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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That just further proves how it’s masculinity, the social construct rather than masculinity, the anatomy (or the chromosomes) that is the problem here.
(An argument could be made that it could be the hormone testosterone that’s the culprit, but I doubt it’s that. The men are much worse in some cultures than in others, but there’s no reason to expect testosterone levels to differ significantly on average among these. The social construct, on the other hand…)
“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”.
Utter and complete and unalloyed double-talk, of which a grown-up person ought to be ashamed.
When the representatives of a political creed can’t express themselves without prevaricating, it’s a bad sign. It doesn’t say good things about the cause they advocate.
“It is dangerous to assert that any category of people deserves a blanket presumption of innocence” – My initial reaction to this was “even babies?”
Ada Christine,
Not a bias of mine, a bias in the statistics of violence and sexual violence. Policy that is informed by real data is not a knee-jerk reaction to ‘the other’, rather it is how policy ought to be made.
Raging Bee,
Sex is not a description of gender identity, it is a description of the body and how it developed. These things are independent of one another.
Elaine the Witch,
Why jump to the extreme of rape? JKR is talking about men looking for a way to mask their intent: “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. Sex offenders have historically been found among [list]”
Sex offenders does not automatically mean rapists; she is also talking about relatively low grade offences such as voyeurism. And if a peeping Tom is given social permission to enter a women’s dressing room simply because he verbally identifies as a woman and perhaps is wearing a dress, some will. Not all sex offenders are the brazen type to do what they want and damn the onlookers.
Anna
Because that’s not what people think. Is it sweetheart? No people think trans women are going to rape them in the bathrooms. Don’t try to play dumb with me. You aren’t fooling anyone.
Anna
I’m a bi woman. I’ve looked at my fair share of naked women in changing rooms. I’ve even got *gasp* aroused by seeing teenage girls all wet and naked showering together in one shower. How horrible that must be. Should I not be allowed in women’s changing rooms?
@Snowberry: Those clever little babies, getting other people to take care of their every need with no outlay of money on their part.
@gss
Well you know, male babies penis can get hard when you change their diapers because of the change of cold air. You can’t trust those little devils to be innocent when their mother or sister are changing their nappy. They may shoot them in the eye and blind them.
@Anna Kiddna – I don’t think you’re being fair saying Elaine is “jumping to extremes” when she’s talking about her own experience. Just putting that out there.
As I wrote before, I don’t know exactly what Sturgeon said, so I can’t tell how well Rowling is characterizing her arguments. Peronally, I wouldn’t agree “that it’s transphobic to suggest any man would fraudulently claim a female identity.” But I would say it’s transphobic to start with the assumption that trans women are “fraudulently claim(ing) female identit(ies).”
On a lighter note, I’m a cis woman and I usually feel more comfortable with my university’s gender-neutral washrooms. The stalls tend to be more private (e.g. the doors go further down). The new sinks stress me out, though, because the hand-drying mechanism is on each side of the tap and that’s confusing 🙂
@epitome
Ever since it happened I have had transphobes telling me I should hate trans women because of what happened to me. But a trans woman didn’t do it to me. A cis man did. And counter that. The same people that were telling me to hate trans women, were also telling me that I shouldn’t be allowed in the girls locker room because I’m not straight. Heaven forbid a naked straight girl get glanced at for a few seconds by a hormonal teenage girl.
I’m sorry y’all. this is just a hot button for me. JK helped me through a lonely childhood only to be the face of this crap. For 10 years now I’ve been hearing the “don’t let the trans into the bathrooms, they’ll rape the women” and also the “don’t let the bi and lesbians into the locker room. they’ll get horny over the naked straight girls” and I’m just sick of it.
I’m sick of everyone thinking we have to protect everyone that is post puberty from anything remotely sexual. we got schools here in the us banning books from school libraries that show racism, gay kids, anything remotely sexual (which includes ann franks god damn book), all because prudes like anna think a brush of nudity or a boner is going to shatter everyone and bring society to a burning heep. I’m tired of the prudes thinking if remove all things possible sexual all minors 11 and up will never ever think of sex or touch themselves till they are ready to get married to a straight partner. I’m tired of people pretending like gay kids don’t exist.
and all of that anger and exhaustion is just coming back up again. especially with anna fucking ” why must it be rape, it could be a lesser crime of a peeping tom” oh yeah wow, a teenager might look at another teenager and get aroused. how awful. we just know that fragile little cis girls and women are just going to crumble into dust if someone has a private horny thought about them and get aroused ( i know they won’t, women aren’t made of glass). I would much rather get naked Infront of a bunch of trans women who might get a boner, then get naked in front of say, my sil ex-boyfriend (who is a transman, that means he has a vagina, for anna), who is far more likely to actually sexually assault me.
Everything would be so much better if the world just got over nudity and arousal.
I’m just gonna try and stay out of this thread now because I’ll just get more worked up and ruin everyone time. I’m sorry again.
