Does J.K. Rowling believe that trans people — or at least trans women — don’t deserve the presumption of innocence? That seems to be the clear implication of an op-ed she wrote for the Times (UK) today. But she is cagey enough in her wording that she can and probably will figure out a way to say, my goodness, I wasn’t saying anything of the kind.
You can decide what you think she meant.
Here’s the relevant quote in context. She is — in the midst of a longer attack on First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon –insinuating that men routinely pretend to be trans women in order to get easier access to women to abuse:
The third argument Sturgeon uses is that it’s transphobic to suggest any man would fraudulently claim a female identity. This claim is extraordinary. Nobody but the very naive can fail to be aware that predatory men are capable of going to great lengths to gain easy access to victims, and have often sought out professions or special status that offer camouflage for their activities. Sex offenders have historically been found among social workers, teachers, priests, doctors, babysitters, school caretakers, celebrities and charity fundraisers, yet no matter how often the scandals break, the lesson appears never to be learned: it is dangerous to assert that any category of people deserves a blanket presumption of innocence.
In the next paragraph, she backtracks a little, if only a little:
This shouldn’t need saying, but in the current climate, it does: literally no feminist I’ve ever met claims all trans women are predators, any more than we believe that all men are predators.
As @Bronwen85 puts it on Twitter,
Seriously if you can tell me how any of this is different from Trump’s “they’re murderers, they’re rapists…and some, I assume, are good people” speech you’ll be a liar, because it’s not
It’s the same fucking thing.
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If a predatory dude wanted an easy way to assault women, why transition when metropolitan police officer exists as a career option? Far easier to become a cop than transition, especially in England
at this rate it’ll be easier to become prime minister than to transition
@Lakitha: Never apologize for pointing out the racial issues! We all need to be more intersectional, and I for one depend on BIPoC women to point something out that I can then look into myself (Note: pointing out, not having to give the Racism 101 lecture again, which I know you’re tired of).
You’re absolutely right; she’s a rich White woman so she’s used to getting her way in everything, the system supports her for her appearance and also capitalism, so she feels free to Karen everywhere about stuff that’s none of her business. It also gets her more attention, which is another thing Karens like.
And, frankly, there’s always been dodgy racist/sexist stuff in Harry Potter (Slave elves? The way the bankers look? Hermione is always right, but Harry gets to be the savior?). I am as White as it’s possible to be before becoming transparent, and when she put up that crap about Native American magic, I wanted to barf. Way to roll thousands of years of hundreds of different nations covering an entire continent into one blob. Even the US, a new-ish country, still has massively different cultures across it. NYC and Philly are big cities on the East Coast less than 100 miles apart, yet have distinct cultures even in this age of homogenizing mass media. NYC and LA both produce said mass media, but the lifestyles of ordinary people are different, even among Whites.
So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised she’s a’scared of trans people for no good reason. She’s decided she’s “one of the good ones” and is therefore safe and supreme. Even though she had to write her books under an ambiguous pen name.
We should flip that and say rich white people don’t deserve the presumption of innocence. It’d grind her guts, but it’s pretty damn true that they do the most harm overall.
GSS ex-noob:
woo! Her American magical systems stuff had me burning! Omg, she was so wrong it was if she had only heard of America by rough description!
Me and some of the kids on Tumblr got together to cobble entire magical systems that took into account the different cultures in the US, how they might practice their magicks, and interact with each other based on population size. It was a lot more fun and informative than any of the bland useless garbage she came up with, since we asked people to contribute magical systems based on where they live and the demographics.
We imagined different Native American tribal magicks based on their own belief systems and geographical specifics, African American magical systems with two schools based in the South and one in the Northeast, along with a host of loose organization of indie practitioners based on herbal and root work, ancestral worship, and west African systems. And of course there was Voodoun and Santeria.
