JK. Rowling has caused a huge media storm in the past week, beginning Saturday when she took to everyone’s favorite social network for reasoned, thoughtful discussion to voice her views on the validity of transgender people. This isn’t the first time she’s brought up the subject, but the directness of her tone, and the mind-boggling timing—during Pride Month, and a global uprising against inequality— instantly made it a defining moment in her career.
And then she doubled down, writing a 3,500-word essay filled with TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) talking points every trans person has heard before. None of her arguments are original, but she is now certainly the most high-profile individual to make them.
So why did this happen? Why, during a global pandemic and mass protests against police brutality towards black people, is one of the world’s most famous authors suddenly picking a fight about whether trans people are valid? Isn’t she supposed to be a liberal? What gives?
While transphobia exists in both the U.S. and U.K., in Britain liberal feminism has been as much of a vector for anti-trans views as the right. It’s caused transatlantic tensions before. In 2018, when the U.K. edition of The Guardian published an editorial claiming “[women’s] concerns about sharing dormitories or changing rooms with ‘male-bodied’ people must be taken seriously,” their American colleagues disapproved, responding in an editorial of their own that this was “the essence of bigotry, [going] against feminist values.” At times, British feminists have abandoned their traditional allies in the U.S. for the far right. While in Washington, D.C. in 2019 to attend a Heritage Foundation panel on the topic, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull and Julia Long, two such U.K. feminists opposed to trans rights, confronted the Human Rights Campaign’s national press secretary Sarah McBride, who is a trans woman, due to her supposed “hatred of lesbians.” The Heritage Foundation, noted opposers of marriage equality, were apparently less of a threat to lesbians.
It’s impossible to work in British media as a trans woman and not encounter this kind of “feminist” transphobia. Read more via Vanity Fair