JK Rowling’s Anti-Trans Post: A Deep Dive

In her long essay on trans issues, JK Rowling uses a lot of techniques to make herself sound more reasonable than she is actually being. She frequently minimizes and avoids explicitly saying the things she alludes to. She spends a lot of time poisoning the well. In particular, she avoids acknowledging the truly terrible things she’s said or supported publicly. She implies that all trans women are physically and sexually dangerous, particularly to children, and she consistently implies that trans people are just “men in dresses” or “self-loathing women”.

I’m going to go paragraph by paragraph through what JK Rowling has written because I think it’s important to highlight the tactics she’s using to minimize her bigotry and aim that bigotry at trans people, especially trans women.

Before I get started I will just say… you really don’t have to read this. It’s a pretty miserable experience and there are much more enjoyable ways to spend your time. That said, let’s get on with it.

This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity.

She starts with poisoning the well, making it sound like the toxicity is somehow generated by the topic itself, and not the result of, for example, her own behavior. She also peremptorily disowns her own bad behavior, without actually apologizing for it.

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.

This is deeply misrepresentative of Maya Forstater. Forstater was a contractor whose contract was not renewed following a series of tweets in which she misgendered trans people and called them “crossdressers”. She dismissed the possibility of trans people existing, referring to trans women consistently as “males”. Her contract was not renewed after an individual complained that she was creating a hostile work environment. After suing, Forstater continued to post vile things – insisting on deadnaming trans people, intentionally using incorrect pronouns, and misgendering people. A judge concluded that this harassing behavior wasn’t OK in a workplace. Forstater is allowed to believe whatever she wants, but when that belief manifests in treating individuals badly, an employer has the right to protect its other employees from harassment.

I can only assume that Rowling doesn’t explain the entire story because it would look very bad for her case. You’ll note that Rowling never directly links to anything she refers to, not allowing people to judge for themselves her interpretations or the validity of her sources. Rowling’s tweet in defense of Forstater was equally misleading and dismissive of trans people, implying that they were just crossdressing, not trans.

My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.

Rowling’s interest in trans issues started because she wrote a book in which a trans woman attacks the main character (the main character then threatens her with prison rape). Her research was to help her write a villainous trans woman. She writes this paragraph as though she’s a disinterested researcher, when she is, in fact, someone with an agenda. Her agenda is to ensure that cis women do not have to share spaces with trans women.

All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.

There are a couple of interesting things happening in this paragraph. First, Rowling refuses to take any responsibility for her liking a tweet. It may seem inconsequential, but liked tweets by popular feeds means that tweet show up in a lot of people’s feeds. So a lot of people saw bile who otherwise wouldn’t have had to. Rowling’s large platform comes with additional responsibilities. On top of that, she again fails to acknowledge what research she was doing (how to write a trans woman villain) or the fact that what she was reading was absolutely awful — or the fact that there were actually several incidents of her “accidentally” liking transphobic material on Twitter. That link has a much more exhaustive analysis of how the tweets were problematic than what I can provide.

The first she liked was an article that presented trans women as predators and “strangers with a penis”. The second was a tweet that described trans women as “men in dresses” and said that supporting trans women rather than the (cis woman) author of the tweet was an example of misogyny.

She also casts herself as some powerless victim of persecution for being perceived to have a “wrongthink” opinion. To be clear, she was accurately perceived to have an opinion which this entire piece affirms. She also seems to be under the misapprehension that freedom of speech means the ability to say whatever you want without facing criticism. She can post things denying people’s gender identity, and that’s free speech, but saying she is wrong is necessarily harassment.

I will say this though, she is right that there is too much harassment on Twitter and some of it is aimed at her. Some of the criticism she has faced has been deeply misogynistic and violent. That is, unfortunately, true of Twitter across the board.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

Again, refusing to take responsibility for liking something that she agrees with, understating the impact of liking a tweet when it makes it appear to millions of people, and overstating the criticism of her by implying trans activists think it’s a “crime”. Berns was young for someone to die of a brain tumour, but she was 36 not 16, which is more the age that Rowling seems to be implying here. As a fully adult woman, Berns was absolutely responsible for her reprehensible views, which were much more than thinking it was OK for lesbians not to date trans women. (Never mind that many trans women are lesbians). Rowling here also here mentions penises in an attempt to scare people. I do not understand her obsession with genitalia, but many anti-trans people seem to reduce people to their genitalia.

Why did she even want to support Berns? That’s not some incidental information, Rowling likely wanted to support Berns specifically for her anti-trans work. Again Rowling implies that dots were joined that shouldn’t be joined, in a piece in which she advocates for transphobia! She wants to imply that trans people are crazy for thinking she doesn’t support trans people, even while she is writing an essay about how she doesn’t support trans people!

As for Berns’ beliefs, they were really aggressively dehumanizing. She didn’t believe trans women were women, she said they were “blackface actors” and “men who got sexual kicks from being treated like women.” She insisted that homosexuality was about attraction to specific genitalia not genders. She was very much a TERF, by the strictest definitions. Rowling again avoids acknowledging the worst of Berns’ public statements to maintain some plausible deniability of her own fear and dislike of trans people.

I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.

She knew perfectly well that as someone who had positioned herself as an LGBTQ ally, people would be upset when she publicly supported someone who literally called trans people “blackface performers.” Yeah, that’s not super hard to predict. Here she performs an interesting trick where she conflates genuine abuse (threats of violence, gendered slurs) with legitimate criticism (contributing to trans youth suicide, destroying books). I have to assume the particularly abusive man who composted her book was considered abusive for some unstated reason? Notice also that here she goes from just following so she could DM to actively supporting Maya. She sneaks in this reveal of what is more likely her real behavior — supporting a very transphobic person specifically because she agrees with the transphobia.

What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.

A yes, a good bandwagon argument. You see the good people of the world, the silent majority, agree with my bigotry, therefore it is correct. She also avoids stating what people are “deeply concerned” about. “[A] socio political concept” means the belief that trans people exist, “influencing politics” means that trans people want their gender recognized, “medical practice” means providing appropriate care to people who are trans, and “safeguarding” means protecting cis women and children from being raped by predatory trans women. The dangers to young people are presumably that trans people are sexual predators and that transitioning is dangerous to the young. The danger to gay people is that somehow their sexuality is not real if trans people exist. The erosion of women’s and girl’s rights is that those rights would also be extended to trans women and girls.

And then there is her claim that, somehow, people who criticize trans people are living in a worse “climate of fear” than trans people themselves. A “climate of fear” is when you don’t know if you’ll be fired, kicked out of your home, disowned, beaten, or killed if someone discovers you’re trans. It’s not worrying that people will call you a bigot for expressing a bigoted opinion on Twitter. These are not the same. The dangers are nothing alike. And using trans youth as a shield here is especially galling.

I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health. I only returned because I wanted to share a free children’s book during the pandemic. Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF.

