I knew what queerness looked like outside my vacuum thanks to Harry Potter fanfiction. I was 11, browsing fanfiction.com and ao3 for tales of Harry and Drac falling for each other because that felt somehow more…accessible. Queer people were using these characters and their world to tell stories of gender fluidity and love being love and everything we lived in long-form and wordcounts exceeding the hundreds of thousands.
We felt seen, if a little pandered to, hearing the creator of these worlds tell us that a character was gay all along, and that’s how she’d envisioned it. It felt like we were right in thinking this world was real enough for us to inhabit in a way that our own realities sometimes made hostile.
We were then shattered as a community when the billionaire behind this haven decided she had had enough of being supportive and wrought an all-out war on transgender people.
It started innocuously enough. It’s a trap that’s easy to fall into, I suppose, if you already have the sparks of bigotry within or around you: She placed women’s rights ahead of trans women’s rights while acknowledging that trans women are women. Knowing second-wave feminism and all its trappings, this isn’t so far-fetched and almost acceptable.
Then, she went on to, in sound mind, publish these words:
“When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.”
‘J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues’, Jkrowling.com
Alright, Joanne. Do you want to talk about bathrooms? How about the few dozen times I’ve been verbally and physically abused in public bathrooms by women and men alike because I didn’t fit either of their preferences for who is welcome to pee? In a cubicle. That they have no contact with. I want to pee, sometimes, I even want to poop. I have no hormones in my system I wasn’t born with but I do dress in a way that people find unacceptable. I just don’t want to have a punch swung in my direction for needing to excrete, is that so bad?
A common plebian like myself with an opinion on gender won’t carry much weight. But you, JK? You have a voice and an audience. So of course, you couldn’t be like the rest of your ilk and self-promote and tell us to vote when we should and stop it there. No, no, you had to tell us you were being victimised by people who make in a year what your lawyers make in an hour for defending ‘women’s rights’.
Plenty of people, activists and celebrities alike, make their case for feminism that centres cis women without feeling the need to mention trans people who form a miniscule part of the population, which in JK’s home of the UK is somewhere around 0.5%. This is the percentage of the population JK Rowling and her horde are targeting to purportedly defend 51% of the population of the country (women).
Correlation might not be causation, and I shall not make it so, but it’s worth considering what has happened in the UK since JK decided to launch this insanely disproportional offensive.
Tories and Labour alike have backtracked entirely on their stance to allow trans people to self-identify. Kemi Badenoch, a self-described ‘anti-woke’ equalities minister in Rishi Sunak’s government has spoken out against gender-neutral toilets, going as far as to have taped ‘ladies’ and ‘men’ signs on the toilets at her party leadership campaign launch.
Badenoch has had her own tussle with trans rights advocate, former Dr Who and acclaimed actor David Tennant, calling him a racist and misogynist for wishing she would ‘shut up’.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, at last year’s Conservative party conference, had much to say about sex and gender, and not that much about economic stagnation, a housing crisis, the cost of living, immigration and foreign policy concerns
Where’s our beloved JK in all this? Well she’s about to meet with Labour leadership to receive assurances about anti-trans policy. That this is what senior members of the opposition party in the UK are concerning themselves with a week out from the election says something, and it isn’t that they deserve Downing Street back.
Oh, and by the way, her caveat to this meeting has been that her dear organisation, the LGB Alliance be derecognised as a hate group. This is, dear reader, the group that has likened trans people to those partaking in bestiality. They deleted the tweet, because, well, even for a transphobe that’s an idiotic way to make your point.
Why, you might wonder, is a person who only knows the UK as a coloniser and an alma mater, so concerned with this issue? Well, consider an erstwhile first-world power, that had both sides of the aisle willing to let people be as they identified. This power then submitted to the lowest common denominator and turned it into a debate so vitriolic that a children’s books’ author is meeting with a major contender for country leadership.
Let this be a warning that hate will overpower the political debate and we will have to repeatedly fight for freedom and beg to exist.
I say again, emphatically, Go F*ck Yourself, JK Rowling.
Leave a Reply to Mateo748 Cancel reply