I don’t know what the hell JK Rowling is babbling about now.
I’ve heard straight men talk about trans women as though they’re fallen men to whom sympathy ought to be automatically extended, but there’s deeper stuff going on, too.
I asked a lefty straight man I know (this is irl) whether he was aware how many penised ‘lesbians’ are involved in the push to access female spaces. The subject made him incredibly uncomfortable. He simply didn’t want to hear it. I then asked him whether he knew what his straight male friends wanted from women in the bedroom, kink/sex wise. Horrified look: ‘no, of course I bloody don’t’
I said to him that if you put 100 straight and bi women of our age and average sexual experience in a room together, they could write an authoritative compendium on straight male kink in an afternoon, from their own direct experience or that of women they know. I said I presumed he knew that a cross-dressing fetish is one of the most common paraphilias in heterosexual men and that this has been in the psychological literature since Freud.
I cannot overstate how little he wanted to talk about this, let alone acknowledge that any of it was real and happening. I don’t know whether it was the idea that women actually talk about what they meet in the bedroom that touched a nerve, or whether he found the whole subject ick, or didn’t like the suggestion that he was naive or poorly informed, but the impression given was that I was depraved to say such things aloud, and that he’d much prefer a seemly silence.
straight men talk about trans women as though they’re fallen men
…what? Who? Does anyone actually think like that?
penised ‘lesbians’
? Is this how TERFs talk among themselves? So she’s talking to a guy who confesses that men don’t talk much among themselves about personal sexual preferences…news at 11.
Neanwhile, she claims that she and her buddies are better authorities on straight male kink
than men themselves, and pontificates on the cross-dressing fetish
, as if it’s relevant, and cites Freud. Is she confusing trans with cross-dressing? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Also, who is she delivering this lecture to?
Then she concludes by admitting that she’d been grossing out the person she was talking about, and that he just wanted her to shut up. Finally! Something I can understand and totally relate to!
The rest just informs me that she’s been talking with her cult/clique and has cultivated a whole bunch of weird-ass ingrown assumptions and biases.
Thank you, JK, for Harry Potter.
Now, be a sweetie and go away.
I had to read it a few times but now I get it. This is what she means:
“Trans women are horny men in dresses who have cross-dressing fetish and they are looking for sex in women’s spaces.”
Relevant context:
Sounds like the poor man just wanted to get out of a conversation with a raving bigot who wouldn’t stop with the uninformed non-sequiturs.
Hawai’i and even some muslim gulf kingdoms have had a “third gender’. So had/has lots of other cultures. This bunch are so out of touch.
I said I presumed he knew that a cross-dressing fetish is one of the most common paraphilias in heterosexual men and that this has been in the psychological literature since Freud.Is this true?
I’ve never heard this.
Apparently not.
Psychology Today says this isn’t true.
JK Rowling is lying.
If you have to lie, you don’t have anything worthwhile to say.
#3 lotharloo
It’s been my experience that one does not need to go to nearly so much trouble if one is simply genuine, nice, respects boundaries, and is a good listener.
I don’t believe any of this.
That leftist straight male is most likely the same as Harry Potter.
A fictional, imaginary character from the warped mind of JK Rowling, an author who writes stories.
She is making stuff up.
Wikipedia: “Cross-dressing is not synonymous with being transgender.”
People cross dress for a variety of reasons, many of them non-sexual. When I was in high school, girls were forbidden from wearing pants or shorts. It was skirts and dresses only.
Pants were a male thing.
These days both sexes wear pants routinely and no one notices or cares.
im beginning to think rowling is so adamant about this because she learned how the wizarding world really feels about this matter and it freaked her out so much.
all the students in hogwarts give each other magical sex changes all the time.
ron goes back and forth all the time because hes so unsure of himself.
the weasley twins have been experimenting with delightful and exotic combinations of genitalia for years.
harry and hermione are actually the same person.
Wait, is she calling the man she was harassing “left wing?” Is this JKR finally admitting that transmisia is not actually a left-wing position like she’s previously claimed?