Again, she uses the term “support” here. Again, without saying what Maya believed and said. Here she says that Twitter abuse was bad for her mental health, without acknowledging that the persistent denial of their humanity and gender is devastating to the mental health of trans people. Again, Rowling makes this about her. She goes on to act as though all she was doing on Twitter was this act of charity for children (you’ll note she repeatedly brings up children to act as a shield for her behavior), when she was actively posting anti-trans missives. Again, minimizing her own behavior and her responsibility for it.

She here mistakes criticism for policing of speech. Your right to say whatever you want isn’t infringed by people telling you that what you said was terrible. You are free to speak, not free from criticism of that speech. Again she does this conflating things as though being (accurately) accused of hatred is the same as being called misogynistic slurs. She also conflates misogynistic slurs with TERF, even though TERF is not that. She also implies that the only women involved in this debate are cis women who don’t support trans people, entirely ignoring all the cis women who’ve not been called a TERF and all the trans women fighting for their rights.

If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.

Here’s another bit of little word magic. She ends the previous paragraph with the claim that every (cis) woman (who is a TERF) involved in this discussion is familiar with the term TERF, to highlight that it’s a terrible slur being used against everyone willy-nilly, but begins this paragraph with, why should you have heard of the term TERF, it’s so unimportant and niche, so she can build the term up as a slur used with abandon and dismiss it as unimportant at the same time.

She’s actually right here about where the term TERF is applied. It was originally used inside the radical feminist movement to criticize radfems who didn’t support/include trans women, but it has become shorthand for anyone who doesn’t support trans people. It has evolved, like many terms, from one that was merely descriptive of a single philosophical position, to having other meanings and connotations. She lists some people who I guess she thinks don’t fit the term, but she herself is a pretty textbook case of being a feminist who doesn’t want to include trans women.

These examples are weird because they feel like non sequiturs. She presents this mother as a caring mother, not as a person standing between her child and help, which is what she reads as to me. It seems like a lot of people who don’t support young people seeking gender transition care don’t realize that a huge part of that care is mental health-related or that it takes years in the UK – up to three years – to just begin any care, then a wait to get hormonal support (if wanted), and then many years on hormones to get surgery (if wanted). It is not as if a teen just goes to school, gets called gay, and has surgery the next day in a huff.

As for the Marks and Spencer lady, I’ve got no clue what Rowling is attempting to say here except that all anti-trans people can get called TERF, even if not feminist. I’m not sure what makes this lady “totally unfeminist” unless shopping for Marks and Spencer is code for that. You’ll note that the writing is muddy here about whether this is the view of the lady or of Rowling, but this was written by Rowling herself: “they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms.” So this is implying that trans women 1. are just men pretending to be women, 2. are sexual predators trying to get into women’s spaces to rape them, and 3. that women’s changing rooms are somehow sacred spaces when they’re literally just tiny closets to try on clothes.

Finally she says that TERFs aren’t trans-exclusionary because they consider trans men to be women. This is super messed up on a number of levels. First, the complaint about TERFs is specifically about their refusal to include trans women. Secondly, she’s asking for credit for refusing to believe someone else when it comes to their gender. Third, this is absolutely excluding trans men, because if you’re refusing to believe them when they say who they are, how could they be included?

But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).

This paragraph genuinely blew my mind, I had to read it several times to even begin to understand what she’s saying. People are intimidated out of bigoted behavior because people will call them out as bigots. This seems… fine to me. Is the ask that people not call out homophobia, sexism, and racism, either, to be sure they don’t intimidate people into not using slurs? It seems perfectly reasonable for a person/organization to say “Should I say something that insults my fellow human beings and denies them their humanity or should I not?” It’s not great that the only thing standing between them and vocal transphobia is a fear of being called on it but, baby steps.

Next she says that calling someone transphobic is equivalent to saying they have fleas — which is to say that Rowling doesn’t think that transphobia is a meaningfully bad thing. She’s really fine with it. Fleas are, sadly, much easier to get rid of.

And then there’s this clownfish stuff that is… confusing. First, she makes this joke (?) about “biological women” (note she refused to use the term cis, instead tying “woman” explicitly to biology) growing balls, but it’s sort of weirder than that, because the implication is that all the people in positions of power are women, which is statistically unlikely. Then she goes on this very weird tangent about clownfish, which she claims that trans supporters believe proves that people can spontaneously grow new and different genitalia.

I spent a long time googling to try to understand this, so here is the only context I can give you: Clownfish exhibit something called “sequential hermaphroditism.” They live as a non-breeding male, and when triggered by the correct circumstances, can sexually mature as either a breeding male or a breeding female. This is upsetting to some transphobes, because it was included in Blue Planet II and they thought this was pro-trans propaganda. What is interesting is that there are many examples of conditions in which humans can present as one sex as a child and then change at puberty or where they look like one sex but actually have chromosomes for the opposite sex. Humans do exhibit dimorphism (differences in body between sexes), though at a lower level than many species, and this is more like a spectrum than two buckets of people — many people are ambiguous, mixed, or change over time, and I’m pretty sure that there’s no one feature of a sex that doesn’t ever appear in the other. (More about biology here.) It is a weird thing to claim that trans supporters believe there are no general differences in physical development, when the transition in question is often about changing those very things. I wonder if she objects to cis women with PCOS shaving their beards or cis men with gynecomastia having breast removal, in order to feel more attuned with their gender identities?

So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?

Uh, because you weren’t ever doing that?

Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

“The new trans activism” is a weird way of putting “supporting trans people.”

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

A charitable trust that, by the way, is all for including trans women and children in their care. The implication here is that somehow it would be bad if her charity had to help trans women prisoners or trans survivors of domestic and sexual abuse? I genuinely do not begin to understand why she’s upset that these would include trans women. I also don’t understand why she thinks the MS research is negatively impacted by focusing the legal definition of gender on identity rather than on sex. The medical history of a patient is the business of their medical providers and isn’t usually the business of everyone else. As mentioned above, there are lots of people who don’t fit neatly into either/or boxes, and medical research generally has to take that into account. Trans people offer the opportunity to learn more, not less, about how human bodies work. Also the use of “if all its demands are met” implies that trans activism is somehow holding the world hostage, not merely asking to be treated decently.

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.

It is not that nothing else in this has made me angry, but this dog whistle is especially infuriating. She’s returned to the term “safeguarding” which in this context means “I think trans women are pedophiles”. I am unclear of the effect of trans rights on education, except, perhaps, that children will learn that trans people exist. It is incredible to me that someone who supposedly supports gay people cannot see that this is the exact same argument that was used against gay people — they aren’t safe around children and children shouldn’t have to learn about them.

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.

… How can someone post this long screed and also claim she doesn’t have freedom of speech. She has a much bigger platform than any of the trans rights people she hates.

The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.