@Elaine –
Ugh that’s ridiculous. :/ No one said that to me as a teen because I wasn’t really out back then, but that would’ve made me super insecure. I already felt guilty about having a crush on a girl in my class.
@ Anna
the statistics don’t count trans peoplr as a distinct category so you can’t possibly extrapolate anything criminological about us from them. Post-hoc rationalization time, eh?
“Why jump to the extreme of rape?”
“This story is so weird that you’ve got to be making it up.”
Oooh, yeah. I’ve heard that before.
“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. Sex offenders have historically been found among [list]”
Forgive me for a vagrant observation: though it’s true that predatory men are capable of going to great lengths to gain easy access to victims, it’s not usually the case that they’re eager to descend on the social scale to do so; in fact, the usual pattern is that they try to rise in the social scale instead, so that they’ll wind up in the same spaces and places which tend to contain the bodies of the kind(s) of women they covet. (See: Jay Gatsby, Jeffrey Epstein, and possibly Les Wexner.)
IOW, what predatory men usually try to do is gain access to the game preserve. It’s not usual that they go out of their way to join the ranks of the prey. Just saying.
@Elaine: Hugs, and I absolutely agree with everything you say.
And men’s locker rooms are (I have been lead to believe) way more homoerotic than women’s. Towel snapping, penis size jokes, grabass…
My college dorm was one of the really old ones, converted from an all-male one, so it only had one mass shower. Presumably some of the girls were lesbians, but we didn’t panic about it. When you’re staggering out of bed early to go to a full day of classes and a full night of homework, you just want to get clean and wake up. And most of us wore glasses so we couldn’t have seen anything anyway. 🙂
Anna’s comments are a textbook example of what I meant when I wrote:
First, Anna insists Rowling didn’t say anything negative about trans people: she merely “compared” them to teachers! How <i>dare</i> you suggest JKR wants to ban trans women from the bathroom! Then in the very next comment Anna asserts that actually, trans women shouldn’t be allowed in bathrooms.
no, no, it’s not that we should be banned from women’s spaces, it’s just that somebody could claim to be one of us to behave in a socially unacceptable way in those spaces and we all have to bear responsibility for shit we didn’t do and wouldn’t condone.
Elaine,
It isn’t a matter of what unspecified other people think, not when we are assessing the words of a specific person. JKR’s op-ed did not state or imply trans women are rapists, she pointed out that in certain circumstances, not even respected people get a “blanket presumption of innocence” specifically because sex offenders would use that cover, if it was granted. Sex offenders. Not trans women sex offenders, [i]any[/i] sex offenders, including cis men taking advantage of such social permission to be creeps.
Ada,
The statistics are very clear about the distribution of sexual violence between the sexes. Changing rooms and similar are divided on the basis of sex specifically because of this.
bcb,
When O when did I say anything resembling “How dare you suggest JKR wants to ban trans women from the bathroom!” Obviously, she is on the side of barring all male people from such spaces.
@ Anna Kiddna
We already ban men from such spaces, what need was there for further commentary? Unless JKR was specifically targeting trans women as not “real” women. . which we know she was.
@Anna
The statistics are _not_ clear on how that relates to stated gender identity. You seem to be of the position that gender identity is not relevant, but I wholeheartedly dispute this. You are abusing statistics to justify your desired outcome because you harbor a prejudice against trans women due to our assigned gender at birth. Your prejudice is not a rational basis for exclusion or scrutiny. It’s bigotry. This is not merely my opinion, but a legal fact defined by the courts in the UK.
@Anna Kiddna (a delightful name for a person whose behaviour is far from delightful)
First, people who demonize and stereotype are more likely to harm the people that they demonize and stereotype than people who do not engage in such behaviour. And yet JK Rowling (and, presumably, yourself) are actually allowed out into polite society. Here you are flaunting your increased risk of committing violence at us yet you maintain the right to use a public restroom.
Doesn’t it seem like if we were making public policy based off real data you and Rowling wouldn’t be allowed to use a public restroom?
Why do you think that such a policy hasn’t been implemented?
Next: if you were AT ALL honest with yourself and your conversation partners, you would admit that the data on male and female criminality is not at all informative about whether trans people are statistically more likely to harm either all women or all cis women.
Data permitting criminological analysis of trans populations hasn’t been available until very recently, and what we do have is not very specific. It’s theoretically possible that we might someday find a correlation between trans people and likelihood to commit sexual or violent offences, but so far all the data suggests that **if** there is a correlation, then in societies supportive of trans equality that correlation is negative — meaning that trans people are safer to be around than others.
But it gets worse.
The idea that gamete production or genital appendage length or anything similarly “male” is actually **causative** of increased sexual violence and/or increased violence of any type whose victims are targeted based on gender (or sex) is one of the most anti-feminist positions it might be possible to hold.
I live in a world where we have been progressively teaching men to be better, less violent people and men have responded. Attitudes toward rape and sexual assault and domestic or intimate-partner violence have all changed for the better over the last few decades.
