And those ideas are reactionary and hateful.

September 23, 2020 12:29 PM

Troubled Blood sees [noted transphobe] J.K. Rowling at the mercy of all her worst impulses: In her latest detective novel, Rowling spends most of her time explaining why she’s mad at modern feminism. [cw: transphobia]

To be clear, regardless of Rowling’s personal feelings toward trans people, all of the ideas she expressed in her essay are transphobic. They actively seek to take rights away from trans people, and they treat trans identity as something that is up for debate, rather than an intrinsic part of human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity. But Rowling has threatened to sue publications who describe her and her views as transphobic, forcing at least one children’s site to issue a public apology.

So to some critics, Troubled Blood is just the latest sign of J.K. Rowling’s increasingly outspoken and retrograde ideas about gender. Others have countered that the book contains no trans characters, that detractors were judging the book without reading it, and that dismissing Troubled Blood before its publication over worries about a trope is cancel culture at its worst. What it would mean to cancel J.K. Rowling, a billionaire with theme park attractions built around her intellectual property, remains unclear. But in any case, Troubled Blood debuted at No. 1 in the UK.

JK Rowling and the damage done:

It’s worth noting that most popular articles published so far criticising Troubled Blood have made an effort to distance the transgender community from the killer, referring to the character as a “transvestite’ or as a cis man in a dress. While the common conflation of a transgender woman expressing her womanhood and a cisgender man expressing his femininity (and vice versa for trans men and butch women) is a real issue, nobody should throw crossdressers under the bus. At the same time, Rowling’s assertion that some trans women are just “men in dresses” is harmful to transgender people because of how it excludes us from spaces and services we may need. It also excuses violence we may face as a consequence of this conflation. Untangling the public conception of trans women and crossdressing men is only part of the solution. Nobody deserves to be treated badly for how they present themselves.

Ultimately, despite Rowling’s claims to support and have sympathy for the occasional trans person, she is arguing for the right of her and all other cis people to judge whether any given trans person is “really trans”. Similarly, she claims to care about trans children, while asserting that children should not be allowed to transition because they cannot know who they are, that their self-asserted gender isn’t real – never mind that medical intervention for youth is reserved for acute distress in teenagers who have to fight hard to get it, and never mind that virtually every trans person cites being forced to grow up as somebody other than who they are as a huge source of trauma.

[previously]

posted by Ouverture (4 comments total)

I highly recommend this recent NS interview with Judith Butler on the subject of JKR (and related issues). She succinctly dismantles the hateful props holding up these ideas.

A quote:

AF: One example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender. In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would "throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman", potentially putting women at risk of violence.

JB: If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.

posted by fight or flight at 12:34 PM on September 23, 2020 [9 favorites]

Is it supposed to ironic that she wrote this novel under a male pseudonym?
posted by njohnson23 at 12:53 PM on September 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

did she just...write silence of the lambs?
posted by Bwentman at 1:03 PM on September 23, 2020

Rowling is a splendid example of how not to take criticism. As a rule of thumb, doubling down and openly aligning with hate groups that reaffirm your bigotry because so many people have questioned same does nothing except prove those people right.

At least everyone knows who she is now the plausible deniability is gone.
posted by Lonnrot at 1:03 PM on September 23, 2020