Certain trans-activists exhibit a traditional, narcissist male hostility to J.K. Rowling we see in abusive cis-men
Public domain photo courtesy of the Executive Office of the White House, 2010
Feminist epic success story J.K. Rowling is a former abuse victim who escaped and never let it happen again, and is now a not-so-fantastic beast to a small tranche of the trans community.
Rowling is the most visible face in the list of people attacked or cancel-bullied by extremist transgender activists — a case study in how vicious a certain segment of the trans community is, aided by natal women lacking basic common sense, or perhaps still fundamentally afraid to challenge anything that is or used to be a man, as too many women are wont to do.
Every time trans-activists try to bully Rowling into silence, she proves she’s more man than they ever were and more woman then they’ll ever be.
She’s got the money, the power, and the courage to stand up to male aggression, however it identifies.
The Harry Potter author and now Public Enemy #1 again for writing a grown-up novel featuring a cross-dressing serial killer originally rose to infamy for stating basic incontrovertible facts about a subject with which she has lifelong experience: Being a woman.
Unlike many of her detractors.
Rational-thinking feminists and abuse victims will recognize in Rowling’s haters the privileged narcissistic certainty that the world was designed for and must be maintained to please those born with XY chromosomes.
Ex-men who hate women and the women who love them
Anyone who thinks the far-right has cornered the market on misogyny, science denial, and ‘fake news’ has never visited the more extreme corners of trans-activism, where (mostly) men-turned-women do what men have done for thousands of years: Lecture women on what being a woman means, and defining who is a ‘real woman’.
Biological, scientific reality be damned.
Rowling has run afoul of trans-extremists and their loyal lapgirls many times, including this summer after she posted her response for speaking out on sex and gender issues.
They were already incensed over her biologically impeccable point:
Here’s an inconvenient biological truth: People born with XY chromosomes can’t menstruate. Ever.
Score one for J.K. Rowling‘s acknowledgement of a scientific reality that hasn’t changed for millions of years.
Then there was this Rowling pearl:
The Twitstorm vitriol strongly resembled what you see at Donald Trump’s organized hatefests.
Having just finished Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft, I see a strong similarity between abusive cis-heteronormative men and trans-activist extremists.
The extremists share that same sense of entrenched entitlement stemming from being born male into a world designed for them. They may want to be women, but psychologically they’re unwilling to give up their birthright in a world ordered to suit them, and the hell with what anyone else wants.
Too often, their allies on the Regressive Left, as Sam Harris likes to call them, are willing to go along. The Regressive Left’s feminism often capitulates to patriarchal dictates originating in a twisted idea of ‘progressivism’. Meaning an overabundance of tolerance, even for toxic behavior and values they’d never condone from their adversaries on the right. On some fundamental level, Regressive Left feminists cringe from challenging any XY who can make them feel guilty. Easy enough to do: Just claim victimhood, Regressive Left catnip.
Regressive Left feminists won’t challenge female genital mutilation in service to ‘cultural relativism’; are less inclined to condemn ‘honor killings’; and in the U.K., they ignored young female sexual abuse victims because the perpetrators weren’t white enough or Christian enough for them.
They are, therefore, willing to throw their natal sisters under the bus in service to proving how ‘woke’ or progressive they think they are. They’ll ignore the same abuses against women they’d never tolerate from cis-heteronormative males.
Regressive Left feminists repeat what extremist trans-activists have trained them to say — that any man who declares himself a woman is a woman. No backtalk, young lady!
Willing to erase, as Rowling put it, natal women’s lived reality, all to please women who act an awful lot like abusive men.
If you think Greta Thunberg-haters and COVIDiots are out of their minds, or that QAnon’s belief in a Democratic cult of baby-eaters is insane, consider extremist trans-activist reactions to Rowling’s entirely reasonable explanation for why she criticizes the excesses of trans-activism, and why she doesn’t accept a man as a woman on his say-so.
