself and others, and I was, and am, fine. Let people define themselves.
(Edit: Re: ROGD. I don’t claim the experience of a trans person and have nothing but support.)
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I see the Sun newspaper has run a front page story giving her domestic abuser the platform to say he’d do it again.
What utterly sick fuckers they are.
Sorry it’s off topic but I feel it does deserve to be noted. Please don’t click. No link.
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This is another example of how so much of terf transphobia is just homophobia they’ve gone back and recycled.
In this example see marriage equality- how bigots said it invalidated their marriages. For restrooms look at homophobia, race, misogyny and the ERA.
Anyone else remember how the ERA was going to allow rapists in restrooms because of equality of the sexes?
How about Barney Frank using the House gym being an actual issue because he’s gay?
3/25/1973, The Anniston Star
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I don’t have much to add to the current discussion, I agree with what (luckily) seems to be the consensus here:
Besides that I feel more comfortable learning about the subject, having too little personal experience with it. So I apologize if the rest of the post is too off-topic.
That’s a awesome quote! I had to search for it to convert it from img to txt, so I now know it is by: Autistic Abby
There are many terms used like that, like “social justice warrior” and “bleeding hearts” for example. I think it can be helpful to periodically call those out and say that you reject the “known meaning” of the phrase and own the phrase for it’s literal meaning. Fuck “the right” for their newspeak appropriation of perfectly normal phrases.
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I came back because of the replies to my posts, and I’d like to say thank you to the posters in this thread. In full disclosure I am a transgender man, who right this second is getting ready to take my transgender wife into surgery for the second half of her facial feminization and a breast augmentation today. (She is so damn excited!)
Seeing how the commenters here support the transgender community, and systematically took apart the arguments about our validity, and how someone like my wife could possibly be a threat to women by existing? It was heart warming.
Thank you all for just existing. I remember a time when nobody would have said a word. When folks didn’t care. It really makes a difference when you see this kind of behavior condemned and challenged on such a wide scale. When there is silence, we have to wonder if it’s complicit. When there is a challenge to this kind of bigotry, we can be firm in the knowledge that we aren’t alone, and others have our backs.
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I wish your wife a good recovery 
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That’s an excellent point. Bigots never seem to have any problem with children learning about the things they want them to learn about - submission to authority for authority’s sake, submission to fascist ideologies, toxic masculinity, bullying, corporate feudalism, wage slavery, class hierarchies, whitewashed revisionist history, scientifically discredited abstinence-only sex education, religious doctrines warped with hate and judgmentalism, health and lifestyle fads with little or no scientific basis, pseudo-scientific arguments for creationism, distrust of the scientific process, facts as opinions and opinions as facts, ect. - but heavens forbid children learn gender roles and racial categories are social constructs or that transpeople exist and are as human as anyone.
Nothing more starkly shows their true bigotry than treating the very existience of some people as pathology. They did it, and many still do it, with homosexuality. They did it with feminism. They did it with racial integration. They did it with races not their own. They did it with nations not their own. The real sickness is that some who count themselves among those groups historically and even currently oppressed are themselves eager to engage is the dehumanization of others and want to perpetuate that bigotry to their children. So goes intersectionality, which is another concept that should not wait until university to be taught in school, if it ever is. It should be part of civil rights curricula from the start.
/end_rant
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Here’s wishing your wife a speedy recovery!
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That’s awesome. 
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This is all very weird. The further down you go, the less sense it makes.
Honestly I haven’t been following all the tweets and drama. I was expecting her transphobia to be definitely more subtle and perhaps nuanced in some ways. Instead, I get the worst, most basic transphobic tropes (which I’m not going to repeat). And at the end of the day, since they are the most commonly expressed ones, they are also the easiest to find clear information and statistics on.
It is a very, very quick google search to find many credible, recent sources to debunk this stuff. What a horrific, hurtful crock of shit.
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Many look out and see that society has a constraining, even repressing system of gender that injures them. Unfortunately some of those seek to change the system so that it does fit them while leaving it just as constrained and repressive, merely targeting someone else. I just haven’t figured out whether it’s a lack of imagination that there could be a non-abusive system, or whether the abuse is the point for them.
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JK Rowling and the
There’s a book I don’t want to read.
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I am glad you’re here. I’m happy to support you and men like you as well as cis men.
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People have suggested that Doyle’s spiritualism, like that of many others of the time, was at least partially an attempt to cope with the generational trauma of World War I.
Rowling, of course, has zero excuse.
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When I worked at university there was an academic teacher who was a rabid transphobe. Sometimes he would start ranting about that subject completely unprovoked (like at Christmas workplace party), with really creepy kind of hate and passion at the same time.
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Dr. Chuck Tingle, retired Doctor of Holistic Massage, has weighed in
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Funny last week i was wondering what Chuck Tingle was up to and presumed they had weighed in on BLM or JK Rowling but forgot to look it up. Thanks for posting this 
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I know this topic is shortly before closing and I’m late for this but I’m really trying to get my head around some of the ethical issues and consequences of the legislation surrounding trans topics. Just to be very, very clear: If anyone says “trans women aren’t women”, “it’s just a disorder” or whatever, that is wrong and despicable. Also I haven’t read any of Rowling’s tweets or earlier communication about this and I have read the text on her site only once and not in detail. I’m not a fan of her or her works, I’m just engaging in this because it is a complicated topic and I’m really trying to understand more and find my own viewpoint about this.