We imagined a Japanese system on the west coast that had a bitter rivalry with the Chinese system in the same geographical area, and another Chinese system of magic practiced on the East coast. We imagined Scandinavian Nature magicks in the Dakotas and Minnesota areas of the Midwest,and Celtic magical systems on the East coast.
It was pretty damn clear she didn’t know shit about this country and in most instances just pooped the shit out of her ass! She didnt do even the minimum of research, made no mention at all of African Americans, and also managed to piss off a lot of Natives while she was at it.
That woman’s fifteen minutes of fame were up an hour ago and she’s still trying to hog the conversation about issues she knows nothing about!
It’s a more egregious example of her suggesting that trans people don’t deserve the same protections as everyone else, but it isn’t the first.
This is the woman who threatened to sue someone for calling her a danger to children, but also characterised calling trans people a danger to children as “free speech” that must be protected.
“Does J.K. Rowling believe that trans people — or at least trans women — don’t deserve the presumption of innocence?”
No more than does any other person, including respected people like doctors: “Sex offenders have historically been found among social workers, teachers, priests, doctors, babysitters, school caretakers, celebrities and charity fundraisers…” If that is an insinuation that all trans people are predators, then it is also – by your logic – an insinuation that all social workers, teachers, priests, doctors, babysitters, school caretakers, celebrities and charity fundraisers are predators too.
@Lakitha Tolbert
It has bothered me for YEARS that the Nasuverse and Mage: the Awakening both managed to put more time and effort into the various magical traditions of their worlds than Jo bothered to, and yet both are largely niche while she’s still making generous royalties every time Emma Watson or Dan Radcliff do anything as actors or activists because reporters STILL feel the need to name-drop the franchise that started their careers in Hollywood.
Let alone the royalties from Universal’s Wizarding World, and merchandise sales.
@Anna
No, she and her friends have been assembling arguments that the freedoms of trans women should be curtailed on the basis that a cis man might pretend to be a woman in order to prey on people. The whole perception of danger lies in the fact that we were assigned male at birth. We’re no more statistically likely to be predatory than any other person on the planet. It’s our mere presence as a maligned and feared Other that is the problem. It’s prejudice, pure and simple.
“Sex offenders have historically been found among social workers, teachers, priests, doctors, babysitters, school caretakers, celebrities and charity fundraisers”
Super true. And yet, Rowling doesn’t write Times op-eds casting suspicion on any of these professions, but reserves her attentions for trans women instead. Now, why is that?
She just wrote an op-ed drawing parallels between trans people and those professions. If she did not denigrate those professions, then she also did not denigrate trans people.
@Anna
The focus was not on the professions she was comparing us to, but that us wanting to exist in women’s spaces means we ought to be subject to a higher level of personal scrutiny that would ordinarily be reserved for professions where individuals gain close access to vulnerable people.
Us existing in public among other people does not rise to that level.
The focus was actually on the push to exempt trans women from the scrutiny normally placed on any other male person that wants to enter women’s spaces.
@Anna
So, without mincing words, do you consider trans women inherently a threat because of our physical characteristics?
I consider <i>male</i> people statistically more threatening to female people than the reverse, despite most not being a threat at all.
I said “without mincing words,” but you answered the question I was really asking anyway.
I didn’t mince words, I point out the exact characteristic that is the cause of scrutiny: being male.
Right, which tells me that you harbor an implicit bias toward trans women because to you being “male” is an attribute that makes us statistically prone to violence. You don’t consider us a distinct category, you don’t consider us within the category of women. So I don’t know what I need to convince you of, really, because it seems you’ve decided where you stand and that’s fine. Have a nice day.
Nobody but the very naive can fail to be aware that predatory men are capable of going to great lengths to gain easy access to victims…
I can’t help noticing she doesn’t actually allege that ANY man has gone to that particular length, anywhere. And quite frankly, why would they? Blithering about their gender-identity only wastes time, draws attention to them, and blows whatever element of surprise actual predators count on when they barge in and assault women anywhere.