Detransitioning is a relatively uncommon phenomenon and it can happen at any phase of transition, meaning that someone doesn’t even have to have taken hormones, much less have surgery, to detransition. Because of how long it takes to reach the point of surgery (years and years, especially for very young people) it is even rarer for someone to have permanent alterations to their fertility when they detransition. Still, such things do happen, but they’re generally from choices made by individuals when they are adults after having extensive medical and mental health care. The logic of thinking trans men shouldn’t be allowed to transition at a young adult age is the same as the logic of doctors who refuse to let women get permanent birth control until they’ve had two children or are in their thirties. If this isn’t policing individual choices of what to do with their bodies, nothing is.
This focus on trans men (as she calls them, young women) is interesting, because she’s been presenting trans women as the bogey man so far, and mostly focuses on them throughout. Trans women are men who are predators trying to get into women’s spaces, and trans men are self-loathing women or self-loathing lesbians.

Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.

Researching this issue properly seems to mean reading a bunch of articles from Quillette. Note again she refers to young trans men as girls. I don’t know many women who like being called girls, but trans men definitely don’t.

This 4400% number is misleading for a number of reasons. First of all, there’s been a huge increase of young people being referred for gender treatment overall. Second of all, it is likely that this is because of the activism to reduce stigma against trans youth. Thirdly, 4400 is larger than the actual number of young people referred. The number of young people referred rose from 97 to 2519. That is indeed a large jump, but considering that there are over 10 million people under the age of 15 in the UK, it’s not a very impressive number. The vast difference of more “boys” than “girls” to begin with was 40 “girls” to 57 “boys.” The numbers currently are 1806 to 703, a much bigger difference, but still such small numbers that it’s difficult to discern much from it. Not all of these referrals lead to transitions, either.
I’m not sure what to make of this statement about “autistic girls” being overrepresented. The first is the implication that autistic girls are not capable of knowing their own gender, which is ableist. The second is the implication that “girls” who are “autistic” can only be “autistic”, and not also trans. Autism must explain everything. Either way, it’s a weird thing to bring up. Note again that she has not provided links for either of these claims so that we can evaluate the actual data.

The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018,  American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:

If this phenomenon has been seen in the US, the following story is not an example of it. Again, no actual reference to support this claim.

‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

Not linking to this story also makes it more difficult for readers to identify the problems with this study. Lisa Littman went specifically to sites known to host anti-trans people and specifically asked parents who didn’t believe in their children’s transition to participate in her study. This sample method is not ideal. Her conclusions have not been replicated in other studies. It sounds very reasonable to insist that you consider social contagion when you don’t consider that she’s specifically sought out anti-trans parents. She also doesn’t offer an alternate possibility, like that children who are different in the same way often find each other. Or that children with anti-trans parents may be open at school, meet other trans kids, and form a social support network before talking to their parents.

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is a term Littman made up that has not been validated by any other study and is NOT a recognized medical condition or term.

Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.

Her poorly researched paper that overreached in its conclusions did indeed create a backlash and had to be edited to meet the journal’s standards.

The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’

Trans youth suicide is a big problem. It may not require transition to prevent, but transition is one way to lower the risks. Other ways include creating a supportive atmosphere where the author of the world’s most popular children’s books isn’t calling her young readers sexual predators and delusional lesbians. Again another reference without a link or any critical thinking about the claims of the person quoted.

The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people.  The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.

She believes young trans men are only clever and insightful insofar as it concerns other mental health issues, not their own understanding of their gender. Why is Rowling willing to believe them on one and not the other? Presumably because she doesn’t think that people can actually be trans. She here conflates all mental illness with being trans and absolutely believes that actually feeling like the other gender is not required for wanting to transition. That her self-hatred would have been sufficient for her.

When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’

This feels, more than anything, a resentment of the fact that youth have more options available to them than she did. She seems to be dancing around the idea that she herself is a self-loathing non-binary person (not to claim that she actually is). And also that not identifying as a woman can only be evidence of living in a world of misogyny. She’s missing the very salient point that gender, because it is a social construct, is absolutely impacted by social assumptions about people of different genders.

As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.

Again stating that being trans is a mental illness. Again being sure to exclude trans women from the experience of womanhood with the term “female-bodied.”

I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.

Where are these study numbers coming from? I cannot find them. But I believe it also refers to the understanding of gender dysphoria in prepubescent children (not teens). The problem with *that* is mental health professionals tend to lump any gender nonconformity into gender dysphoria when they are dealing with children, which means a lot of LGBQ youth get labelled gender dysphoric rather than gay. In other words, many parents of boys who liked to wear dresses took their children to psychologists because they assumed something was wrong. There is no reason to assume that everyone with gender dysphoria has any interest in transitioning even just socially, much less through hormones and surgery. That is even more true of children, because children get brought to therapists by parents who assume certain behavior, like boys dressing in dresses or girls being tomboys, is somehow pathological, and not within the normal range of experiences. Most prepubescent children who are thought to have gender dysphoria grow up to be gay or just slightly outside typical gender presentation. Some do grow up to be trans. But again, this observation is of prepubescent children, not of teenagers.  So, as far as I can guess without a source, Rowling is referring to numbers that apply solely to prepubescent children and NOT to teens. My understanding is that the majority of teens who identify as trans are, in fact, trans.

I hate that she’s dismissive of the young trans people as simply “adorable.” I also hate this “I have a trans friend, so I can’t be transphobic” move. Again, she doesn’t recognize how many steps and how much time it actually does take to seek transition care in the UK. And again she thinks that trans women are men trying to sneak into women’s spaces to attack them.

We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.

There is a lot about our current era that has manifested misogyny in a really ugly way — and Twitter is among the worst places. She once again puts wholly different things in the same list: violence (punching) and educating. One of those is not a threat. She also here implies that trans activists are men telling women to sit down and shut up. Again refusing to acknowledge the identities of trans women.

I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much.  It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.

I don’t understand why it’s misogynistic to think that women don’t all have common experiences. There is a huge spectrum of what women’s lives look like and how their bodies behave. Not all women menstruate, not all women can get pregnant, not all women grow breasts, not all women are raped. The idea that women’s lives are all similar comes from an extraordinarily middle class and white conception of what it means to be a woman, something the feminist movement has a history of doing. This claim is classist, racist, transphobic, and homophobic.

Also, again and again, she uses the term “women” to solely reference *cis* women, excluding trans women.

She claims that trans women insist that there is no difference between trans women and cis women, when actually they just want to be recognized as women, a remarkably broad category of people with plenty of room for trans women, and they want even more to not be treated as predators and abusers.

But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.

Okay, so here she is saying that trans women are men wearing a costume, based on an idea in their man head, because they think being pink-brained and liking shoes makes them a woman. Apparently any kind of desire for femme things is… not progressive and based on a specifically male understanding of femininity. See, here’s the thing, because not all cis women menstruate or even have vulvas, it is useful to be specific when you’re addressing a particular concern, even before you consider including trans men in the equation. I’ve also personally never seen the word “menstruators,” only the phrase “people who menstruate” which again, not dehumanizing, it has the word “people” right there. There are real slurs that have been spat by violent men, some of which Rowling has a genuine grievance about being thrown at her on Twitter, but this ain’t it.

Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.

I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.

Yo, you are a bigot for not wanting women in your women spaces. No amount of domestic abuse and sexual assault makes it ok to deny other people their humanity.

I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

“My trauma justifies my bigotry. I refuse to recognize trans women as not men and I am afraid of men.”

If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.

“I don’t want trans women to be murdered, I just don’t want them to be treated as fully human. Look at how reasonable I am!”

I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.

You can just call them trans. Calling them “trans-identified” implies that they’ve just chosen to call themselves that. Here she lists many many reasons why trans women should be welcomed in women’s spaces, including, for example, her domestic violence charity that she is afraid of trans people benefiting from.

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. 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.

She wants trans women to be safe, just not from being misgendered and harassed by people like Rowling. “Natal girls and women”? There is literally a word for what you’re trying to describe, it exists already, just use it. Again, she outright states that trans women are delusional men, denying them their identity and humanity. I do not understand why people like Rowling believe that the lack of a gender certificate would stop a predator from coming into a bathroom. The thing is, these certificates have been issued for like a decade, and there hasn’t been some increase in bathroom attacks by trans women.

On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity.  I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.

Again, trans women are men who just say they’re women. She was triggered because she doesn’t believe trans women are women and thinks that they’re all predators. She thinks that trans women being allowed into changing rooms is a rape threat. She thinks her own mental health problems are best addressed by denying humanity to an entire class of people rather than, for example, therapy.

Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.

She was just innocently looking at the pictures of children (again, using children as her shield) not, you know, actively saying some transphobic stuff. “Paying the price” being people saying that she is a bigot, because… she is. Again she conflates a bunch of things that are very different: legitimate criticism (transphobic, TERF, deserving canceling) with gendered slurs and threats (cunt, bitch, punching, death). I think she’s genuinely upset that someone called her Voldemort, which is pretty funny.

It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”

Earlier, and below, she will state that there’s a huge number of people who agree with her, and that they’re in the majority, but somehow what she’s doing isn’t virtue signaling to that crowd, she cannot bask in her own afterglow. It is conformist to believe what she has elsewhere claimed to be a minority view. Confusing.

Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.

Huge numbers of cis women who don’t believe trans women are valid are afraid of being called bigots or having their bigotry exposed. I don’t support the harassment of these people, but I don’t know why anyone thinks that saying bigoted things will not cause some pushback.

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is.

No one is targeting her, they are responding to her actions and statements. She’s an extraordinarily famous person expressing extreme bigotry on a very large platform. Responding to that isn’t targeting any more than buying Harry Potter books was targeting. And here again this person, who supposedly is down with trans people, says that they are predators and trans women aren’t women. She’s literally targeting a class of people by calling them predators and denying them their identity but complaining that people are responding to that negatively. There are trans young gay kids, fragile trans teenagers, and trans women who are reliant on spaces without men. It’s just that she fails to see them as valid.

Here again she refers to some external source of a poll without citing it or allowing us to determine whether we think it’s valid. She also makes the claim that it’s only possible to support trans people if you’ve never experienced gender violence, even though trans women are subject to more risk for assault than cis women. I truly doubt that whatever poll she is referring to asked people if their beliefs about trans people were informed by their own personal assaults. But I can speak with complete confidence that being raped doesn’t make you hate trans people.

The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them. Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.

Here she again implies that all cis women are against trans people and that trans women aren’t women and trans men aren’t men. Unsurprisingly, non-binary people really aren’t part of her schema. Again and again she fails to acknowledge that *her* concerns are NOT the concerns of all women, cis or trans. It may be that none of her friends who don’t support trans rights “hates trans people” they just are afraid of them, think they’re delusional monsters, and don’t want them in any of their spaces. You know, in the same way that you don’t have to “hate black people” to want them to use their own water fountains and have their own schools. And again, the wild accusation that the term TERF, which literally describes her actual philosophy, is meant to silence people. It’s like thinking that calling a Christian a “person who believes in Christ” is somehow negative. But here again she’s basically saying it’s great that people use the term TERF because it makes there be more TERFs. She’s all over the place.

The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.

She is asking us to excuse her bigotry because of her experience of abuse. And while she claims not to forget complexity when it comes to trans people, she absolutely doesn’t want to treat them like fully realized humans. They are evil to her mind, as she’s expressed repeatedly in this piece and in her own fiction.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.

She has spent an entire article insinuating that trans women are abusers, rapists, and pedophiles, but she’s asking for empathy for her own plight. Lovely.

JK Rowling’s Anti-Trans Post: A Deep Dive
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Gay Marriage Nationwide: The Joy and the Sadness

gaymerica
It’s hard to believe it was nearly 7 years ago that Prop 8 passed in California.  I remember staring at the television, immobilized with disbelief and horror, my happiness at Obama’s election completely erased by my anger at the California voters for messing this up so badly.

What followed for me was an obsession.  An obsession with law, an obsession with the Prop 8 case, and an obsession with the intricacies of the Supreme Court.  That obsession led to my writing being published somewhere outside my blog for the first time, it led to me spending the night outside the Supreme Court to hear the Prop 8 arguments, and it led me to today — sitting home alone, watching SCOTUSblog live-blogging the legalization of marriage nationwide and sobbing so hard my Fitbit thinks I’m jogging.

I knew gay marriage across the US was coming, but I am still an emotional wreck, experiencing a full rainbow flag of conflicting emotions.

I am, of course, ecstatic and relieved.  It’s as though a huge weight has been lifted, but it’s also like that weight was holding the blood in from a lot of old wounds.  That night in 2008, that day almost exactly 2 years ago when California got marriage but the justices would not deliver it to the rest of the country, the passing of dozens of state constitutional amendments defining marriage as between a man and women, my mother’s best friend who died of AIDS twenty years ago, the struggle of so many of my friends in coming out or being dragged out in a hostile culture, and on, and on.

And I am exhausted because this was a drop in the bucket of injustices in the world and it took so much energy from so many people to manage this change.

There are other battles, other fronts, other wars waging. Marriage was a fight for inclusion in a conservative institution — for LGBT (although, let’s be real, it’s mostly G here) people to become more accepted by mainstream society and have access to institutions of that society.  Radicals are right to worry that we are buying into broken institutions with deep flaws, not just marriage, but the entire idea of a mainstream, conservative respectability.  I disagree with radicals that the way to do this is entirely from outside, we need outsiders AND insiders, but the worry is that if queers get acceptance they will no longer be interested in changing the problematic social institutions in the world — prison, gun violence, homelessness, climate change, the war on drugs, the war on terror, racism, sexism, and a host of other problems that exist in the world.  The worry is that the fight for marriage will have fully drained them of resources, and we’ve seen organizations lose funding while the focus was on marriage.

