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J. K. Rowling Compares ‘Transgender Hormone Therapy to Gay Conversion Therapy’

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The Harry Potter author has been on the TERF train for a while now, but these days it’s feeling more and more like she’s driving it herself.

Through a series of 11 tweets, critics now say Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling is comparing “transgender hormone therapy to gay conversion therapy.”

“I’ve ignored fake tweets attributed to me and RTed widely,” Rowling began. “I’ve ignored porn tweeted at children on a thread about their art. I’ve ignored death and rape threats. I’m not going to ignore this. When you lie about what I believe about mental health medication and when you misrepresent the views of a trans woman for whom I feel nothing but admiration and solidarity, you cross a line.”

“I’ve written and spoken about my own mental health challenges, which include OCD, depression and anxiety. I did so recently in my essay ‘TERF Wars’. I’ve taken anti-depressants in the past and they helped me,” she said. “Many health professionals are concerned that young people struggling with their mental health are being shunted towards hormones and surgery when this may not be in their best interests. Many, myself included, believe we are watching a new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people, who are being set on a lifelong path of medicalisation that may result in the loss of their fertility and/or full sexual function.”

Rowling continued, “These concerns were explored by the recent BBC documentary about the Tavistock Clinic. Whistleblowers were talking about transitions driven by homophobia. As I’ve said many times, transition may be the answer for some. For others, it won’t – witness the accounts of detransitioners. ‘The system sees surgery as the easy fix to girls who do not conform.’”

The tweets went on with links to various articles articulating the author’s points. However, we should note that a research study in 2019 by Stonewall showed that de-transitioning is very rare and that of the 3,398 trans patients who spoke to the NHS Gender Identity Service between 2016 and 2017, less than one percent had expressed regrets about transition or had de-transitioned.

“Sophie is a trans woman and a true feminist ally,” Rowling tweeted next. “She was making the point that anti-depressants were over-prescribed to teenagers in the past, with serious consequences. The long-term health risks of cross-sex hormones have been now been tracked over a lengthy period. These side-effects are often minimised or denied by trans activists.”

Rowling added, “Carl Henegan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, has described the off-label use of puberty blockers on under-18s as an ‘unregulated live experiment on children’. None of that may trouble you or disturb your belief in your own righteousness. But if so, I can’t pretend I care much about your bad opinion of me.”

There certainly are an array of opinions about the wizarding legend. In an article published July 6 for The Atlantic, writer Helen Lewis likened Rowling’s extremely public missteps as of late to a deeply gratifying lesson in the Potterverse.

“Those who feel rejected and disoriented by that should look for comfort in the character who is the true moral center of the Potterverse,” Lewis wrote. “It was never Harry, the boy who happened to live, whose luck always holds, whose mistakes are minor. It is Severus Snape, who was made miserable by Harry’s father and took it out on Harry, who loved Harry’s mother and betrayed her friends, who redeemed himself with a morally repugnant act. A bully, a victim, a villain, and a hero: a human.”

But is it enough to cite foul human idiosyncrasies as a means to forgive inadequacies by individuals who should probably know better and do better in the process of human evolution? That will be decided over time in the court of public opinion. For now, we have this right here to digest and dismantle (click below to expand and see all 11 tweets).

Rowling was back at it on Twitter Tuesday with the interaction below. Get ready for another news cycle, folks.

Written by Sarah Toce, The New Civil Rights Movement. Image via NCRM.

Does Ricky Gervais Hate Trans People Or Not?

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A recent dust-up over tweets the British comedian made about transgender people has mainly left us confused.

Last month, Ricky Gervais tweeted about trans people a whole bunch, and by the end of it all, he’d contradicted himself multiple times, frustrating both the UK’s ascendant TERF movement and LGBTQ people everywhere. Can we make heads or tails of it all? We’ll certainly give it a shot.

This whole thing started with the controversy over JK Rowling’s tweet in support of Maya Forstater. We’ve covered this in detail elsewhere, but the basic upshot is that the Harry Potter author took to twitter to defend a British feminist who lost her research-foundation job over the fact that she insisted on making a point, Ben Shapiro-style, of misgendering trans people. Rowling tweeted support for Forstater by using anti-trans phrasing like “sex is real.” It really bummed a lot of LGBTQ Harry Potter fans out.

Ricky Gervais didn’t get involved until a satirical twitter account known as “Jarvis Dupont” tweeted out an article he had written about the JK Rowling incident, with the caption, “J.K. Rowling is a TERF! Speaking as a trans woman, the thought that I will no longer be welcome in a fictional school for wizards has destroyed me.”

Now, before we go on, Jarvis Dupont requires a bit of unpacking as well. This account is an attempt to mock the type of people referred to as “SJWs” in right-wing discourse; Gervais described Dupont in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter as “a spoof Twitter account, and the joke is that he’s so woke that he’s actually gone full circle and does terrible things.” This isn’t exactly it, but it’s close.