To label the risk biological is to throw up one’s hands and announce either the problem unsolvable or the answer to literally eliminate male characteristics from men’s bodies.
We haven’t reached the non-violent society that is my goal, nor has the gender disparity in violent offending disappeared. That said, the feminist way forward offers hope for the future that is supported by a record of past results that had nothing to do with removing male characteristics from men’s bodies.
The way forward based on the perspective you share with Rowling is one of never-ending fear and coerced (or enforced!) bodily harm, possibly up to the point of mutilation.
Me? Like always, I stand with the fucking feminists. Wish you and Rowling had the courage and wisdom to do the same.
Snowberry:
One of my first thoughts was that, if we take JKR’s statement more literally than she probably intended, we’d have to conclude that cis women do not deserve a blanket presumption of innocence. Therefore, gender segregation is not relevant as a measure of safeguarding (or whatever you call it) against sexual violence.
Of course, this goes against her general argument, or at least doesn’t support it, looking just like a big fat non sequitur instead. In the quote provided by David, she first starts parroting a common GC argument about bathroom safety, but then it devolves into a shoddy analogy about predators choosing certain professions, and finally stops making sense altogether. The common GC argument about bathroom safety does very much assert that cis women do, at least for practical purposes and relative to cis men, deserve a blanket presumption of innocence when it comes to sexual assault against girls and women.
The final statement doesn’t even look like an obvious dogwhistle or a buzzphrase to me, although I’m only moderately familiar with GC dogwhistles. I think the main dogwhistle here is that GCs relentlessly bring up the concept of opportunistic male bathroom predators in association with trans women, while nominally acknowledging that those are two different groups.
…
After writing the above, I think I can maybe guess JKR’s train of thought. She’s thinking of all AMAB users of women’s spaces, legitimate or not, as a clearly distinct “category of people” who’ve sought out a specific “job” (in reality, you don’t even need formal gender recognition, despite what the GCs always claim) that grants them special “access” to close contact with girls and women not available to most “people” meaning AMABs. Though she may not have really thought out whether the “group” she’s alluding to is self-declared trans women or cis men or all AMAB people. Meanwhile, AFAB people do not factor in as a comparable group, because their presence in women’s spaces is taken for granted and they also aren’t considered as potential predators – they are categorically considered as potential victims.
@ Lumipuma:
One of the tactics which anti-trans people try to use to persuade fence-sitters who wouldn’t necessarily be receptive to GC or tradcon beliefs on gender is that some cis men might abuse any concessions given to trans women, so throwing a tiny minority under the bus is necessary to keep a larger group safe. This has been touched on during this whole conversation already and doesn’t need rehashing, so I’ll just reinforce the main counter to that: They. Don’t. Need. To.
It’s not even just that perverted and/or predatory men can and do simply walk into women’s spaces without even a pretense of disguise, and get away with it. It’s also that the vast majority women spend nearly all of their waking lives in non-gender-segregated spaces, where that presumed measure of safety doesn’t even apply. The only thing which keeping trans women out of women’s spaces would meaningfully accomplish is making it much harder for such men to add an extra, usually minor-in-comparison layer of wrongness to a situation which is already very wrong (such as impersonation in order to gain trust or respect before a betrayal). Which is the sort of thing which doesn’t happen anywhere near enough to warrant any special precautions, any more than most people hide their kitchen knife blocks in case a weaponless intruder might stab them with their own knives. Also, hiding a knife block is a little weird but harmless, but oppressing trans women does actual harm.
Rowling’s post facto worldbuilding has attained some downright grotesqueries when it comes to bathroom anxiety: my favorite is her decision that wizards didn’t even have outhouses or chamber pots until circa the 18th century; until then, they simply let fly wherever and used magic to clean it up. Consider the implications: wizard-raised children would therefore need potty assistance up to age 11—and Squibs living in wizarding society throughout their lives.
(Another of the myriad cautionary lessons Rowling exemplifies for writers: when a fan or interviewer asks you about an area of worldbuilding you haven’t gotten around to or that perhaps never even occurred to you, don’t be afraid to say, “Good question—I’ll get back to you on that”, rather than ass-pull a snap answer and get trapped into committing to something ill-considered.)
@FMOx: So presumably “Expello pooamus” is the first spell learned in Ye Olden Wizard School? How bad would it have stunk back then? How distracting would it have been for a time when the kid next to you in class dropped a load and took a minute to get the stuff zapped out of there? You’re trying to work a spell against the Dark Arts and you lose concentration because some Weasley ancestor craps all over the floor.
She definitely thinks about bathroom activities way too much. I dunno about you guys, but I think about them when I’m actually in them and occasionally when I need to buy more TP. (goes “hmmm” in a Sigmund Freud manner) Any wonder she’s a FART? 😀
And of course there’s exactly one gay person, but we don’t learn that till after he’s dead (because it’s never mentioned in the books), and he had exactly one relationship decades ago in which his sweetie became Evil. Literally tragic gays and Kill Your Gays.