Also, do rapists — who seem to want to establish dominance and superiority over women — really want to do anything that involves pretending they’re LESS masculine than they want to be? I’m no great understander of rapists’ mindsets, but that doesn’t seem plausible to me at all.
@Raging Bee: I suspect if an example of someone doing this existed we would never stop hearing about it.
@Raging Bee
Sadly yes sometimes. “Coercing someone else to sexually dominate or top them through manipulation or threats” is a form of abuse I’ve witnessed a bunch of times, and from people of several different genders and both birth sexes. It’s underappreciated, even by feminists and queer people, and I think “but this isn’t stereotypically masc and dominant!” is how the rapist often justifies it.
Sorry to bring this up, I know it’s kind of not the best time/place, but this stuff is really important – I’ve seen way too much abuse fly under people’s radar.
OTOH one thing that male rapists don’t do, as far as I’m aware, is start down the whole long, exhausting, persecuted road of transition just to commit rape. Literally the most common way IRL rapists offend is by picking someone up in a bar and getting them too drunk to resist – these creeps know what actually works.
Edit: I’m also pretty sure Anna Kiddna is here in bad faith and will not be convinced of anything, just saying.
There’s a certain sort of magical thinking popular among transphobes that goes beyond the usual sense of the term and almost approaches actual claims of magic. “We declare these people ‘male,’ and therefore all statistics and patterns which apply to males as a whole now also apply to this group.” “We declare this division of people into a binary to be absolute, and our combined will is so powerful that reality itself must obey our dictates and any other categorization is hereby pronounced blasphemous.”
Sometimes the rationalization of transphobia is just “the fallacy of division doesn’t apply when I don’t want it to,” but other times the transphobes really seem to act as if their use of language dictates reality instead of having any responsibility to reflect reality.
I didn’t mince words, I point out the exact characteristic that is the cause of scrutiny: being male.
And transwomen aren’t male.
She just wrote an op-ed drawing parallels between trans people and those professions. If she did not denigrate those professions, then she also did not denigrate trans people.
Did she explicitly say no one in those professions deserves a “blanket presumption of innocence?”
@Lakitha: Your version of the world is SO much better! It would have led to a LOT more stories that were a LOT more interesting. I would have read the heck out of that.
Shows how mediocre she is that a bunch of Tumblr kids could come up with those ideas, probably without even trying. And yours were so much more plausible. Just what you put here had great images going in my mind (You needed South Asian people, though — Hindu magic would have been something).
If you want a kid to read about kids becoming wizards, give them Diane Duane’s entire “Young Wizards” series, starting with “So You Want To Be A Wizard”. Right there in the first book, they deal with an evil presence (THE evil one) that might kill the entire world. All their stakes are higher than anything in HP.
Real kids, living in real areas, going to regular schools, with ordinary teen problems. The boy is Hispanic, the other is a bullied girl.
Over the series, they discover so many other wizards on Earth and so many wonderful alien ones as well. Nobody cares what the other looks like, because wizards are wizards no matter their shape. Even the sentient white hole they meet in the first book. The supporting characters are all developed.
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, etc.
Plus AFAIK, the author is not a terrible person. And she loves cats (who are also wizards, just as you suspected).
Anna
I hate to tell you this. But if a man wants to rape you, he’s going to rape you. And no one will care about. Hell, a man can rape you in a bathroom, while fully looking like a male and another woman can walk in, see it happening, apologize to your rapist and then walk out and leave you there with him without so much as a phone call to the police. No trans costume required.
What? You think it can’t happen? Your looking at the woman who it happened too. That’s why I will never believe the idea that men transition into trans women to pretend to be woman so they can attack cis women. Because cis men and cis women don’t care if you get cis raped by a cis person. No one care if it happens to you and a good chance is your precious virtual slinging cis will be so embrassed about waking in on a sex act that they leave you to continue you to be raped.
Welcome to reality. Now kindly fuck off