The article Dupont was promoting in the tweet Gervais responded to was published by The Spectator, a conservative British magazine, and is the sort of ham-fisted satire that wouldn’t fool anyone (The Onion, this ain’t), but demonstrates through the very on-the-nose-ness of its satire (“I don’t want to live in an intolerant world where men cannot legally force women to change their views on biological reality in the name of intersectional feminism”) that it is written by someone who, underneath all the “jokes,” sincerely holds some really TERF-y views.

In response to Dupont’s tweet of this article, Gervais decided to get in on the fun by responding with a tweet written in imitation of Dupont’s satirical tone. “Those awful biological women can never understand what it must be like for you becoming a lovely lady so late in life,” Gervais tweeted. “They take their girly privileges for granted. Winning at female sports and having their own toilets. Well, enough is enough.”

The problem he immediately ran into was that the very clumsiness of Dupont’s satirical approach, when Gervais himself attempted it, was read as sincerity. And it didn’t help when Gervais responded to another twitter user saying, “Kindness is magic. Try to remember that,” which seems to have been a very gentle chide against Gervais saying something that would hurt people, with the reply: “Exactly. We need to protect the rights of women. Not erode them because some men have found a new cunning way to dominate and demonise an entire sex.”

And if that first tweet was hard to read as a joke, this one seems all but impossible to read as such. Instead, it seems like Gervais jumping on the same TERF bandwagon that has been running roughshod over dialogue around transgender issues throughout the UK. However — plot twist! Gervais then immediately responded to someone asking, “Can you clarify if you think the trans women are men or that there is another group of people that are men and up to no good?” by saying, “I think trans women are women. I wasn’t talking about trans people.”

Gervais went on to say things like, “No, I’m not telling you I don’t believe people can be trans. Or that trans people shouldn’t be respected etc.” All of which, in addition to getting him a whole lot of grief from actual TERFs (who tweeted things like “Sellout” and “Bigger back flip in history dude! Sad Ricky. Very sad”), left him with a series of confusing and contradictory tweets that were impossible to reconcile without knowing what sort of tone he intended them to have.

Gervais tried to clarify in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. When asked, “How do you respond when people keep bringing up comments that you’ve made and implying that you are transphobic?” He responded, “I just say I’m not. And there’s nothing else you can say, you know? Yeah, I’m not.”

Gervais then fell back on the old “it’s better to let people say terrible things than to abridge free speech in even the slightest way” chestnut — a favorite of conservatives and alt-right types — saying, “I think offense is the collateral damage of free speech, and it’s no reason not to have free speech. That’s what I’d say — it’s the lesser of two evils. Having free speech and some people getting upset by it is the lesser of two evils because not having free speech is horrendous.”

But of course, his clarification also made it difficult to understand his original tweets. That first one was clearly a joke, regardless of how badly constructed or easy to misinterpret it was. The second one, which included the line “We need to protect the rights of women. Not erode them because some men have found a new cunning way to dominate and demonise an entire sex,” is a bit harder to interpret. And later on, when he was clearly trying to explain himself in all seriousness, he said, “I wasn’t talking about trans people.”

So then we must ask: who was Gervais talking about? Was he saying that transgender women are perfectly valid and cool by him, but there was some OTHER menace to the rights of women? And that that menace involved men, actual men, using transgender identities as a means to disenfranchise women? Presumably both cis and trans women, since he claims to regard trans women as women?

This is an awfully fine line to parse, and frankly, it seems like bullshit. A 2018 study from the Williams Institute found no correlation between allowing transgender people to use the bathrooms corresponding with their gender and reports of attacks and other crimes in public bathrooms. Trans people aren’t doing anything in public bathrooms other than what cis people do in public bathrooms, and there’s no evidence to suggest that nefarious cis men are attempting to enter women’s bathrooms at all.

That hasn’t stopped a lot of anti-trans forces, including many UK-based TERFs, from claiming that giving trans people legal rights creates an imminent threat of exactly this. And if there’s any coherent way to understand Gervais’ latest tweets about transgender people, it’s that he believes both sides. He simultaneously believes that trans women are women, that their identities are valid, and that allowing them legal rights will inspire many nefarious men posing as trans women for evil purposes to attack and harm women.

While I suppose that makes Gervais less of an enemy to trans people than JK Rowling, it ultimately doesn’t make much difference if the end result is a position along the lines of, “I respect and believe in you and your identity, but giving you legal rights would just be too dangerous for society as a whole.” At that point, you may as well be a full-on TERF — it amounts to the same thing.

