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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Why on earth did code work yesterday but not today??
@anna
So why didn’t the safe female only space system save me from getting rapped by a cis gender man?
@Elaine: Shh, don’t confuse her with facts. You know she’s not good with them.
I tried to sum up with a series of important questions raised by my criticisms of your argument. I even numbered them all nice and neat at the bottom of my last post. Anna Kiddna ignored them.
It seems that AK can’t analyze (or perhaps keep track of) what the most important aspects of an argument are, so as much as it pains me, I will keep myself to one topic so it can’t be ignored:
You have insisted that
Except that I have shown you the research that demonstrates that this doesn’t “overturn” the system implemented for the safety of the female sex AND that it is indeed a net gain — safety did not decline.
Since I brought up the research, you have had multiple opportunities to respond and instead you’ve repeatedly discussed anything else, including but not limited to research that fails to show any general risk from trans people who transitioned in 1989 or later.
THAT RESEARCH IS NOT ON POINT, AND DOES NOT SHOW WHAT YOU WOULD NEED TO SHOW IN ANY EVENT.
The research that exists on changing bathroom policies show that they are, in fact, a “net gain” (to use your terminology) in that they find cis women to be exactly as safe as before while providing benefits to trans persons.
If you want to know about the safety of a policy, you study the effects of the policy itself, not things tangentially related like prostitution arrests in 1983.
You have a study on point. You refuse to address the fact that the study disproves your assumption that such policies make cis women less safe.
You can, if you like, create an elegant edifice of argument showing how, if all your assumptions hold true, a few merger, scattered facts about the world should be enough on top of those assumptions to prove that a new policy would definitely endanger cis women.
Your problem is that whether or not I effectively rebut any particular assumption or disprove any particular fact, real world data shows that your argument is wrong: these policies are a net gain and cis women’s safety is not sacrificed in any measurable way.
Your argument is flawed and leads you to a false conclusion. We know this because we can see the facts in front of us. We see the real world and know it to be different than your argument insists the world must be. You can pick at what I lay out and insist that none of the criticisms of your argument in fact apply.
Fine.
I don’t give a fuck.
Because your argument still adds up to bullshit because your argument still insists that the policies are not a net gain and will threaten the safety of cis women while IN REALITY they do not, in fact, do this.
Feel free to assume that the flaw in your argument is something I have not discovered. Feel free to insist that I am wrong on every point in my criticisms of your articulations.
I’m not wrong about reality. The reality is that the policies do not sacrifice cis women’s safety — at least not in the cultural milieus where they are proposed and enacted.
Feel free to think that before 2018 your position was entirely reasonable.
But it’s after 2018. We have the data. You’re wrong. And your credibility is threatened not by me, but by your refusal to even mention the existence of the study that cuts to the heart of your elegant argument and shows that what you claim should be true is actually false.
Come back when you’re able to admit what reality is. Until then, nothing you write is worth the time it takes to discuss because I’m only interested in helping end violence and poverty and oppression in the real world. I don’t actually care if those things exist in the imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson or JK Rowling or your argument.
You’re wrong about these policies. We have the data. You refuse to admit what’s true. But whether you admit it or not, all productive conversation about your argument is done.
@gss
I’m pretty sure anna just wants to protect straight cis femine able bodied women. The rest of us just need to get fucked then.
Also. I’m 5″2. I weight 100 pounds. I’ve got massive tits. Yet when I was a teenage and my hair was short, if I didn’t wear lady like clothes, I got mistaken for a boy all the time. So I’m not so how you can tell someone sex just by looking at them
@Elaine: I have been mistaken for a boy/man so many times in my life (I have a fairly deep voice) I can’t count them. Yet somehow I remain a straight cis woman, and nobody was ever afraid of me in the bathroom.
I finally got fat enough they don’t do that. Bootylicious, y’all.
@AK: Maybe the code got as tired as we all are of your voluminous posting which was all lies and attempts at distraction with blather.
@AK: you are claiming crime statistics are based on sex as you define it and therefore they are meaningful to your argument. The onus is on you to demonstrate that this is the case not on anyone else to prove otherwise.
Trying to shift the burden of proof makes it seem like you don’t really care if your argument is true so long as it advances your ideology.
Yep.
And my good friend Cynthia at 5’3″ with huge boobs and a dyke’s short cut was constantly “sir”d and given directions to the men’s room when she was asking for the bathroom. It happened in front of me twice, and she had assured me that she had been directed to the men’s room many other times. Honestly, you couldn’t possibly miss those tits, yet people still insisted on validating gender cues like short hair over probable secondary sex characteristics (they could have been fake boobs, of course) like mammaries the size of watermelons.