It’s like the flag at the SC State House, flying today during the funeral of Senator Reverend Clementa Pinckney.  Yes, it must come down. Yes, it’s horrifying that that is even under discussion.  Yes, it is a symbol of racism and hatred.  But removing the flag won’t fix the problem, it’s not enough.  That flag didn’t go to Dylann Roof’s house and point him the way to the Conservative Council of Citizens or Stormfront.  Taking down the flag is necessary but it is also a band-aid over a gaping wound we can’t heal with hiding flags, and we’re focusing on it because it’s the only thing politicians can get done to address the social issues brought up by this act of racial terrorism.

It takes obvious, in-your-face, undeniable injustice to get action, and too often the action is the easy action.  We aren’t dealing with racial inequality or access to guns or the reality that white men are our homegrown terrorists, we’re taking flags down. Gay marriage was the easy thing to fix, which is hard to believe considering how much time and money and energy and heartbreak went into the thing, but that’s true of that flag too.  And gay marriage matters, it matters so much, if for no other reason than it offers same-sex couples a place from which to fight for other issues, but Loving v Virginia didn’t end racism or even create full mainstream acceptance of interracial marriage.

And so today I cry.  I weep with joy and relief for a victory that was hard-fought and well-deserved.  I weep for the people who didn’t make it to today, for the millions who died in the AIDS crisis, and for those who simply were born too soon to see this justice. And I weep because there’s still so much to do, more than can ever be done in my lifetime, more than can ever be done by my exhausted hands. I weep for the future person who will be crying like I am because you and I didn’t make it to see justice done.

But I also celebrate because today is a good day, a day in which massive good was done in this world, and that’s not nothing.

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ETA: For similar commentary with a little bit of a different perspective and details, see Greta Christina’s post.

If you like what I’m doing, please consider supporting me at Patreon so that I can keep doing it.

Gay Marriage Nationwide: The Joy and the Sadness

DOMA ruled unconstitutional by CONSERVATIVE federal judge

A woman married to another woman owed almost $400,000 in estate taxes upon the death of her wife because DOMA prevents the federal recognition of her marriage, so she filed a case arguing that this was illegal discrimination.  This case was just reviewed in federal court by Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, a super conservative judge.

Shockingly, not only did he (and the court) rule DOMA unconstitutional, his opinion includes language that states that LGBT should be treated with heightened scrutiny under the Constitution.  This basically means that the court recognizes that LGBT are a historically marginalized group who deserves special consideration when having laws directed at them.

In this case, all four factors justify heightened scrutiny: A) homosexuals as a group have historically endured persecution and discrimination; B) homosexuality has no relation to aptitude or ability to contribute to society; C) homosexuals are a discernible group with non-obvious distinguishing characteristics, especially in the subset of those who enter same-sex marriages; and D) the class remains a politically weakened minority.

Not only is DOMA unconstitutional, but ALL attempts to discriminate against gay people have to pass heightened scrutiny — something that law has, somewhat shockingly, completely failed to establish.

The hope now is that SCOTUS will adopt the same reasoning.  They should because it is completely reasonable, but that doesn’t always mean anything.  If SCOTUS did accept this reasoning and adopt it, it would functionally mean that all discrimination on the basis of orientation would be illegal.

The opinion is here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/110431508/12-2335-447

This is a big deal, or at least could be. Fingers crossed.

DOMA ruled unconstitutional by CONSERVATIVE federal judge

Chick-fil-A Decides it’s OK to be Gay!

And I think that means I can decide it’s OK to eat Chick-fil-A!!!

http://www.sdgln.com/news/2012/09/18/chick-fil-agrees-end-anti-gay-donations-mandates-equal-treatment-gays#.UFlvlf8MRs8.facebook

After months of negotiations with Ald. Proco “Joe” Moreno over its anti-gay positions and donations, Chick-fil-A has agreed to cease donations from its non-profit charity to anti-gay organizations and issued a company-wide internal mandate calling for the equal treatment of all employees and customers.

Chick-fil-A Decides it’s OK to be Gay!

The difference between “atheism+” and humanism

I am an atheist.  I am also a humanist.  Being a humanist is actually far more important to my worldview than being an atheist is.  In fact, the reason I care about religion and atheism is because I am a humanist.  In my opinion, organized religion is responsible for many evils in the world, a lot of which come down to human nature and the nature of large organizations, but many of which are made far worse by the nature of religion itself.  I support gay rights, I am a feminist, I am against the drug war, I am for social support systems and changing the way the world treats the poor — all of these things I am because I live my life from a humanist perspective.  Imperfectly, no doubt, but that is where I am coming from.

And yet, if asked how I define myself, I say “atheist” rather than “humanist”.  Why would I choose to define myself as part of this newly christened “atheist+” movement rather than the “humanist” movement?

It’s a completely legitimate question — if you go look at the American Humanist Association, you’ll see a group that does almost everything I could want a movement to do (and I support the AHA gladly and whole-heartedly).  It’s just that it doesn’t do one thing that is really important to me: make it clear that I am an atheist.

I guess it could be a small thing for some people, but it’s not for me, because where I am from, being an atheist is not really OK.  People face serious discrimination, people in my local atheist groups fear for their jobs if they come out.  The emails from the local atheist billboard campaign were truly horrific.  And what many atheists face from their families, even families who aren’t extremely religious, it painful and can lead to lifelong rifts.

As a longtime participant in the gay rights movement, I have been taught that self-definition is incredibly important; it matters a great deal that you should be able to label yourself as gay or straight, male or female, somewhere in between, or to eschew labels altogether.  When those labels automatically mean you are going to be treated badly, it becomes an important political act to stand up and insist that you are not undeserving of equal treatment just because you don’t identify with a different label.  I am an atheist because I don’t believe in gods, but I call myself an atheist because being an atheist means I get treated like shit by some people and that is not OK.

The desire to hold on to “atheism” rather than use the term “humanism” isn’t from a fundamental difference of goals and beliefs, but from a difference of self-definition. I personally like “atheism+” because it’s more confrontational, embraces a minority position that is loathed by many, and it is more transparent about the belief that religion is one of the root causes of many social injustices.  My humanism is more than just secular, it is anti-religion.

Beyond that, the social justice issues that “atheism+” care about include issues specifically about atheists as a group.  We are committed to is the pursuit of equality for atheists, a public acknowledgement of our existence, and a political voice for the godless. It’s not that humanism doesn’t believe in equality for atheists, of course it does, but that’s not the focus.  “Atheism+” is not my favorite of titles, I’d have gone with Atheist Humanism, but I don’t think that humanism, secular humanism, and “atheism+” are the same thing. Huge overlaps? Yes, absolutely.  But so long as I’m going to be treated as a social pariah for being a non-believer, I feel it is important for me to not be afraid to be out of the closet and loud about that label.