In the end, the best we can probably hope for is that this whole kerfuffle will be enough to keep Gervais from mentioning trans people at all for a while. God knows we don’t need his input.

Top Photo: Gervais holding 2019 Golden Globes, via YouTube

JK Rowling Is On Board The TERF Train

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After months of hints on social media, the Harry Potter author has overtly expressed support for one of the UK’s many transgender-exclusionary radical feminists. Our childhood is officially ruined.

Thousands of LGBTQ teens and young adults are bummed at the news that broke last week about JK Rowling. Through things like social media likes, the beloved author of the Harry Potter stories had already been very subtly indicating support for the trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) movement that has been ascendant in the UK for the past several years. Now she has made a public statement via Twitter in support of Maya Forstater, a British researcher who lost her contract with charitable organization Centre For Global Development (CGD) due to her social media statements to the effect that trans women were not real women.

On December 19, Rowling tweeted, “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill”

In this tweet, Rowling attempts to have it both ways. She begins with a number of statements telling an unidentified person or community to, in essence, live their life as they choose. But then, in her final pre-hashtag question, she frames the situation surrounding Maya Forstater, who the hashtags indicate she is “standing with,” as trans people hounding Forstater out of her job for “stating that sex is real.” Which is exactly the kind of heavily-loaded language that’s become all too common in the United Kingdom, as that country’s TERF movement has gained more and more traction in the mainstream over the past decade.

I honestly don’t feel like rehashing that entire issue, so if you’re not aware of what I’m talking about, I will simply refer you to my 2018 article, “Gender Trouble: Will The UK’s TERF Problem Invade the US?” and move on.

What we do need to talk about is Rowling’s statement that “sex is real.” Which, if you think about it from a certain angle, is a wild thing to say. But she doesn’t mean sex as in sexual intercourse — she’s using the scientific term for the distinction between male and female. And that’s a real distinction, sure… but in the wake of transgender and non-binary acceptance becoming more prevalent in certain areas of mainstream society, scientists are looking deeper and finding that the issue is a good bit more complicated than your high school biology class told you.

Not if you ask the many TERFs with prominent voices in the UK, though. Much like American right-wingers, they rally around declarations that biological sex is immutable, that there are only two genders, that gender is binary. Maya Forstater has made similar statements. Indeed, when a UK judge, James Tayler, ruled against her last week in a discrimination lawsuit she’d filed against the CGD for firing her, she said exactly those sorts of things in her response to the judgment, printed by The Guardian.

“My belief … is that sex is a biological fact, and is immutable,” stated Forstater. “There are two sexes, male and female. Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female. It is impossible to change sex. These were until very recently understood as basic facts of life by almost everyone.”

So there we are — the woman JK Rowling has taken to social media to defend is the textbook definition of a TERF. She believes that trans and non-binary identities are invalid. And based on her statement that “sex is real,” it seems JK Rowling believes the same thing.

What’s more, Rowling’s entire framing of the Forstater situation is misleading and unfair. She implies that trans people hounded Forstater out of her job, when in reality, the CGD made the decision not to renew Forstater’s contract on their own. What’s more, after Forstater sued the CGD claiming discrimination, the aforementioned Judge Tayler ruled against her, stating that “[Forstater] is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

Maya Forstater speaks at a feminist conference. Photo via Maya Forstater/Facebook

Louise Rea, a lawyer with the firm of Bates Wells, which advised CGD in the case, further explained to the Guardian the reasoning behind Tayler’s legal ruling. “Employment Judge Tayler acknowledged that there is nothing to stop the claimant campaigning against the proposed revisions to the Gender Recognition Act or, expressing her opinion that there should be some spaces that are restricted to women assigned female at birth. However, she can do so without insisting on calling transwomen men. It is the fact that her belief necessarily involves violating the dignity of others which means it is not protected under the Equality Act 2010.”

Therefore, this clearly isn’t just a case of trans people hounding a woman out of a job, as Rowling states. It’s a case of a TERF hounding trans people in public until her bosses didn’t want to employ her anymore, and a judge finding her behavior unacceptable under the law of the UK — which is, as we’ve discussed, not exactly the most enlightened country where trans rights are concerned.

This isn’t the first time Rowling’s come under suspicion of holding trans-exclusionary beliefs; in March 2018, Rowling liked a tweet on social media that referred to trans women as “men in dresses.” When confronted about it, though, her press agent backpedaled, saying that Rowling’s like of the tweet was “a clumsy and middle-aged moment,” and that it didn’t reflect her true beliefs.

So far, there’s been no such backpedal this time. Perhaps we’ll get one in time for Christmas? It seems more likely, though, that Rowling has decided to go along with a prominent sentiment in UK feminism. And with a tweet like this one, I don’t really see how there’s any going back.

Top Photo: JK Rowling, via Facebook