Wow, Anna is still at it. Reminds me of a Tank Dempsey remark in the Call of Duty video game after you blow limbs off a zombie and it keeps coming at you. Something to the effect of “Gotta hand it to you zombie, you got no quit in ya.”
@ Anna
I think it’s also cute how you are so naive that you think cis women will save you if a big evil man breaks into a woman’s rest room or changing room to rape you. Odds are they will leave you to it without so much as a phone call to the police. I don’t trust anyone else to keep me safe. I sure as hell don’t put my safety in other women’s hands. Just mine.
@gss
Apparently one of the nuns at my church gets mistaken for a man all the time. I’m talking she’s in a full nun dress. Shift and all. But because she doesn’t have traditional western woman features and her voice is lower, they think she a man.
@Elaine: That is really hard to do. Do they think she’s a man cosplaying as a nun? In a church?
@gss i mean it happens when she’s like. Getting groceries and stuff.
@ elaine
It’s also ironic how some religious folks get hung up on things like how to address people.
I went to catholic school. So I am very familiar with nuns having traditionally blokes’ names.
As seen on the Derry Girls blackboard.
@Anna Kiddna: Either cite actual news or police reports of a spike in sexual assaults by transwomen against ciswomen, anywhere on Earth, or admit you have no case.
Elaine,
For the same reason a ‘women’s gender identity’ space would also fail – because the rapist was brazen enough, and perhaps the place was deserted enough, that there was little thought of consequence. Whatever the exact reason, the self-identity system would have served as poorly.
Crip Dyke,
That is inaccurate. By the time I reached those questions, I had spent some time already addressing those points in the order that they appeared in your comment. Why answer them a second time? Anyway…
“…this doesn’t “overturn” the system implemented for the safety of the female sex…”
If a place is reserved for the female sex, and then a change is made such that males can enter, that previous system has been overturned.
“…safety did not decline.”
The problem with studies of interactions taking place in say, changing rooms, is that in those jurisdictions which change sex based spaces to gender identity spaces, certain things which would previously have been recorded as a crime or public disturbance go unrecorded. An obviously male person enters the shower block or restroom or whatever, various female people are made to feel uncomfortable (and of course various others are not at all uncomfortable), but there is no recourse for them to register that an incident of male intrusion took place, because by legal definition, that is no longer considered an intrusion… provided the male is wearing a dress, and/or informs the people there of identifying as a woman.
“THAT RESEARCH IS NOT ON POINT…”
I informed you of why the trend disappeared for the 1989-2003 group: reduced data for analysis. Also I challenged you to support your assumption that the trend was linked to improving attitudes towards trans people… and I see no such substantiation. Which means we should probably go with what the study authors said themselves on that very table, as I pointed out to you.
(Whic is not to say that your supposition is disproven per se; the lack of data does not support your supposition but also cannot be used to rule it out. It is simply unsupported either way.)
“Feel free to assume that the flaw in your argument is something I have not discovered. Feel free to insist that I am wrong on every point in my criticisms of your articulations.
I’m not wrong about reality. The reality is that the policies do not sacrifice cis women’s safety — at least not in the cultural milieus where they are proposed and enacted.
Feel free to think that before 2018 your position was entirely reasonable.
But it’s after 2018. We have the data. You’re wrong.”
Likewise.
GSS ex-noob,
Strange, Crip’s code still works. Ba-dum tish. But in my specific case, the clicky buttons were only present for one prior comment, and the code seems to fail when typed out. Strange.
SpecialFFrog,
You have it the wrong way around. The data of crime and sex is widely accepted by experts and policy makers; if you believe there is some fault in the data collection, the burden lies with you.
Elaine again,
“I think it’s also cute how you are so naive that you think cis women will save you…”
When did I make that claim? The main point of a legal boundary is that there is legal recourse when it is trampled, it is not a guarantee that nearby people will be sufficient to prevent the crime. This is the case with all law, not just that which pertains to this conversation – all laws are there for there to be legal recourse; no laws offer a guarantee that crime will not happen.
Raging Bee,
This point is touched on in my reply to Crip Dyke.
@anna
So let me get this straight. A cis man raped me and there for it is trans women’s fault. Flawless logic you have there. So really your gender safe space doesn’t work at all. But you want to pretend it does. Should lesbians and bi women also be banned from changing rooms and bathrooms? I know I use to get turned on by naked teenage girls in the locker room a lot. What about disabled woman who need the help of a male partner? They just suppose to not use public restrooms because that means a man has to go into women’s rest rooms? You have answered that either sweet cheeks.