But. There are three things I’m getting from what she’s written that kinda didn’t get discussed here or go against the way it was (there’s a bunch more that might be more controversial but those are the ones I’m focusing on right now):
- To me it reads like she absolutely accepts that there are trans people, that they have it hard in the current social climate and that they need support. I don’t understand, at least from this text, why she’s portrayed as not acknowledging trans people. I understand her to be talking about the legislation about transitioning.
- She doesn’t criticise people being able to identify as trans, but making it easy for creeps, i.e. men that identify as cis-men, to get access to women-only areas just by claiming they’re trans. The point has been made in this thread that women have nothing to fear from trans women, just because they might have a penis, and I agree with that 100%! And I don’t have an easy solution and there might be none, but I think people should be able to be skeptical of me entering a women’s rest room and maybe call me out on it. I don’t know, I get the problem this poses to trans people though.
- Another point she is making is about teenagers. Again, I find this super hard to come to grips with. On the one hand, trans teens need all the support they can get. But, just as she says, everyone needs to come to grips with their gender during puberty and it’s confusing for anyone, I know it really, really was for me. I could totally identify with what she’s writing in the text, just from the “other side”: I was never a very masculine person, I’ve always worn my hair long (except for a short time during puberty, ha!), I was never into what the other boys did, sports, brawling, all the physical stuff, I found it very hard to talk to girls, etc. etc. I feel (although I can’t be sure) I would have it easier nowadays where the social norms around what it means to be “a man” or “a woman” seem more flexible, at least in some contexts. But, having had to work through all this, I am a happy adult cis-man who, by now, has no problem with not conforming to everything that a traditional male role used to mean. That being said, the way I understand the point she’s making, is that there is a very difficult distinction to be made between teens that just have it very hard to come to terms with their assigned gender because of societal expectations, perceptions of their body or whatever, and real gender dysphoria. And this I find super hard. On the one hand, if it turns out that, say, a person who’s been assigned female would be happier living as a man, it would be beneficial for them to transition as early as possible. However, if, in the other case, they later find out that they were mistaken and it was a hard case of gender identity confusion in puberty, they may have to live with irreparable changes that they may later regret.
A disclaimer: I have only very vague ideas about how reassignment therapy actually works and what the legislation around it is, so maybe the last points totally unfounded. If that is the case, Rowling should of course be aware about this and her argument would be in bad faith.
Anyway, I hope it’s clear that I’m not trying to defend Rowling specifically, but I am just wondering about these three points. I would be very grateful if other commenters could either tell me whether a) I misunderstood her and she’s not saying those things but other things she’s wrong about, or, b) she says those things but they’re still wrong (and why!). (Or c) neither of those, she makes those points, they’re sensible points, and the outrage is because of other more despicable things she’s said or just outrage for outrage’s sake.)
Sorry for the long-winded post.
Rowling repeatedly references TERF talking points about trans people doing little more than playing dress-up or fetishizing women’s identity for sexual reasons when discussing trans people, and she’s repeatedly invoked gender essentialism to nullify trans people’s right to be recognized by their stated gender. She recognizes that trans people exist, but fundamentally fails to acknowledge their lived experiences or believe that their feelings about their own bodies are valid.
This is a “problem” that has been entirely invented by the religious right and their allies in the TERF community. People posing as or claiming to be trans for the purposes of exploiting or assaulting women is not a thing that happens and it never has been. It’s a fabrication based on projection and nothing more. It’s far more dangerous to trans people to force them to use the bathroom that matches their assigned-at-birth gender, especially (but certainly not only) if they’ve transitioned.
If you want to know more about where this trans bathroom panic come from, this is a good starting point:
The entire point behind teenage-appropriate treatments like puberty suppressants is to give those people time to process their dysphoria without multiplying it by the pain of going through a bodily change that worsens those feelings. It’s far easier and definitely far less traumatic to take someone off of puberty suppressants than it is to force them to go through puberty while while also watching their own body continue to turn into something even less in line with their own mental image of themselves on a fundamental level.
It’s great that you turned out fine as a cis man. But have you considered how traumatic that experience would have been for you if the body hair, genital changes, and hormonal differences were deeply horrible for you to look at? Nobody is about forcing kids to have gender affirmation surgery on a whim or doing something they may come to regret (though the stats on that concern are overwhelmingly in favor of letting people decide on what’s best for their own bodies and not the trans panic “rapid onset gender dysphoria” camp). The entire aim of treatments for children, teens, and young adults is to give them the space and time to come to their own conclusions about their bodies in the least invasive, least traumatic way possible.
I would encourage you to educate yourself by reading up on articles about trans issues by trans authors and foundations, and not listen to people who cloak their acceptance of trans people in patronizing concerns about their physical and mental well-being or utterly unfounded fears about their intentions.
Trans people want to be who they are, man or woman. Letting them do that, and being open and accepting of those questioning their gender identity in a safe and holistic way is quite literally the easiest thing in the world. All it requires is listening (and hearing) what they’re saying as a community, and not insisting that you know better than they do what’s good for them, or that they’re just confused, or that they’re just pretending for any variety of nefarious, devious, or sexual purposes. It really is that simple. And Rowling can’t even manage that.
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