Rowling is hardly ‘transphobic’ or a TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) for pointing out there should be considerations and perhaps limits to trans women’s rights to women’s safe spaces. At least while we work to define and understand what transitioning means, including questioning whether someone still with a penis is a woman, and how it affects natal women who’ve been badly treated by penis-owners in the past. It’s created moral dilemmas for which there are no easy answers, and you can’t say, ‘Everyone is allowed to define themselves,’ while expecting everyone else to accept their definition. No one’s obligated to validate another’s self-perception.
Rowling also observes medical professionals and scientists are afraid to speak out for children who may be harmed by unquestioned non-medical dogma. Trans-activists have shut down important conversations on medical treatments for confused children and adolescents who think they’re trans. Medical history shows around 80% of them will outgrow their temporary gender dysphoria and the rest, when it’s clear they’re genuinely trans, can then be treated medically as they see fit.
Intelligent questions have been raised, in the meantime, on whether children and young people are pushed into it by well-meaning adults or perhaps even from their peer groups. The latter syndrome is called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria and the very idea incenses trans-activist extremists.
For those of us who favor critical thinking and debate, it’s troubling to think we can’t even talk about it without being labeled haters and bigots.
The more I delve into the way so-called ‘trans’ children are being treated medically, before their bodies develop on their own, and the more I read of kids wanting to transform for dysfunctional reasons — like they’re gay and they fear homophobia, or they think males have easier lives than women — the more I believe altering children’s bodies before they’re mature enough to make these decisions themselves amounts to unconscious child abuse.
What trans-extremists don’t care to understand — since when have entitled (ex) men ever listened to women anyway? — is you can critique excesses, especially the ignorance and ignoring of science and informed medical opinion, without denying there’s real gender dysphoria, that a certain number won’t ‘outgrow it’, and when people are old enough to make their own decisions, they can then move forward with whatever they deem they need or want, as adults.
Until then, nothing stops them from ‘social transitioning’, so they can try on their new identity, or several, and see how it fits.
We don’t allow children to make certain decisions for themselves because we realize they don’t have the experience or maturity yet: They can’t vote, drink alcohol, buy tobacco products, join the military, get married, get tattoos or body piercings, or engage in consensual sexual relations until they reach a certain age. Yet some believe impressionable children and youth can make informed decisions about altering their bodies in ways they can’t reverse if they do in fact ‘outgrow’ their trans identification.
We now understand how the brain doesn’t stop developing until around age 25, so it seems foolhardy and downright cruel to push often irreversible surgical procedures on the very young, as we now recognize arbitrarily assigning and surgically ‘fixing’ an infant born with intersex characteristics is unintentionally harmful.
Teenage girls are ‘binding’ their breasts and even exploring removing them. How many adults would support cutting off breasts to prevent cancer if it ran in a girl’s family? Feminist outrage would be justified. But it’s okay when she’s not comfortable with being a girl and no one wants to ask whether there are psychological reasons, before she loses her ability to ever feed her own child?
Rational-minded feminists want to know: Is this how you ‘smash the patriarchy’, by becoming a man? Why is it the female body, once again, is held responsible and not an overly-sexualized view of women in a patriarchal culture?
Similar practices abound in some African countries where female relatives ‘iron’ or flatten a developing girl’s breasts to make her less attractive to men, rather than questioning why the men in their culture think they’re entitled to have sex with her.
J.K. Rowling’s questions about ‘trans’ kids and adolescents shut down brains still entrenched in male privilege. Trans-activist extremists react as any abusive man would when challenged, with threats, vitriol and holy crusades.
Running with the Trumpies
Is there any difference between Trumpoplectic far-right language fits vs. trans-extremists’ and their allies’ colorful responses to Rowling on Twitter?
Them’s fightin’ words we’ve seen aimed at Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren and any other women who dare to challenge male authority, traditionally from red-capped men with Twitter handles like @ProudBoy_Michigan whose profile promises he will fight the libtards and snowflakes for Jesus.