There is a difference between a self-defined humanist doing something good for mankind and a self-defined atheist doing it, simply because of the massive amount of stigma associated with atheism.  Proving that atheists care about other people and making the world a better place is important.  I think that “atheism+” is a way to bring the philosophy of humanism more strongly to the fight for atheist equality, and vice versa.

Calling myself part of the atheist — +, humanist, or otherwise — movement is a meaningful political act, and one not worth dropping to join something incredibly similar, but different.

The difference between “atheism+” and humanism

Marriage Equality is an issue with no valid middle ground

This could also be titled “how to get unfriended on Facebook”.  Always beware of someone asking “genuine, non-rhetorical questions” they want answers to from the opposing side.  Sometimes they don’t like your answer.  My former FB friend posted the following, in reference to an article by Michael Rowe:

I truly hope this opinion from one man doesn’t reflect the consensus of those who oppose Chick-Fil-A. Is there no room for nuanced or civilized debate that doesn’t resort to character assassination?

Here’s just a sample of how the Chick-Fil-A supporters who showed up on Wednesday are labeled: “(they are) a pageant of banal, cheerful deep-fried American hate, unified in bigotry and detestation of a group of their fellow Americans who were different from them.”

It gets worse when describing Dan Cathy, the owner of Chick-Fil-A: “He’s actually making millions from it, and he’s done it cynically, and at the expense of other human beings, then sharing that blood money with others like him, whose mandate isn’t holiness, but hatred, violence, division, and ostracism.”

Now here’s a genuine, non-rhetorical question I’m hoping to get answered by those who oppose Chick-Fil-A. Do you believe it’s possible for someone to oppose same-sex marriage and not be a hateful bigot? Do you believe that all who oppose same-sex marriage follow a mandate of “hatred, violence, division, and ostracism” that trumps the dictates of Christian behavior?

I am not for redefining marriage, but I also have several gay friends who I love dearly and whose honor I would defend (physically if necessary) if I ever witnessed them being bullied or harassed because of their orientation or for any other reason. Is this love I feel for my friends automatically phony because I oppose same-sex marriage? Do I have deep hatred that’s even hidden from myself? I think not. Christ’s command to love is far too important for me to not take seriously as a dedicated Christian. God loves all his children unconditionally, and woe is any Christian who finds any reason not to love a person whom God loves.

Michael Rowe also makes a point to say that basically those who oppose same sex marriage are not practicing true Christianity. I don’t know if Rowe is a Christian himself, but biblically-based Christianity (Catholic or Protestant) has never supported the idea of same-sex marriage.

So Christians who actually believe in what is almost universally taught are labeled as bigots and phonies. Rowe has no authority to redefine beliefs systems about gender and sexuality and then declare them to be more Christian than what’s been traditionally the case.

Then let’s be clear. Anyone is free to disagree with, or even hate, Christianity if they feel so inclined. And as a lover of liberty I will fight to defend your legal right to smear Christianity six ways from Sunday. But if you think I am a bad Christian (or specifically bad Catholic), because I follow what my church teaches, you are simply wrong.

I know this country is deeply divided ideologically. But if we are to make any progress in bridging the divide it must start with a commitment to cast aside examples of false polarization. Between legalizing gay marriage and keeping it as the status quo is an entire spectrum of thoughtful and valuable opinion that doesn’t automatically involve degrees of ignorance, hatred, or bigotry.

But nuance doesn’t make for good sound bytes.

My answer that got me unfriended:

“Do you believe it’s possible for someone to oppose same-sex marriage and not be a hateful bigot?”

I do not believe it is possible for someone to oppose same-sex marriage and not be a bigot. The denial of rights is inherently hateful. Saying I am better than you is hateful. Saying you aren’t quite a fully deserving human, but a lower caste member deserving of second-class citizenship is hateful. Saying my religion tells me to do this so I don’t care what your religion says, I’m going to make you follow my religion’s rules is inherently hateful. Saying love is wrong is hateful.

“Do you believe that all who oppose same-sex marriage follow a mandate of “hatred, violence, division, and ostracism” that trumps the dictates of Christian behavior?”

As I have seen many Christians who endorse that sort of behavior, I’m not sure I can say that they’re going against their dictates. I do not think they are necessarily violent, but telling a group of people their love is worth less than yours is, again, inherently hateful, divisive, and ostracizing.

“Is this love I feel for my friends automatically phony because I oppose same-sex marriage?”

If a white man has a lot of black friends who he loves dearly but flips his shit when his daughter dates a black man and thinks interracial marriage should be illegal, is his “love for his friends” automatically phony. No. It’s just really fucked up.

To those of us who support marriage equality, what Chick-fil-A and their supporters look like are people who protested integration of schools and the civil rights acts and allowing black people at the lunch counter. And in addition to discriminating against them for who they are, you are punishing them for having the most wonderful thing that a person can have: love.

If your religion wants to be cruel, fine, but don’t enshrine it in law. If you’re mad at invective, just remember how heartbroken those of us who think of gay people as fully human and deserving of happiness are to see them treated so badly. It’s so hard to watch every day, and it’s so hard to watch people get so excited and mean about it, it’s so hard to hear the word faggot and dyke thrown with such invective at people who are fundamentally decent, it’s so hard to see children whose parents aren’t allowed to marry or jointly adopt the child they are raising, it’s so hard to see people deported because their partner is of the same-sex and therefore they cannot get citizenship through marriage, it’s hard to see people say that these wonderful people are destroying America. It’s really hard. And if you really have a heart and can look at these people and say that that’s OK, well, you must not think they’re really people.

So yeah, people called Dan Cathy a bigot — but hey, at least they aren’t calling him a cocksucking faggot who will destroy America just because he is in love with the wrong person.

Addendum to that answer for the blog:

“Between legalizing gay marriage and keeping it as the status quo is an entire spectrum of thoughtful and valuable opinion that doesn’t automatically involve degrees of ignorance, hatred, or bigotry.”

There is no middle ground on the question of whether gays should have equal rights under the law.  There may be a middle ground in the debate Christians have over how bad gay people are, but that’s a separate question.  I’m sorry to be so blunt, but how you justify your bigotry isn’t thoughtful or valuable to anyone but other bigots.

I’d also add that the gentleman in question is a *good* Catholic, and that’s his problem — sometimes being a good Christian makes you a bad person.  It’s a shame, because he’s not a bad person, but he’s wrong and being wrong on this issue causes harm.

Marriage Equality is an issue with no valid middle ground

Gay Marriage: Blankenhorn’s Conversion

It is human nature to love the story of a convert, but it is even better when the convert is someone who has been fighting against your cause for a long time.  David Blankenhorn was the key witness for the Prop 8 proponents (anti-marriage) and is generally thought to have made a bit of a shambles with the argument — mostly because there was no legitimate argument to be made.  He is now supporting gay marriage.

Blankenhorn’s primary argument up to the conversion had been that marriage is about having children and that same-sex marriage would undermine that purpose.  Despite his longtime support for so-called traditional marriage, he said the following in his testimony, in response to aggressive questioning:

I believe that adoption of same-sex marriage would be likely to improve the well-being of gay and lesbian households and their children.