I’m not entirely sure what she’s trying to communicate here either, but it somewhat reads like she’s trying to reduce trans people to simply having some sort of fetish. I don’t know why she mentions Freud. I don’t know if he actually discussed the topic or not, but it’s also entirely irrelevant since Freud was completely wrong about almost everything. I don’t know if her anecdote is a real story, but I can certainly imagine the total discomfort of the “lefty straight man” during this conversation, so it probably did happen.
It is beyond unfathomable to me that JK Rowling, who as best I understand was a poor, struggling single mom when she wrote the first Harry Potter book that eventually made her a multi-millionaire, has chosen this awful, ridiculous hill to die on. WTF have trans women ever done to her? So what if some trans women who haven’t had any body modifications identify as lesbians and seek lesbian partners? Does JK think they (successfully) lie to their prospective partners about their physiology, and subsequently attempt to rape them?
I’m cis, hetero and O-L-D, so I am the first to confess that I don’t know much about the social dynamics of courtship among trans and cis people, but I really have trouble imagining that a couple who are interested in each other wouldn’t have a conversation about their respective physicalities and preferences before embarking on a sexual relationship. As long as full disclosure and enthusiastic consent is involved, what exactly is the problem with trans women who haven’t had surgery “accessing female spaces?”
I just do not get it.
bigkitty@11: Best I can tell, she’s simply addicted to the praise she gets from bigots whenever she starts spouting off this nonsense. Rowling is not a very worldly person- she was actually shocked a few years ago when someone pointed out that the Death Eaters were a Nazi parallel. Any yet she’s had people telling her she’s a genius and just absolutely amazing and every thought she ever has is wonderful and completely original for over two decades now, which has left her feeling that she knows everything about everything. So she’s been seeking out the people who keep praising her and keeps saying stuff that they like so they keep praising her.
Okay, thanks to other comments I think I’ve got what she tries to say here. (Trans women are actually cross dressing guys preying on women – we’ve all heard that before…)
What I’m now asking myself is: Harry Potter was certainly not the best written children’s literature I ever read, but compared to this mess, did she have a ghost writer?
I’m not sure I’d go even that far.
I get that a lot of people have fond associations with the series, from reading it as kids or whatever, and I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum.
But objectively…the books are kind of awful, on just about every dimension, including the literary and the political.
@ ^ mordred : Ithink she went waaaay downhill afetr writing the Harry Potter booksand getting hooked on transphobia.
The books seemed a lot more tolerant and better aside from some real What the..?! moments like the whole “Lets mock Hermione for wanting to stop literal slavery of sentient equal to human creatures – house elves delberatey and implausibly making Hermione seem dumb for actually caring about injustioce and everyoen -even the suppsoed Hero Harry be like shrug slavery, yeah, meh… She even had scenes where her “Scooby Gang” equivalent were meeting in the girls dunnies and offering to have a feeeemale ghost share its toilet with Harry for eternity (Moaning Myrtle) and there was no issue and doing that was fine frex.
See : https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Moaning_Myrtle%27s_Bathroom
Then she got all transphobic reichwing and , yikes and yeesh did she ever gio bad -or expose her bad side? – after that.
@11: There are rumors that she may, in fact, be transgender. So it may be self loathing.
Tried finding that tweet but I can’t; I wanted to post my “Godzilla Had a Stroke Trying to Read This and Fucking Died” reaction to it. Because it would fit perfectly.
The existence of this does explain why someone was bringing up Transformers Kiss Players on BlueSky last night…
At this point I am feeling very mildly curious about what’s going on in this person’s head.
I mean, she’s famous, well-regarded at least in the fantasy lit circles, and very very rich (years ago she was shopping for castles in Scotland! )
So why keep hammering on this subject? What’s her interest in it, why is it preying on her alleged mind so much? Is she so bored she has nothing better to do, like those rich people we often hear about? All the time in the world and not enough brains to make use of it?
I don’t know, sometimes it seems like these “famous people” feel the need to melt down in a very public manner. Go figure.
@15
Aside from the issues with house elf slavery, the books can’t make up their mind about whether love is more important than bloodlines. I wrote about this here, where I also compared it to the moral incoherence of the Torah:
https://transfem.social/notes/9u9s7sv4xlr116cc
mordred @13: No evidence for a ghostwriter, but she certainly had editors. And even then you can still see progression in how there was less and less editorial control over the books starting with the fourth one.
