MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Rowling was right all along! Even critics admit suspicion of puberty blockers, surgery on kids and men in women’s sport is NOT transphobia. Thank you, JK – for giving us the courage to speak up
JK Rowling is explaining herself. It’s time her detractors listen.
Her message, as she says in the fourth episode of ‘The Witch Trials of JK Rowling’ podcast: Transgender identity is real. She is sympathetic.
You’d think this would generate headlines — JK Rowling, public enemy number one of the trans community, countering her critics. But no.
Rowling offers her nuanced thoughts in this podcast, informed by voluminous reading and research and her own past as well: an abused wife, pregnant and in fear for her life, her baby, and her first Potter manuscript, which she says was held hostage by her then-husband.
As a tortured teenager who questioned her own femininity and sexuality. As a woman worried for other women who feel they are being systematically marginalized, threatened, and silenced, but who cannot afford — literally, financially — to speak up.
‘Did I want to join the public conversation?’ she asks. ‘Yes… because I was watching women being shut down. And it was as though there was no woman perfect enough to say her piece.’
She knew well what would happen.
‘There were people close to me,’ she says, ‘who were BEGGING me not to do it . . . they’d watched what had happened to other public figures and there was certainly a feeling of, ‘This is not a wise thing to do; don’t do it.’
We’ve never heard Rowling reveal so much of herself and her thought processes, and it’s fascinating. What she has to say can’t be boiled down to a tweet or a like on Instagram, and hallelujah — someone in the public square courageously demanding conversation and debate. As grown-ups should.
Apparently, the Potter books are no longer regarded as proof, so it must be said: Rowling possesses a sharp, unique, provocative mind. She is all too self-aware. She deserves much more than being treated as a caricature in much of mainstream and social media. Yet even this podcast, a valuable addition to what should be respectful and informed debate, has been dismissed in the usual outlets.
You’d think this would generate headlines — JK Rowling, public enemy number one of the trans community, countering her critics. But no.
Her message, as she says in the fourth episode of ‘The Witch Trials of JK Rowling’ podcast: Transgender identity is real. She is sympathetic.
‘Exhausting,’ said Monica Hesse in the Washington Post. Hesse couldn’t point to any one thing Rowling has ever said that’s transphobic, but the author, Hesse wrote, nonetheless has ‘a fuzzy aura of harmful rhetoric.’
New York magazine, Vulture: ‘Can Anyone Trust the Witch Trials of JK Rowling?’ Podcast critic Nicholas Quah, after listening to just the first two episodes, decried the concept of actually letting Rowling explain herself: ‘That Rowling’s perspective so utterly dominates the podcast’s opening stages is incredibly frustrating,’ Quah writes.
Wow. The whole point of this podcast is to examine how the most beloved author of our era has become the subject — I doubt Rowling would ever use the word ‘victim’ — of an international witch hunt, online and off.
Would Quah have written the same sentence about a complicated, misunderstood man? Displayed — ostensibly anathema to a critic — an already closed mind?
Episode four delves into the surging rates of tweens and teens transitioning — a sudden surge in biological girls identifying as boys especially — and a medical community all too willing to put these children on puberty blockers or remove breasts or alter genitalia without comprehensive psychological evaluations.
Teenagers who later decide to de-transition face very real consequences: Biological girls face infertility. Biological boys may never experience an orgasm. But to investigate social contagion, the valorization some parents take in having a trans child, the phenomenon of detransitioning — the numbers, the reasons why, the ages at which this is most common — is to be transphobic.
Frankly, that’s insane. Rowling’s not alone here, and there’s no doubt her outspokenness is encouraging others.
Take Jamie Reed, a 42-year-old self-identified queer woman, politically to the left of Bernie Sanders, married to a transman, and a recent whistleblower who quit her job at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Hospital last November.
To investigate social contagion, the valorization some parents take in having a trans child, the phenomenon of detransitioning — the numbers, the reasons why, the ages at which this is most common — is to be transphobic. Frankly, that’s insane.
‘I could no longer participate in what was happening there,’ Reed wrote in the Free Press. ‘By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to ‘do no harm.’ Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.’
Then there’s former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines, speaking out about the essential unfairness of competing against those born biologically male and biological female athletes no longer having their own locker rooms — their own safe space. She said last month that she has received multiple private messages of thanks and endorsement from elite male and female athletes, but is disheartened by their reluctance to go public.
‘Now I realize these private thanks,’ Gaines said, ‘make them responsible for this continuing and advancing as it has.’
You only need to look at the faces of any female swimmer competing against Lia Thomas, a trans female, as they lose and lose again to someone with greater wingspan and lung capacity and upper body strength: The futility, the pain, the utter disconsolation at never having a chance in their chosen sport, one that required enormous personal and financial sacrifice, afraid to express their anger because the mainstream media is cheering this on as a heartwarming story.
JK Rowling is shifting the conversation. The BBC, which airs the series ‘Strike’ based on Rowling’s adult detective novels (published under her pen name Robert Galbraith), apologized twice to the author last month for not defending her against charges of transphobia. They have renewed ‘Strike’ for a sixth season and have made it clear: The BBC stands with her.
In Finland, Sweden and the UK, there has been a sharp pullback on medical interventions for kids who identify as trans. Last July, Britain’s National Health announced Tavistock, the UK’s only clinic for transgender youth, would close in favor of new, smaller centers and protocols. Too many children, said Dr. Hilary Cass, head of the Tavistock review, are ‘at considerable risk’ of depression and impaired mental health. One clinic alone, Cass said, is not ‘a safe or viable long-term option.’
Even The New York Times is coming around, recently publishing an op-ed titled ‘In Defense of JK Rowling.’
‘The campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd,’ columnist Pamela Paul wrote last month. ‘The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.’
Take Jamie Reed (above), a 42-year-old self-identified queer woman, politically to the left of Bernie Sanders, married to a transman, and a recent whistleblower who quit her job at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Hospital last November.
The notion that the Times would publish such a defense, rather than fold to woke junior staffers having philosophical seizures on Slack, would have been unthinkable a year ago. Now, top editors at the Times, it seems, have begun regenerating their spinal columns, telling staff that there is now zero tolerance for its own journalists protesting the way the Times covers this issue in all its complexity.
Thank JK Rowling. She’s not just encouraging others to summon their courage. She’s forcing them to admit — she has some valid points
In this podcast episode, Rowling addresses the costs not just to biological women but to young kids. Here she shares her own private torment as a confused young girl and adolescent:
‘I grew up in what I would say was quite a misogynistic household,’ Rowling says. ‘Like all young girls, I grew up with certain standards of beauty and ideas of femininity, and I felt I didn’t fit into either of those groups. I didn’t feel particularly feminine . . . I looked very androgynous at 11 and 12. I had short hair.’
She says she felt the very common anxiety young girls do as their bodies change, as they develop and get their periods, as their bodies become something boys and men observe in new ways — ways that can carry shame or ambivalence, a wish to stop what’s happening.
‘It’s very difficult to cope with that,’ Rowling says. ‘I questioned my sexuality. I’m thinking, ‘Well, I can tell my friends are pretty — does that mean I’m gay?’ Which I think is very common. I grew up to be a straight woman, but I’ve never forgotten that feeling of anxiety around my body . . . Having felt like an outsider in several different ways in my life, I have a real feeling for the underdog. And I have a real feeling for people who feel that they don’t fit. And I see that, hugely, particularly, among younger trans people. I can understand that feeling only too well.’
JK Rowling is speaking. The tide is turning. Will her most vehement critics begin to admit fault?
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