We would be more American on the day we legalized gay marriage than the day before.

With quotes like these in his testimony it is perhaps unsurprising that the lead witness against Californian’s right to gay marriage is now identifying as a gay marriage supporter.  Blankenhorn’s position has always been more nuanced and humanist than the anti-gay arguments generally given against same-sex marriage and it is refreshing to see him turn that nuanced acumen to a different conclusion.  I happen to massively disagree with his conclusions as to the worth, goals, and historical understanding of marriage, but it is clear he thinks that human dignity and rights are an important part of saving the institution he cares about and the only way to do that is to stop making the defining feature of marriage the fact that it’s for straights only.

His essay in the New York Times is heartening and a reminder that being out and being vocal about your rights does matter and changes the world, even if it is just one person at a time.

I do believe, with growing numbers of Americans, that the time for denigrating or stigmatizing same-sex relationships is over. Whatever one’s definition of marriage, legally recognizing gay and lesbian couples and their children is a victory for basic fairness.

Gay Marriage: Blankenhorn’s Conversion

Women in Secularism: The Good, The Bad, The Awesome

Earlier this year I had to make a financial choice — I could either afford to go to DC for the Women in Secularism conference or I could afford to go to Vegas for The Amazing Meeting.  I say this not to denigrate TAM, but I could not have made a better decision.  The Women in Secularism conference is far and away the best atheist/skeptic conference that I’ve ever been to.  If you missed it, and you probably did, you need to not miss it again.

One of the things that I have trouble with in this movement is the lack of focus on issues that “matter”.  I came to the secular movement from the LGBT movement, fresh off of the Prop 8 loss, I discovered that out-and-proud atheists also had a movement, and I was eager to join a fight that I thought impacted everything, including LGBT and women’s issues.  So I went to the OCFA conference, to local skeptic and atheist meetups, I went to TAM, to Dragon*Con’s Skeptrack, to the SCA lobbying training, I wrote about it here, I wrote about it for secular.org, I gave speeches.  In short, I got involved.

Photo by Brian Engler

This month is my two year anniversary of being involved with this movement and, as someone who cares deeply about social justice, it has very often been a very difficult movement to be a part of.  For me the great appeal of secularism, the great tragedy of religion, and my own personal passion for this cause is all centered around the fact that religion is the source of many evils or used to justify those evils perpetrated against humanity.  As was said several times over the weekend, UFOs and Bigfoot aren’t that important to me, skepticism is much more interesting when applied to issues that impact people’s lives in serious ways.  Children, minorities, people of color, women, poor people, the disabled, the elderly, LGBT, and other marginalized groups would benefit so much from having the tragic consequences of religious bigotry removed from their lives.

So when people in charge of important organizations speak on a panel at TAM to say that social justice isn’t and shouldn’t be within the purview of skepticism, or people in my local atheist group leave because they think it is inappropriate that someone posted a link to a story about the Rally Against the War on Women because who cares about that feminist bullshit, or important people in the movement tell me not to bother submitting something to TAM if it has anything to do, even tangentially, with women’s issues, I start to doubt why I am even involved.

This conference was the antidote to that.  If you are someone in this movement who wants it to be about creating change in the world, this is the conference you should have been at.  If you are someone who thinks all that atheists and skeptics should do is talk about is why the bible is stupid and why UFOs aren’t real, then it really wasn’t for you.  I think that UFOs and critiquing the Bible and all of that are important discussions, but I think they are a reflection of an old, traditional, white male scientist way of thinking, and it’s not why I want to be involved.

I know why I am involved, and this conference was it.  In reality, it wasn’t the “Women in Secularism” conference, it was the “Secularism for Social Justice” conference.  I am proud to have been a part of it.

HIGHLIGHTS (all quotes paraphrased)

  • Typing 13000 words while liveblogging
  • I place as much value on anonymous comments made on blogs as I do on statements of eternal love made after a late night drinking at a bar. – Susan Jacoby
  • This conference is a good start, the first of its kind, but these panels BELONG in regular conferences. There are places for these issues at every conference we hold. Especially on science and education. Things have not changed enough, and women are the primary educators and caregivers. Secular organizations, if they want more women, are going to have to address this. The reason men aren’t here isn’t because the conference isn’t welcome, but because men in the movement don’t give a shit about this. – Susan Jacoby
  • Both religion and sexism are hard to give up. They’re ingrained and it’s tough to overcome, especially because it’s not conscious. Giving up religion feels freeing, but giving up sexist beliefs as a man isn’t necessarily freeing because it means examining, acknowledging, and confronting privilege. It feels like reentering a place where you’re made to feel guilty. But sexism impacts men too, and men don’t seem to realize it. Men get called girly as an insult and are driven away from being themselves if they’re not “man enough”. They don’t care about reproductive rights. As though they don’t have to deal with getting a girl preggo. – Jen McCreight
  • Sikivu and Ophelia disagreeing strongly, and talking about it rationally and pleasantly.
  • Recognition of the underground acknowledgement of the bad guys in the movement and how women are afraid to speak up about it because it will hurt them instead of the well-known man.
  • Panel arguments that were over details of implementation and how to fight, not over whether there was a problem in the first place
  • I have never found a trace of morality in my own religion – Wafa Sultan
  • The complete rejection of the Prime Directive and everyone agreeing that helping women in other cultures is a moral duty, not cultural imperialism.
  • It’s cultural imperialism to help these women? Tell the to the girl who had her clitoris cut off, tell that to the girls who had acid thrown on their faces for going to school, tell that to the women being stoned to death for the crime of being raped. Tell that to them and then FUCK YOU.  – Greta Christina
  • Having a military base in Saudi Arabia isn’t imperialism but opening a school is? If you can invade a country how can you not open schools? We need more secular schools, not more army bases! – Wafa Sultan
  • Wafa Motherfucking Sultan.  For many personal reasons, it was a very difficult and traumatic talk to sit through and I was nearly sobbing by the end of it, if I hadn’t been transcribing, I’m sure I would have been.  I hope that this talk goes up first, it needs to be seen.
  • A lot of people are talking about issues that apparently have nothing to do with secularism, should Catholic hospitals get public funding and refuse to give the morning after pill, should black boys be frisked without probable cause in NYC, we are skeptics, we’re good with numbers, we should care about it. These stories, we who are skeptical, we who believe that morality does not come down from on high, we who understand that it is our obligation as humans to first do no harm and make sure that others are not harmed, have to — HAVE TO — tell our stories. – Jamila Bey
  • We’re so foundational. If I can convince people to spend more time thinking about things, using critical thinking, it’ll fix a lot of these other problems I’m fighting for. Because our message is so basic and foundational, I think that it is a part of everything else. – Debbie Goddard