@183231bcb:
That’s actually an excellent point, that I don’t think I’ve seen made before.
There are a lot of pretty fundamental flaws in those books. IIRC, the major one Shaun identifies is that Rowling is fundamentally small-c conservative, in a kind of lazy, unexamined, middle class “things are fine, nothing should change that much” way. And this leads directly to the extremely unsatisfying conclusion.
Because it’s not just magic bigots and house elf slavery that’s wrong, it’s everything. The “wizarding world” is chock-full of morally corrupt and ineffectual institutions, which (much like [neo]liberal institutions in our own world) have been directly responsible for allowing, if not actively perpetuating, at least a hundred years of pointless misery and evil. It all needs a radical shake up. Just the kind of thing a seven-book heroic adventure arc might be able to accomplish…
But it doesn’t. Because Rowling is blind to the idea that anything can or should actually fundamentally change. There are no systemic problems in the Rowling’s world, just a few “bad apples”. Once the big bad is gone, the “happy ending” is where the heroes growing up to join the same corrupt conservative institutions which caused the whole mess to begin with…
Masochism is a common paraphilia among women. Therefore, women should be prohibited from strenuous exercise in public spaces because they might be getting off on it.
Why are conservatives always so worried about what turns people on? The appropriateness of behavior depends primarily on its effect, not its intent. Corrective rape isn’t nobler than rape motivated by horniness. Parents don’t have less right to breastfeed in public if they’re exhibitionists. Child molesters don’t get cookies for planning to marry their victims (unless they’re Republican politicians in the Deep South.)
Also, just as a practical matter, it’s usually kind of obvious if you’ve got a dick and get turned on while wearing a skirt. Most women’s clothing is not designed to conceal an erection. Becoming aroused in a women’s space can easily lead to embarrassment, ridicule, verbal/physical assault or arrest, which is a pretty effective boner-killer for most people.
And now I have to go self-flagellate because I wrote “appropriateness” instead of “propriety.”
JK Rowling is flat out lying here.
A cross dressing fetish isn’t even in the top five paraphilias.
If you have to lie a lot to support your claim, your claim isn’t correct.
It’s a delusion or…phobia.
Who is it here that is suffering from a psychological problem now?
Maybe Rowling should look up Transphobia.
In fact he practically begged me to finish my latte order and stop blocking the Starbucks drive-through.
@raven #23,
Well, that’s partly because pedophilia, voyeurism and exhibitionism are the paraphilias (along with bioastophilia) most likely to get you in trouble with the law. People are more likely to seek clinical treatment for those conditions because of a court order, or because they fear the social and legal consequences.
That said, this study with a non-clinical sample found voyeurism, fetishism, frotteurism, sadism, masochism, and biastophilia to be more prevalent in men than transvestic fetishism. Transvestic fetishism was also the only paraphilia which showed no difference in prevalence between men and women, so I suppose Rowling should also be calling trans men and cis women perverts if they wear trousers.
(On which subject, it seems like the definition of “transvestic fetishism” is absurdly culture-dependent. Are Afghani women transvestites if they don’t want to wear veils?)
…which last point I see @raven already made in #7.
I think that Rowling was really traumatized by the Twitter pile-on. She naively thought that, because it’d been all love and kisses for her on the internet before, she could post opinions that she knew to be controversial without criticism.
I’ve noticed that after the huge immediate response, she’s become very, very angry. No more “Trans people, live your best lives, I love you! I just have a few concerns.” Now, she has to post an angry and (what she thinks is) cutting reply to every message. She has to seek out obscure posts that have 5 views by obscure people and repost them and angrily try to destroy them.
And that makes her suck up the more crazy and angry TERF theories more and more. Her entire last book under her pen name was a tedious collection of posts written by her characters, detailing the “canceling” of one of them.
Contrapoints was right, Rowling is in what pilots call a “graveyard spiral” of obsession.
Methinks Freud would have fun navigating the rabbit warren of her mind.