@anna
Oh no! Those poor fragile cis women were uncomfortable! Oh good heavens. Let me get the fainting couch. We all know poor cis women should never be uncomfortable a day in their lives! We should probably just band the lesbian and bi girls too since those girls have wicked lustful eyes that make the straight cis uncomfortable! Hey let’s band the black people two since that makes white people uncomfortable! We could get them a sperate bathroom too! I bet I can get a source that shows you what a threat black people are to whites!
@Elaine: Yeah, ain’t it (not) funny how the “no trans in bathrooms” arguments are exactly the same as the “separate bathrooms for black and white”?
Being trans isn’t a race, but still — same arguments. Bigots gonna bigot.
Also, if I see someone in the whole nun outfit at the grocery store (which I have), I’m gonna be sure they’re AFAB. The Catholic church isn’t fond of any of the LBGTQ+ folks.
(Excepting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who aren’t actually trying to pass for real nuns, unless real nuns now have drag queen makeup and sparkles, which I doubt. And maybe on Halloween. And that time I was in a stage production of “Agnes of God”, but then we didn’t go to the store in costume and all the women were cis.)
@gss
Our church actually just recently got welcome back in with the Vatican with pope Francis. Because our priest is an asexual man. And we’re in the same place with west baptro, he works really hard to be a welcoming space for LGBT folks who believe in god but have been or felt rejected from conventual churchs. The nun in question that I’ve been talking about identifies as a lesbian.
I think it’s a good example of the world not being black and white and that you can’t just assume everything about a person by looking at them.
Not that it’s surprising, but just so that people who are only casually following along have a chance to see something that might otherwise be lost under a small hill’s worth of verbiage.
JKR and Anna Kiddna both began by talking about SAFETY for cis women under specific policy changes.
1. AK brings a study that does not focus on policy changes, but focuses on general criminality from the 70s to the 90s, unrelated to bathrooms or other aspects of the proposed policy changes. I state that the research is not ON POINT and AK glides right past this — stating that my interpretation of the study has flaws, but failing to understand what “on point” means: The study is not a study of the safety effects of the policies that JKR and AK support.
It would be very weird for AK to not understand what “on point” means, so the reader is left with parsing whether AK is simply too unintelligent and/or distracted by ideology to understand common English or if AK is deliberately mendacious. But I did want that part pointed out.
2. I pointed out that if JKR’s and/or AK’s concern about specific policies is safety, that we have research on the safety effects of those policies. (That is, we have research “directly on point”.) We don’t have to extrapolate possible risks from a study of when trans people weren’t given the benefit of the doubt in self-defence situations in 1978. We can study whether the actual policy changes they oppose increase or decrease safety.
And we did.
And we found safety to be unchanged for cis women.
So here we get to the rub. Anna Kiddna refuses to acknowledge the validity of such research because of this objection (emphasis added):
The study measured safety from violence — which was, in fact, the initial concern raised by JKR and, seemingly, by AK (though it’s a little more complicated here, since AK was defending JKR thus incorporating JKR’s argument by reference without necessarily repeating everything JKR said. It’s theoretically possible that AK might protest that AK’s initial concern was something different and that AK’s concern about violence, while obviously important to AK, was third or fourth in order-of-appearance).
AK objects that SURE, cis women are SAFE. But the study didn’t prove that they were COMFORTABLE.
But that, of course, is not what JKR argued. And if the argument is about comfort, then studies about violence are irrelevant as well. You have to have studies about discomfort.
This is not only goalpost shifting of the most extreme kind, but it again brings up the objection that AK never addressed:
How is segregating bathrooms on the basis of sex or gender (whichever you prefer) more or less ethically valid than segregation based on race?
AK likes to sidestep this question and has repeatedly asserted that AK did include an answer — but if you read the purported answer it only asserts a justification for sex segregation. It NEVER even attempts to distinguish how that is morally different from racial segregation in cases where such racial segregation is justified on the basis of the same predicate.
This was bad enough when AK was articulating that any correlation with violence can be used as a valid basis for segregation.
But now AK is arguing that any correlation with DISCOMFORT can be used as a valid basis for segregation.
Unfortunately for AK’s argument, there are many, MANY people who are racist as fuck and are uncomfortable with someone of another race sharing a bathroom or changing room (either for their own ostensible sakes or for the “sake” of their children).
JKR and AK believe that their personal feelings should be protected in law, to the point that **potential discomfort** is the job of the government to prevent through criminalization. Ultimately their argument is that some people must go to prison so that they never experience a particular discomfort in their lives.
But of course there is no natural limiting principle to this argument. If it makes Rowling uncomfortable to use the same bathroom that a trans woman theoretically might have entered at some point, or might even enter at some future point, possibly while Rowling is still in that bathroom, and if that is sufficient to criminalize behaviour and to enforce such criminal statutes — which for clarity means people spending time in jail — then what other discomforts that JKR might experience during life also require sending others to jail to prevent?
MAKE NO MISTAKE: Anna Kiddna, in changing the conversation from safety to comfort, is articulating that AK’s comfort justifies your sentence to a term in jail.
Right now AK is only asserting that argument in the context of bathroom access policies, but the argument is not limited to that context unless and until AK and JKR come up with an ethical argument for why sex is different from race and more generally for why some discomforts should be prevented through use of the criminal law and some should not.
This is a frightening, horrific argument that makes one person responsible for the feelings of another.
Don’t allow AK’s facile language to elide the radical change to law and policy that AK proposes and defends.
Elaine,
This does not even remotely resemble what I’ve said. Go back to school.
Elaine again,
Oh no! Those poor fragile trans women were uncomfortable [in the male amenities]! Oh good heavens. Let me get the fainting couch. We all know poor trans women should never be uncomfortable a day in their lives!
You get my point, hopefully. The argument for letting trans women into female spaces is that they aren’t comfortable in male spaces. But if cis women’s discomfort is so easily dismissed, so too is that of trans women.
Crip Dyke,
Look no further than yourself for why the verbiage escalated so quickly.
1. The study was a rebuttal to the idea trans women are not a threat to cis women. But if they retain male patterns of criminality – which was substantiated by the study for the 15 year period for which there was enough data for analysis – then they are exactly the threat to women as male people are in general. And this background level of threat was enough that legislators wrote sex segregation of public amenities into law long ago.
And bear in mind the thrust of JKR’s op-ed: male people will use these changes to law in bad faith, a point that was misconstrued as a jab at trans women by the site host and just about all commenters.
By the way if you really want to tee off on someone’s intellect, I recommend a glance over Elaine’s comments.
2. The finding of safety is arrived at by first removing certain offenses from the law books, redefining intrusions which would previously be considered unlawful into lawful, even if they degrade the feeling of security for women. And this is all in aid of easing the distress of a subset of male people – trans women – at the expense of increasing the distress of female people.
This is not a net positive solution.
Safety is addressed by my answer to your point 1. Point 2 deals more with feeling secure and legal recourse. Bear in mind that an argument for permitting trans women into female spaces, despite them being male, is based on their lack of feeling safe in male amenities. If feeling safe is an argument worth considering for their placement in female spaces, then it is also worth considering for those people already in those spaces. But if this is an inadequate consideration for the female population, then it is also inadequate for the trans woman population.
Not an argument of mine. You extrapolated from what I argued beyond what I actually argued. But if we were to employ my reasoning for sex segregation to the dynamic of race, looking at the historical interplay between races suggests that public amenities should have spaces protected against white entry – a reversal of what was enforced in the days of racial segregation. A point which renders your next conclusion:
…total bullshit.
And yet this following reasoning:
…is EXACTLY what is employed in the furtherance of male intrusion into female-only spaces. Trans women are at risk of depression and self-harm donchaknow, therefore they must be accommodated.
I don’t know if you can’t see this double standard in your argument, or if you don’t want to see it. If you consider it emotional blackmail in one direction, then it is also emotional blackmail in the other. Take your blinkers off. However, your final comment does not inspire confidence in your intellectual honesty:
You forget or ignore, even though I’ve said it in multiple comments, that sex divided amenities go back to the 1800s. What I propose is merely the continuation of this policy; what you propose is its eradication. You are the one that wants radical change.
Mischaracterization seems to be a popular theme here.
P.S. I asked you which female-only spaces you support, you never answered. I was really interested in the answer, I hope the reason you didn’t give one was simply that you didn’t see it or forgot to get around to it. Never mind.
@All the FARTs: Fuck your fee-fees, bigots. Put your big girl panties on and deal with reality instead of your made-up self-induced fears.
@ Anna Kiddna
You either do not understand Crip Dyke’s points or you are choosing to misinterpret them, neither is a good look. All you have proved so far is that you are a transphobe, we got that pretty early on, and nothing you have said has justified that position. That you have to resort to moving the goal posts to women maybe feeling uncomfortable really says it all; I find changing rooms uncomfortable because I don’t have a good relationship with my body, should I be able to ban all others from using a changing room at the same time as me? Of course not, it is as ridiculous an idea as your insistence that transwomen be banned from women only changing rooms because they may make other women uncomfortable.
Oh no poor little Anna is so uncomfortable with trans women that they should make laws for her feel feels. Trans women may get raped and murdered and beaten in male bathrooms but who care because poor Anna is uncomfortable! And she still refuses to answer my questions about disabled women and bi and lesbians women. What a shock
Sometimes being an adult means you have to be uncomfortable and learn to get over it.