NITPICKS

  • Some of the talks were either too broad and not focused enough.  I say this with absolute love, because there was not woman who spoke that I didn’t want to hear more from, but many of the talks were so detail rich on such a broad topic that they were very difficult to follow.  Annie Laurie Gaylor was particularly guilty of this, I’m afraid I didn’t retain very much of what she talked about because it was basically just a list of names.  Her argument, which was that women have historically been freethinkers, could have been made in a way that wasn’t as hard to follow.  I just didn’t know any of the names or have any point of reference.  Susan Jacoby did a lot of the using names without explaining who they are thing as well.
  • Using cards to take questions was great, but I didn’t have access to any and would have had to interrupt the session or leave to get cards to be able to ask questions.  I think there needs to be a stack under each chair.  Especially since my neighbors all grabbed all of the cards immediately when they sat down so I had none!
  • The talks were too long, I’d rather have heard shorter talks from more people and some of them felt a little stretched out, I’m thinking of Bernice Sandler’s in particular, but just generally I think hour long talks are excessive when you’ve got so many other people who didn’t get to speak.  The panels were the perfect length.
  • Attendance.  I would have liked to see a lot more men and people of color in the audience.  I said it was the Social Justice in Secularism conference, and I think that’s how it should be advertised, because it wasn’t just about women and it wasn’t just for women and women’s issues are human rights issues.  So much of what we covered this year was new territory for these conferences, I hope that the conference continues and continues to expand into covering topics like prison reform and drug policy — things that impact women even though they aren’t traditionally thought of as “women’s issues” and were brought up several times over the weekend.
  • I admit that, because I work in media and I study media, I am unusually focused on this, but I wish that there had been more time spent on addressing the representation of women in the media.  And if you need someone to rant about that next year, I’m sure I’m only one of a whole lot of women in the movement who could go on and on for hours.
Readin’ a list; Photo by Brian Engler

And my final complaint, which is not a nitpick and not the fault of the conference, is the tragic performance of Edwina Rogers, who literally read a list from an old power point presentation over the course of 15 minutes and then left the conference entirely without taking any questions.  She had been there before the speech, available to be approached, so she wasn’t hiding entirely and I wouldn’t accuse her of that, she was just avoiding having to publicly answer questions.  And she clearly was not hired to be a charismatic public speaker and I never missed the overly enthusiastic rabble rousing of Sean Faircloth more.  This wasn’t just my response, I heard this from several people who didn’t know anything about her background.

I also had the opportunity to meet her and I was disappointed in that as well.  She just threw talking points at me about opening state chapters, and she and Woody, her handler from the SCA, both acted like they didn’t know who I was.  This despite the fact that I was recruited by the SCA to be one of the the first bloggers for their organization’s website, I spent hours and hours last year with Woody, led a panel discussion for the SCA last year, and have sent them much feedback and, admittedly unsolicited, advice about Edwina.  If they don’t know who I am, it’s insulting, and if they do know and they acted like they don’t, that’s even more insulting.

That said, Melody Hensley did an amazing job with this and deserves all of the credit in the world.  Conferences, especially first ones, are incredibly difficult to pull off.  This was so much better than I had hoped for, I have come away impressed by everyone involved.  Well, almost.

I will be adding a list of resources mentioned while I was taking notes over the weekend, for people who want to read more or watch videos that were recommended.

Women in Secularism: The Good, The Bad, The Awesome

My Unite Against the War on Women Coverage

I am everywhere today, it seems.

I am quoted in the front page story of our local independent paper, the Free Times.

The couple watches as women’s advocate Ashley F. Miller, a doctoral candidate in mass communications at the University of South Carolina, stands at a podium on the State House steps and declares, “This is not just a war on women: This is a war on dignity … 88 percent of the jobs in the recovery have gone to men. Our poverty rate is 25 percent higher than men’s poverty rate. In South Carolina, we’re still only making 76 cents on the dollar.”

America, Miller says, could turn into a place where women in some states could be arrested for having a miscarriage, while the killing of abortion doctors in others could be considered justifiable homicide. (Indeed, lawmakers in Utah and South Dakota, respectively, have introduced legislation to such effect.)

I was interviewed for Voices of Russia Radio about the rally and why it is important.  I have actually managed to sit and listen to the whole thing.  I will try to get a transcript of this for you, I thought I acquitted myself quite well.

Finally! You can watch me give my speech from the rally.  Here is a livestream video of the entire event, my speech starts at around 57 minutes.

Unitewomen.org

My Unite Against the War on Women Coverage

Why Reason Rally?

I have posted so much about the Reason Rally in the last few weeks, but I have one last thing I want to talk about: why I care so much about this event.

Many of my friends talk about this event as a rallying of the troops, a way to build morale and group identity among secular America.  Plus, it’s a big party with others like us!  This is important, absolutely, and I wouldn’t want to take anything away from those who are going for this reason, but it is not why I am going.  I am going to demand a voice.

I came to the atheist movement in a somewhat circuitous fashion.  I’ve been a non-believer since I was eight.  I found my teeth in my mother’s jewelry box and, having already been quite suspicious of the entire thing, concluded that there was no Tooth Fairy and, therefore, no Easter Bunny, no Santa Claus, no Jesus, and no God.

I didn’t become vocal about my atheism until after reading Hitchens’ “God is Not Great”, but even though I cared deeply about secularism, it was not my primary cause.  I was more interested in being an activist, and I didn’t see any opportunities for activism for secular causes.  Instead, I spent my time fighting for civil rights for LGBT, women, and minorities.  When I lived in California and campaigned against Prop 8, the gay marriage ban, I finally met atheists and skeptics who were fighting, actively, for political change.

Secularists need to join one another, not only to create community and acceptance, but to demand it.  I am incredibly lucky that, despite being from South Carolina and the Bible Belt, my family tolerates my non-belief — mostly in the hope that I’ll get over it, but still.  There are so many people I know, including those who are active locally, who cannot speak publically about their lack of belief for fear of losing their families and their jobs.  There are so many people I know who have been mistreated by the religious, so many children hurt and abused because the law gives special rights to religion, and many others who feel they can never make an impact politically unless they kowtow to the Christian Fundamentalist majority in our state and our country.

Change is started, yes, by coming out of the closet, and this is a national coming out day for the non-religious, but change also comes from demanding your voice be heard politically.  The public attitude towards women, minorities, and gay people has been changed by individuals demanding a voice AND by the movements demanding legislative change and support.

I could not be more excited to see Tim Minchin and Eddie Izzard, two of my favorite performers, but I am also excited to see Sean Faircloth and Herb Silverman, who have made significant legislative impacts, and to see two brave men who serve in Congress and are willing to risk the political stigma of associating with atheists.  I am excited that we are not just speaking to ourselves anymore, we are speaking to the world, to the country, to the government that should be serving us.

We are going to Washington not just for ourselves, but because we absolutely have to.  We have a voice and we refuse to be ignored any longer.

Why Reason Rally?