Words do matter, and words can kill, indirectly. Hate speech can drive the anger and passions to incline (not compel) those with little impulse control to commit terrible acts of violence. There’s no question genuine hate speech against trans-people puts them in a lot of danger, and no reasonable human being is against addressing genuine hate speech, or violence against anybody.
We debate whether Donald Trump should be allowed to keep his personal Twitter account after he’s no longer President for the demonstrable hate speech (bile) he’s spewed for four years.
Yet confused Regressive Lefties aim the very same foul verbiage at Rowling and other natal women who express real concerns about extremist trans-activist misogyny. It ignores the realities of women like Rowling who’ve survived pretty horrific abuse and who can’t be faulted for not trusting ‘a woman with a penis’, especially when her ‘woke’-addled sisters don’t challenge, and even abet, victimizing women.
Like in what’s supposed to be the ultimate ‘safe space’ for battered women.
Regressive Left feminists, who otherwise defend women against abusive men, turn on the victims, like Rowling, if they don’t fall into line like good girls.
‘Not all trans-women!’
I’m quite sure most trans-women only want to live their lives peaceably with their natal sisters. Trans or not, those of us who stand with J.K. Rowling understand gender identity doesn’t always align with genitals and everybody should be allowed to live as they want.
We’re at a turning point. The trans movement only gained traction about a dozen years ago, asking us to redefine what we understand about gender identity and lived realities, and to realize some people don’t and perhaps never have felt comfortable in their natal bodies. They’re trying to figure out how far they want to go with their transition, and we need to accommodate them, even if it’s not perfect and not as much as they’d like.
Many trans-women understand it’s a new reality for natal women too, not all of whom are comfortable with XYs for very good reasons — and natal women’s rights and comfort levels need to be respected. Our lived experience is men for countless generations telling us how to think, act, talk, dress and be. Now we’ve got a small percentage of new women telling us the same, and acting very much like abusive, entitled, overprivileged men when they don’t get their way.
La plus ça change.
Non-whites reacted with rage when the parents of a natal white woman revealed their daughter had faked being a black woman for years.
It ignited a furious debate about race and how she chose to be black, which natal black people didn’t, and how she could never understand what it was like to be black because she hadn’t grown up black in a racist society.
A similar observation must be made: It’s different when you’re born female.
XXs and XYs are physically distinct, evolved as we did to reproduce, as all biological life is driven to do. Blame evolution for giving XYs a penis capable of fertilizing the womb of an XX, and ensuring the perpetuation of the human species by making us, for the most part, attracted to the genetic creature with which we can make more genetic creatures like ourselves.
Today, after a few million years we’ve evolved in about as many different ways. Survival of the human species isn’t in question and not everyone feels quite like others in a binary-gender world. It shouldn’t matter who they’re attracted to, who they love or don’t love, whether they want to reproduce or how they present themselves to the world.
What matters is our reality is still deeply sexist, and an XY who feels he was born in the wrong body can still never know what it’s like to be born and grow up female in a sexist society. However much he was bullied or abused for not being ‘man enough’, he still grew up in a world designed by XYs for XYs, and he benefited in the same involuntary way natal white people benefit by a society set up by people like them, for them, a long time ago.
Just as many non-whites argue it’s not their job to make white people — the dominant race — feel comfortable, it’s not natal women’s job to make former men feel comfortable either, especially when some so-called women behave far more like abusive, entitled men than women who want to live their lives in peace.
Young transgender woman Creative Commons image courtesy of Zackary Drucker and the Gender Spectrum Collection
We all have to work this out. No one can mandate our beliefs or values. We do need to recognize everyone’s fundamental human right to live as they want, as long as none are forcing their will on others. Or calling dissenters filthy names for raising important questions.
It’s misogynist to deny natal women’s lived realities, and it’s time we call out the misogyny and entitlement in the more insane corners of trans-activism.
This article originally appeared on Medium in November 2020.
Commentaires