I guess the K in JK stands for Karen. I’m sure someone else has made that connection.
Why are there so many pushy middle-aged women trying to invade trans spaces?
I’ve known two or three trans-women in my time. One was bi and the other two were straight(into guys). Transphobes seem convinced that transwomen undergo hormone therapy and gender affirming care in an effort to spy on cis women whilst they’re on the dunny.
[gijoel, Karen is female-coded]
@gijoel #29,
I’m a nonbinary trans lesbian, but if my gender presentation was chosen to maximize my prospects with women, I would never have transitioned in the first place. The dating pool’s way bigger for a nominal straight guy, and it’s easier for a lazy person to stay fit when you’re running on testosterone instead of estrogen. I actually haven’t dated anyone since my transition, which is fine; I don’t crave a partner’s validation nearly as much now that I’m more comfortable with myself.
The ability to spy on other women in the bathroom…doesn’t really come into it. I’m usually more concerned that someone will spy on me and kick the stall door down if they see I’m standing up to pee. Hasn’t happened so far, though, and I have had some nice conversations at the sink about hair care and such.
Rowling is playing the same “those dirty $SLURS is comin’ fer our wimminz!” card that’s been in circulation since…I don’t even know how long. It’s gross that she does it and grosser that it works :<
That said, having a genital preference is not transmisogyny, and I would feel very betrayed if someone wanted to date me and wasn’t up front about not having had bottom surgery. It’s nothing personal, but it’s also nothing negotiable.
@31
I don’t blame you. I’ve read enough stories about bathroom police harassing cis and transwomen alike. I wish people like Rowling would spend just a minute and try to see this issue from another perspective. But that could entail realizing they were wrong, and some people would rather die than admit that.
Even as a cis male who goes to male bathrooms, I might actually have to worry about this, too, given how readily the nutbars will question the “real” gender of cis people they don’t like.
@Marissa van Eck #32,
“Up front” like telling you unprompted, or “up front” like being truthful when asked? Not a gotcha, just curious about people’s expectations.
I certainly don’t think that anyone’s required to date me if they don’t like what’s in my pants, and arguing over whether they should like what’s in my pants sounds like an exhausting and unpleasant experience for both of us.
@35/Prax
Up front. When someone is asking me to go from friends to something more than friends, I think it’s only fair to let me know, if only to prevent unnecessary heartbreak on their part. It’s academic since I’ve been taken for 12+ years and am happily monogamous, but this is a hard requirement for me.
@Marissa van Eck #36,
That’s reasonable. I don’t try to pass and am an open book, so anyone would know I’m trans 5 minutes into the conversation. I’m happy to provide anatomical details afterwards if asked, but I don’t think I’d volunteer them unprompted; “LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY JUNK” seems like a conversational turn that not everyone would welcome.
Trans woman here. There is a now-widely-discredited theory by Ray Blanchard that trans women largely were just suffering from a paraphilia which he named “Autogynephilia” – the arousal one feels from imagining oneself as a woman having intercourse with a man. It’s pretty nonsensical. If you’re a trans woman and you like men, then of course imagining yourself in your correct gender role with the partners of your choice is going to be arousing. Anyway, this idea has caught on in a huge way among the British TERFs/GC/Transphobe community, whatever you want to call them. Overall they dehumanize trans woman by dismissing us as “AGP perverts” and/or sexual predators lying in wait for helpless women in the loo (contradictions be damned). It almost makes the unbridled hate from American transphobes feel refreshingly honest. They don’t try to cloak it in faux arguments about the psychology of gender or women’s rights: they say God hates us and we need to be exterminated. Simplifies the argument nicely.
Oh, also JKR has frequently referred to trans women as “penised” or, charmingly, “bepenised” despite the fact that a) many of us are not and b) thanks to her political allies, it’s all but impossible to get bottom surgery in England. Nice Cath-22 there.
@Liam Yore #38,
Clearly Aretha Franklin was a filthy autogynephile. Probably paid off by Big Trans.
[related]
In Charlie’s Blog (Scottish SF author): https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/07/the-obligatory-political-threa.html#comment-2193614
Later on: