The J.K. Rowling saga has been going on for quite a while now, since last year if memory serves. Just this past week however, Ms. Rowling appears to have unseated several silly internet meme trends and other media red herrings to take the top-spot in my Facebook and Twitter feed.
Rowling has come under fire - and rightly so - for not just supporting TERFs via her Twitter account, but likewise, regurgitating patently ignorant TERF nonsense - attacking the validity of transgender people, and also their acceptance as women.
Modern society appears to run on social media nowadays. Everyone's on sites like Twitter and Facebook and a plethora of other lesser-known ones. Everyone's got something to say - and everyone expects to have the right to be allowed to say it - and to be taken as seriously as the next person chipping in their own two-cent's worth.
There's a tendency however, for a perception to develop, that everyone's opinion is of equal value or of equal weight. That seems as good a place as any to begin, so let's start there.
According to some people, the opinion of a street-sweeper for example should be viewed as equal to an opinion of a college professor. This might hold true if the opinion is about what flavor of milkshake they like best - or which car, or about how particular laws or taxes affect them personally.
When talking about street-sweeping for example, it's doubtful that the college professor would know much about the actual job. The street-sweeper would know all about the fine-points - the little tricks of the trade, the knowledge acquired through years of performing the various tasks involved in doing the work. Likewise, the street-sweeper might be very well read on the subject of chemistry, while the college professor might, for example, have been teaching that specific subject for over 20 years and have acquired his doctorate in the subject.
Of what practical value would it be for the street-sweeper to argue against the college professor on the subject of chemistry? He might know just enough about chemistry in the practical sense to have lost his eyebrows once when he accidentally put too much drain acid into a mixture, and no more!
Other than generally speaking, neither's opinion about the work or field of the other would be of much value, would it? They might only debate on how each has affected them on a personal level - how professor Jenkins has personally experienced sweeping - perhaps as a youth while he worked in a shop and "handled a broom a little" wouldn't qualify him to argue with a career janitor when it comes to the technique or fine-points of the job performed by Mr. Alberts who's been in the job for thirty years of his adult life, and who likely knows a lot more about the job of sweeping than a professor of chemistry.
The key term here is 'personal experience' - and, when it comes to opinions being viewed as being of equal worth, false equivalence is a slippery slope.
A glaring example of this exists in the form of recent news covering Dr. Fauci's expert opinion of COVID-19 and the handling of epidemics being rubbished by Donald J. Trump. Fauci is a defacto expert in the subject with a life-long career built in the field - while Trump has zero qualifications in that (nor likely in any other) field, and whose major contribution to Human society has been nothing more than to demonstrate the effects of populism, greed, corruption, shoddy ethics, to increase hate-crime, worsen racial relations, and to demonstrate the practical application of stochastic terrorism.
Now I'm not suggesting that Mr. Trump doesn't have a right to hold an opinion, or even to mutter it under his breath - or to express it privately - but when the President of the United States - a man who obviously doesn't know much about anything let alone specialist viruses - publicly refers to the most qualified American expert in the field as essentially an idiot - and does so as president, the rest of us should sit up and take notice.
When an expert on any particular subject provides a qualified opinion about the topic, and a layman or non-expert disagrees with that expert - and their opinions are held at equal value or worth by the broad public, this becomes a clear example of false equivalence.
Unfortunately, most of Trump's brain-dead followers completely agree with everything he says, no matter how crazy, inaccurate or completely insane - which is probably why they're so willing to let him sacrifice their lives to keep the billionaire class in gravy.
Authors are not often also politicians, that's true - and they don't have authority or power like politicians do - but they too have platforms and social-media following of their own... and they do have some influence. J.K. Rowling needs no introduction, does she? After all, her books have gone from print to screen and they have helped shape a whole generation of people. Ironically enough though, the literary heroine who wrote her characters and their struggles - and even promoted them and their ethnicity and sexual orientation as being open to interpretation - hasn't extended the same generosity toward transgender folk.
Instead, she's aligned herself with TERF's - and in so doing alienated a broad slice of her fan base. in fact, there's even been a flurry of statements from actors who'd starred in her Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts movies to take her on, on her insistence that 'transwomen aren't women' .
For those who still don't know, TERF is an acronym for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, and like all TERFs Rowling expresses the ignorant opinion that transwomen being validated and treated like women somehow insults or invalidates cisgender women and devalues feminism and women's dignity.
TERFs typically apply the same patriarchal misogynistic arguments previously applied to women by proponents of male patriarchy against feminists, against transgender women - and without even seeing the truth of that fact. Many even employ the term "women who menstruate" to differentiate between cisgender and transgender women - apparently without realizing that along with transwomen, they're also excluding cisgender women who are older and have stopped menstruating, have various other health conditions or who've had hysterectomies. But then, TERF's aren't widely known for being very intelligent.
A few days ago, on her official website Rowling posted a response to criticism of her transphobia, in which she attempted to cast herself as the victim of misogynists, and in which she literally defended her TERF associates in their attack on transgender women in particular.
Victim blaming? She's playing the victim here? Seriously?
"Rowling is not backing down, however, as today she published lengthy, 3,600-word essay defending her stance."
You can view an analysis of it here, but here's just a snippet to put her horrid willfully ignorant schoolyard bully attitude under the spotlight:
"She said people like her often get labeled “TERF” (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist), a term she claimed is used “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!’” She continued, “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).”"
In so doing, all she's done is to double-down on and celebrate her ignorance-based hatred and bullying of transgender people in general, and of transwomen in particular.
She clearly hasn't bothered to familiarize herself with the masses of freely available educational and informative material available which would alleviate her ignorance around the subject of transgender, transwomen or what we as transwomen feel or have to endure in the face of attacks by her TERF associates just to live.
This person calls herself a 'feminist'? Not hardly!
Feminists don't degrade other women. And I'll say it unequivocally, transwomen are women!
"She's entitled to her opinions." I've been told when sharing articles about the matter, typically by slavering fans who refuse to acknowledge the validity if even an iota of criticism of their literary idol.
Typically, the ones I've seen doing so in regular online social media threads have no idea what she - or trans advocates are even talking about - and they simply blindly leap to her defense... and jump on the transphobic bandwagon by attacking transgender people as a whole because they're also completely clueless about transgender issues anyway.
Sure - they're exactly right - at least in the sense that Rowling is entitled to her own opinion. However, when someone assumes celebrity status, their opinions, when expressed publicly and insistently - become far more influential than an opinion expressed by a non-celebrity. And as one's social position rises, so too does one's reach increase.
For example, you - as Joe Soap, janitor - are also entitled to your opinions - but I doubt yours would carry as much weight or travel as far as J.K. Rowling's... which is exactly the point.
Do you have any idea how many transwomen have been brutally assaulted and killed, and even tortured, just because they were trans? This year alone?
According to the Human Rights Campaign, 12 were killed in the USA alone, up to May 27. 2019's figure stands at 26 for the same country. Transrespect.org lists 30 for the same period. Globally, they place the figure at 331 between 1 October 2018 and 30 September 2019 alone.
I see articles in my news feed from South America and the USA virtually every day about transwomen being brutalized, tortured and murdered - some mutilated and burned to death, simply because they were transwomen - and it's not lost on me that every one of their tormentors would agree wholeheartedly with everything said by TERFs. It's also not lost on me that many of their attackers simply walk free because either the laws of that country - or those enforcing it - agree with the culprits.
How many of the criminals who committed these heinous acts share exactly the sentiments of the people using their social positions as politicians, clergy - and let's expand that field to include TERF-supporting authors - to make their messages of hatred heard?
If you've still never heard of something called stochastic terrorism, google it.
Recently in Hungary, the far-right government created a law that will now tie an individual’s gender to the person’s sex and chromosomes at birth, restricting later modifications on official documents. What this means for transgender Hungarians is that they will be unable to follow any legal process to change their names or gender markers or descriptions on official documents. This, in a member country of the European Union and the United Nations - both organizations which allegedly enshrine human rights values and ostensibly protect the human rights of transgender people.
Far-reaching and short-sighted (and downright spiteful) decisions such as the Hungarian one are made based exclusively upon a combination of religious-fueled bigotry, ignorance-driven fear, and outright malice towards people hated for these very reasons.
Where does this misinformation - the lies and outright fallacies influencing politicians and other officials - come from?
It is the historic struggle for recognition and equality and human rights of gay and lesbian people which provides the answer. For many years run the gambit of false "studies" and pseudo-scientific "expert witnesses" against them - chiefly of which was a certain Paul Cameron, a disgraced and discredited former psychologist who was tossed out on his ear in 1983 by the American Psychological Association for producing his many unethical and patently fraudulent "studies" created as propaganda pieces to "prove" how harmful it was to be gay.
Cameron's fake "studies" and fraudulent claims and "research" have nevertheless been spread around like a malignant cancer, via sympathetic religious organizations, media and homophobic activists. Here we see in this example, a demonstration of how the perversion of academia - how academics are perceived as expertise - has been used to aid a bigoted group in undermining the human rights and legal equality of an entire section of not just one country's population, but of the entire world.
Again, when it comes to opinion - when a plumber expresses an opinion about hating gays or transgender people, it's not an opinion equal to that of an expert in that particular field - which is precisely why Mr. Cameron did what he did - he wanted to use his qualification - that is, as a Doctor in the field of psychology - as a weapon to break down any public credibility of the people he hated.
For many years, his material has been used to achieve exactly that. Even now I frequently encounter statements by people which indicate to me that their opinions of LGBT people have been influenced and formed by the dissemination of Cameron's phony "research". There are still numerous organizations which still rely on Cameron's rubbish because it suits their views to do so. (Here we refer to what's called 'confirmation bias' - it fitted with their prejudice and it comes from an alleged academic, so it must be right.)
It's not hard to see the similarities between these concepts in principle, between what people like Cameron did - and in what kind of harmful influence other kinds of perceived "experts" have on affairs which affect transgender people and our quest to be allowed to just be treated as equal to everyone else.
Celebrities are of course famous. People are interested in what they have to say about - well, anything - but they shouldn't be taken up as experts on whatever subject they speak on, just because they're celebrities!
As an author, J.K. Rowling has found what most authors crave - success, both in her writing achievements and financially. As an author, I understand how difficult and rare it is to have that land in one's lap! It would be pretty much like opening a cupboard door and finding a unicorn in there looking back at you, wagging its little tail!
With great power... comes great responsibility...
But with that newfound success come celebrity, media attention and a public following - and suddenly everything that person says or does becomes public property. Suddenly everyone is interested to know what they say, think, feel or do in life. Suddenly, the writer becomes an idol, a heroine to hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of fans... and every little thing they say on social media travels around the world in an instant.
In the sense of previous examples of transphobic TERF personalities and poster-girls, Julie Bindel, then a journalist in the UK - herself a lesbian incidentally - who made the headlines frequently in the 2000's as a poster-girl for the newly-hatched TERF movement (then called "radical feminism") writing material which was little more than overt transphobic rants not worth the paper it was printed on. Judging by this 2019 article, I can see that not much has changed.
Clearly, even the G,L and B portions of the community - and other new mystery letters that keep popping out of thin air - aren't above being transphobic towards the T portion. Hell, I've even encountered a few transphobic transgender people in my travels - the idiots that vocally support transphobic politicians just as a for-instance, and nothing's made me scratch my head harder than that, let me tell you!
At the time, Bindel's criticism of transwomen in particular gave rise to precisely the same sort of nasty sympathetic remarks from common or garden everyday TERFS in the social media of the day, typically white middle-aged housewife types (these days referred to as 'Karens') who coincidentally either shared her view - or who were inspired to do so by her powers of persuasion.
Some people are perpetually on the lookout for particular viewpoints that suit their particular bias, right? What these celebrities are doing is providing it for them, on a platter. Pushing a narrative deliberately to gain the support of your audience simply because it's what you think they want to hear, is called populism.
TERFs today still push the same hostile transphobic "transwomen are not women" trope, espousing the false and unscientific notion that transwomen are by nature mentally ill, and that the societal acceptance of transwomen as women is an attack on women and feminism.
Similarly, they display a bristling intolerance for any efforts by gender activists and academic experts to broaden, expand or grow the scope of societal understanding of the concepts of gender or sexual orientation or personal identity, based upon an equally clear ignorance of, lack of understanding - or inability to understand the subject. They appear to cling rigidly to the almost Victorian views of gender roles and "morality" as a drowning man clings to anything which floats nearby!
Considering how patriarchal those views typically are, and invariably misogynistic, I find it supremely ironic!
Of course, as we said earlier, everyone is entitled to their opinion, even if they are wrong - even up to and including people like Julie Bindel and J.K. Rowling - and even if they have NO relevant qualifications or experience to present their opinions as if they are fact - but that entitlement ends where their personal opinion is disseminated far and wide in public - deliberately - and in order to influence others to share their same invalid, ignorant hateful views.
Ms. Rowling - as a celebrity author with a significant following - has publicly thrown her name and weight behind a movement built on the hate - and in inciting hate speech and hate crime against transwomen in particular, one which has made it its' business to wage war on and destroy transwomen. In fact, she's become something of a poster-girl for TERFs, which again, is exactly the point which everyone criticizing Rowling for the harm she's already done is trying to make - and for the harm she may still potentially cause.
As an influential writer and public figure, Rowling's publicly expressed opinion has consequences - and as a transphobe, she's inciting hate against transwomen. By supporting TERFs and their ideology, she's aligned herself with them - actively working to invalidate transwomen as women, and helping to push these twisted, hateful ideas into society via her platform.
As a transwoman, and as an author, I will remember J.K. Rowling for this:
When the time came for her to stand up and do something right and to pick a side, she stood up and took the side of the oppressors: the transphobic TERF scumbags peddling exclusion and intolerance for transwomen and to increase their suffering at all levels.
If you still support her, knowing this, so do you.
"Blachart" by Christina Engela, narrated by Nigel Peever, now available on Audible.
All Mykl d’Angelo had to do to redeem the other shipwrecks in his life – his lost career in the Imperial Space Fleet and a chance at a relationship with the girl of his dreams - is lead a recon team on a suicide mission behind enemy lines, brave the perils of Meradinis, risking danger and death.
No Problem.
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All Mykl d’Angelo had to do to redeem the other shipwrecks in his life – his lost career in the Imperial Space Fleet and a chance at a relationship with the girl of his dreams - is lead a recon team on a suicide mission behind enemy lines, brave the perils of Meradinis, risking danger and death.
No Problem.
Get it now on Audible.
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If you would like to know more about Christina Engela and her writing, please feel free to browse her website.
If you’d like to send Christina Engela a question about her life as a writer or transactivist, please send an email to christinaengela@gmail.com or use the Contact form.
All material copyright © Christina Engela, 2020.
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