On Sunday, as the rest of us battled a pandemic, racism, and police brutality, Rowling decided to take issue with a public health notice for being overly inclusive:
She’d prefer the article to explicitly say “women,” even though not all women menstruate (including post-menopausal women and trans women), and not all who menstruate are women (non-binary people, trans men). Besides, anyone who can read understands the article’s target audience.
This and similar tweets have landed Rowling the label of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist or TERF, so named because these otherwise liberal feminists depart from the mainstream solely in their opposition to transgender equality. (They prefer to say they’re “Gender Critical.” I prefer to say they’re “In Slytherin.”)
These philosophies contend that trans women are not truly women and trans men are not truly men, and are therefore not entitled to legal protections and social privileges as such.
In this weekend’s tweetstorm, Rowling argued that trans-inclusive language erases the lived experience of cisgender women, who’ve fought, and continue to fight, gender-based oppression.
However, instead of highlighting the topics covered in the article—domestic violence, menstrual heath, and reproductive rights, all issues primarily affecting cisgender women—she bemoaned the word “people.”
Rowling defends her stance by proclaiming, “sex is real,” politically coded language that sounds reasonable on its face but carries a deeper meaning. Think of a person who says they’re “pro-life.” They’re not broadly in favor of living—you don’t normally see them fight for equal access to healthcare, against police killings or for the lives of migrants and asylum seekers—but rather opposed to legal abortion.
Similarly, “sex is real” doesn’t affirm the undeniable reality that humans have genitals; it seeks to deny trans people of the legal and social privileges of their authentic gender because, they argue, biology is fixed and immutable.
Scientists disagree. Approximately 1.7 percent of the population is born with intersex conditions – roughly the same number of people are born with red hair. Peer-reviewed studies found that chromosomes, gonads, hormones, and cell receptors—the components of biological sex—are neither binary nor fixed.
Researchers, along with the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, to name a few, all agree: Trans people are who we say we are. We are neither perverse nor predatory. We deserve equal rights and dignity.
That, of course has not stopped the Trump Administration from co-opting “fixed biology,” as they attempt to define trans people out of legal existence.
Rowling and her cohort perpetuate a narrative of trans people as an invasive species, colonizing the LGBTQ movement and making it inhospitable to cisgender women—never mind that Black and brown trans women of color are credited with starting the movement.
Trans people are far more likely to be rejected by our family, become homeless, and attempt suicide. We face impossibly high economic barriers, as well as devastating social isolation.
No wonder we feel so threatened by a philosophy built on excluding us from full participation in the world.
Trans people have existed throughout history. We are not an invention of ideology. Treating us as the enemy squanders an opportunity for solidarity.
The oppression of trans people, the oppression of women and people of color and the poor and all who are marginalized is built upon the same foundation. We cannot afford to forget this, for it will take all of us together to bring it down.
We’re in the midst of an unprecedented global pandemic. The world is at last seriously interrogating racism and police brutality. And one of the most beloved authors in history, who captivated so many of us with a story about an outsider hero and the triumphant power of love, used her platform to stoke division. An author who created a world populated with creatures capable of vastly stranger transformations the the normal, natural fluctuations on the gender spectrum of human beings, time and time again refuses to see us as we are, or to acknowledge the harm inflicted by arbitrary binary distinctions.
Imagine if she didn’t. Imagine if she brought us together. Imagine how she could’ve changed the world.
Zeke Smith is a writer, comedian and former Survivor contestant.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
