Mick Hartley

Today's Sunday Times has an article by Leaf Arbuthnot which is clearly an attempt to provide an even-handed account of the whole business from the viewpoint of a millennial – Why the Harry Potter generation rejected JK Rowling. Unfortunately it's not really a subject that you can be even-handed about. So:

In December 2019, she expressed her support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who was sacked after saying, among other things, that trans women are “not women”. In June last year, Rowling then retweeted an opinion piece that referred to “people who menstruate”. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” she wrote. “Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

Her tweet was seen by many fans as glib, childish and provocative, and the internet blew up. Later that month, she wrote a long essay that set out where she stands on what she archly called the “Terf wars”. (A Terf is a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” — a woman who does not believe that someone who is born a man can fully become a woman when they transition. Mostly, the term is used as an insult against people such as Rowling.)

The essay drew a line in the sand. Some Potter fans were moved by its honesty: Rowling wrote about being sexually assaulted, and implied the experience had made her fiercely protective of the sanctity of women’s spaces. Others, especially the young, were aghast. Rowling was using her platform and influence to spread paranoid ideas about trans people. She was highlighting precisely the wrong thing: the dangers posed by trans people, rather than their vulnerability to mental ill health and suicide, to bigotry, to murder.

In what possible way could Rowling be accused of spreading paranoid ideas about trans people? This is complete nonsense. The only mention Rowling made of trans people was to wish them well: "live as you want to live". She just thinks – along with the vast majority of the population, and in accordance with the real world of science and biology – that no one can change sex. 

Potter fans began describing Rowling in extreme terms borrowed from her own canon: she was Lord Voldemort; she was a Death Eater. Millennials and Gen-Zers, normally pilloried for advocating “self-care” and “kindness”, turned nasty. One requested: “Pls kill her for my 18th birthday.” Rather than defending her, Radcliffe, Grint, Watson and other Harry Potter actors soon made clear their distaste for Rowling’s views. “I want my trans followers to know that I and so many other people around the world see you, respect you and love you for who you are,” Watson said.

Among the fans still working through their disappointment in Rowling is Juno Birch, a 27-year-old trans sculptor from Manchester who grew up with the films. “Imagine the amount of trans women who have suffered abuse in changing rooms because of what she’s said,” Birch says. “All I want is just for her to leave us alone. We trans women want to live a normal life and get on with our days. The fact that somebody so powerful and rich is trying to affect our daily life is sad.” A comment by Rowling about trans women, Birch claims, “sends hundreds of people towards me and other trans women in the public eye who receive this amount of hate”.

And again with the myth that trans people are suffering some kind of uniquely appalling levels of persecution – perhaps on the grounds that if you repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe it – when there's absolutely no evidence of this. The only "hate" they're receiving is a refusal to accept their cherished belief that by declaring they're women they really are women.

Yes, Maya Forstater is briefly consulted:

I ask Forstater about the view that the books are about tolerance and love; that they celebrate difference, so Rowling’s wish to exclude trans women from some women’s spaces seems odd. “I see it the other way,” Forstater says. “I think the books are a story about an authoritarian capture of institutions and about the fightback of the truth.”

If the author really can't understand why Rowling might wish to exclude trans women from some women’s spaces, then she's completely failed to grasp what the debate's all about. 

I won’t be unfollowing Rowling on Twitter. Like many millennials, I’m a little bemused by her fixation on trans rights, given the tiny size of the community and the hell that trans people often go through. Being able to self-identify your gender is the norm in many countries and there’s little evidence to show natal women have been endangered. 

Where to start? Sport, prisons, rape centres. And it's not a fixation on trans rights: it's a fixation on women's rights. The point is, of course, that it's not so much the supposed threat of trans people: it's the fact that self-identifying is so clearly open to exploitation by the unscrupulous. Apart from death and taxes, the other certainty in this life is that some men will use any chance they get to take advantage of women.

Incidentally, I don't see Janice Turner's article in the printed paper. Was this Leaf Arbuthnot piece stuck in as an alternative, as being more trans-friendly?