It was no April Fool’s joke.
Harry Potter author-turned culture warrior J.K. Rowling kicked off the month with an 11-tweet social media thread in which she argued 10 transgender women were men — and dared Scottish police to arrest her.
Rowling’s intervention came as a controversial new Scottish government law, aimed at protecting minority groups from hate crimes, took effect. And it landed amid a fierce debate over both the legal status of transgender people in Scotland and over what actually constitutes a hate crime.
Already the law has generated far more international buzz than is normal for legislation passed by a small nation’s devolved parliament.
What happened was she was severely mistreated by men growing up and she’s now so scared of men that it completely clouds her judgment. To her, women are vulnerable and all men are predators that can never ever be trusted. It’s been there all along, it just wasn’t visible until she made some comments on trans women (that she’s terrified of, because “men”). And then people went nuts, and she tried to explain herself, and people didn’t care about her explanation and instead of going “hey that sucks, let us help you overcome that trauma and become a better person” they went to war which made her defensive and double down instead of changing her mind, as always happens, and it’s only been getting worse ever since.
What happened is she is from TERF Island and plenty of people there hold the same exact bullshit viewpoint. Many of which are males.
Its that she hates women, or thinks women are inferior to men. You see this with all terfs.
So she invented some magical bullshit about why she was a full person.
But the magical bullshit is magic; doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Which trans people inherently bring/are.
So trans people must be stopped (from existing), the territory must be flattened to match the map!
I sincerely doubt she hates women. She’s been supportive of women’s causes for a very long time afaik. Based on what I’ve read she seems to feel extremely weak and vulnerable among men due to her experiences, especially when she’s alone with a man or men, and it’s very likely she ascribes that “weakness” to all cis women. But that doesn’t mean she thinks men are better, it’s that she thinks men are dangerous to cis women. Seriously, she’s written things that made it seem like a legit phobia, like breaking down and crying and hyperventilating because she happened to end up in a room with some random man in the middle of the day, and he didn’t even interact with her iirc. I’m guessing her broken brain sees trans women as if someone put a hat on a tiger and called it Bob and let it near her. She’s a bit messed up and the small window of slight opportunity to maybe help her see straight was obliterated by counterproductive behavior based on understandable emotions. Something that happens all too often these days.
But with all that said, it’s been a long time since I heard or read anything from her, so she could have gone off the deep end and I don’t know it.
But that feeling of vulnerability is part of what informs the misogyny, which they compensate for with an essentialist fairy dust woowoo articulation of ‘the divine feminine’ or some shit, never clearly defined, which requires hating trans people, because trans people are walking talking de/re constructions.
And since you’re (hypothetical terf you. Also has terrible hemorrhoids and a crippling tobacco addiction, wanna go beat the shit out of them later? Would feel weird without you on side.) already misogynist and essentialist and a bigot, and tge only things you care about are completely made up; nazis are your natural allies.
Just out of curiosity, since I haven’t seen or read anything from her in a very long time, can you give examples of what misogynistic things she’s said? And I have to say it feels rather convoluted, the notion that she, a woman who’s been supporting women’s causes for a long time, hates women, so she boosts herself with undefined ‘divine femininity’, which in turn means she has to hate trans people because they present something different. It’s too high level and fluffy. I mean, hey, I don’t know what’s going on in her head (neither do you btw), but I find it a much simpler, more logical, foundational and believable explanation that she’s just scarred from her trauma related to men and therefore is also scared of trans women because with her phobia she doesn’t trust them to not behave like men at some point. And she probably has built a whole structure of beliefs, opinions and arguments on top of that, that gets bigger (and thereby expands further away from the core) and more reinforced with every argument she has online. And somewhere in that structure might sit ‘divine femininity’, as a coping argument.
I haven’t read her shit in years, but I remember reading something like a decade ago, and there’s a straight line from the ‘goddess feminism’ of the 80s, which seemed like her thing, to terf shit. Please don’t make me look it up; only one of us has to see this to convince you.
I’m sure she doesn’t think she hates (cis)women. None of them do; not even dudebro Nazis.
I’m not putting it on you to prove it or convince me, but just as a general statement, I need solid and concrete proof before I ascribe a feeling to someone else contrary to their own claims. Something that’s generally a bit of an asshattery thing to do imo since they’re the one feeling their feelings and I can’t actually know.
Generally valid, but fascists are kind if an exception, because they’re never honest, and taking them at their word is rude to everyone else.
No, she doesn’t. You just operate from a (shockingly common) perspective in which any case where anything gender-related that doesn’t conform to your particular flavor of progressive feminism must collapse into misogyny.
She literally just believes that men are evil monsters who will do whatever they have to to prey on innocent-by-default women. Including pretend to be women if needed to get to their prey. It’s like the white supremacists who believe black folks are inherently criminal, violent monsters except with men instead of blacks.
She’s never believed she wasn’t, or needed to invent magical bullshit to believe she is, at least related to gender. She just needs to believe that men are evil monsters who will pretend to be women to attack “real” women, which is shockingly common.
Her problem isn’t that she sees trans people as fuzzing up her hierarchy in which men are superior to her.
There’s a reason why transphobic dialog is rarely about trans men (despite them also violating the same “magical bullshit”), and very often framed in terms of “men in dresses”, and that’s because it is most often about how men are monsters and women need to be protected from them, and trans women are forever tainted by the original sin of having been born male sexed.
Ive read her books. Some of them at least. That’s a bit much. She does not believe this. Or didn’t when she wrote them. Also, I think that some days, and I’m not a transphobe.
She didn’t actually have to invent it, it was already floating around since at least the middle ages.
No the rhetoric is just different, more transparently objectifying; ‘protect the titties’ discourse. TERFs talk about them as ‘mutilated sisters’ or some shit, because its still about tge myystical divine feminine bullshit to them. You hear it more direct from patriarchy than from its proxies.
You’re reading a little transphobic and under informed on the topic here
Oh yeah fuck you stop talking to me.
Rarely about trans men, not never. The dialogue is mostly framed in terms of men being a predatory danger to women so taht women need spaces where men are kept away from them and men being such predatory monsters that they will pretend to be women in order to get access to their prey. This is more or less the standard TERF (and amusingly also the right-wing tradcon) perspective. They don’t even really hide it.
It feels like you’re just jumbling things up here - if the core premise is that men are better than women and trans people disrupt the patriarchal hierarchy, why wouldn’t the focus be mostly on trans men, framed in terms of them trying to steal patriarchal power for themselves rather than mostly focusing on trans women being framed as predatory “men in dresses” using gender identity claims to have easier access to their prey?
Transphobic how? By not accepting your interpretation of transphobic arguments that requires ignoring the actual arguments made in favor of all transphobia just being that trans people represent a disruption of a patriarchal gender hierarchy? Because that doesn’t really align to basically any transphobic arguments that transphobes actually make. It requires ignoring what transphobes actually say almost entirely.
When people tell you what they believe, it’s usually better to believe them. They generally have the better view of both what they believe and why they justify those beliefs.
For what, drawing an explicit difference between sex and gender? Or am I supposed to pretend now that there is no difference - there is only gender?