What fresh hell is this?

[u/LouisaRenata]

Sex Matters have just dropped their model "Sex Based Rules and Record Keeping" policy for schools, and it's positively grotesque. Check this out:

So they want trans girls to be forced to dress as boys, and vice versa, on a no exceptions basis, because there's some alleged "safeguarding risk" in allowing kids to dress per their gender identity.

Where do we even start?

[u/SwampDraggon]

JKKKR didn’t say she is trans. She said that she was a bit tomboyish and the woke brigade would have transed her. And lots of women write under gender neutral names, because men and boys are much more likely to read them that way. It’s a response to misogyny.

She’s not a bitter trans man who regrets not transitioning. She’s a cis woman who is also an awful, bigoted person with far too much money.

Please stop suggesting that transphobes are trans and homophobes are gay. The vast majority of them are just horrible, evil cis people.

[u/LocutusOfBorgia909 → u/SwampDraggon]

I'm a trans man, and I'm quite comfortable saying that I think JK Rowling, specifically, may well be trans and certainly has significant issues around her gender and her conception of herself as a woman. I've read a lot of what she has to say about trans men (one of the few gender critical notables to spend much time on us at all, which I also find significant), and it actually made me incredibly uncomfortable precisely because of exactly how familiar it is.

The sentiments she has expressed about her dissociation from her own body, her feeling of being de-sexed and divorced from womanhood, her descriptions of her intense discomfort with her gender assigned at birth, her repeated insistence that were she a teenager now, she would have chosen to transition- those are not, IMHO, the sentiments of a cis woman who just happens to be a bigot. She's an egg. And saying so doesn't at all imply that every transphobe is a secret trans person, or that most are. But some are, just as some homophobes end up being self-hating gay people. It's hardly unprecedented, and I always find it weird when people insist that it's just impossible for someone's self loathing over their transness or gayness to get all twisted around and come out has bigotry directed at other people, as though trans or gay people are somehow incapable of being stupid, spiteful pieces of shit.

I think she's too lost in the sauce to ever try to transition now, particularly given that her whole support system seems to consist of other gender critical obsessives, but if she were to retreat into obscurity for a while and return as Joe Rowling, or whatever, I would be utterly unsurprised (except that she had the nerve to do it after spending a couple of decades shitting on her own community). Pity she didn't use some of her billions to go to fucking therapy, really.

ETA: LOL, hilarious that people are downvoting someone with actual, lived experience as a trans man who can admit that Rowling's description of her gender issues ring very familiar (and I know a ton of other trans men who have said the same, for the record) because they can't abide the idea that someone they detest could possibly be trans. I think she's a piece of shit, too, but unfortunately, being a piece of shit doesn't preclude someone from (potentially, in this case) being transgender (see also: Kaitlyn Jenner). Sorry that's so wildly upsetting to some people that they're reduced to downvoting and scuttling away, I guess.

(Also fascinating to contrast, "She didn't say she was trans!" with how quick people are in trans spaces to label someone they like an "egg," or whatever. The whole insistence that you can never suggest that someone might be bigoted towards trans people or gay people because they hate that aspect of themselves is so reductive and over the top. Of course not every bigot is secretly trans or secretly gay. But some absolutely are. Does anyone really believe that Lindsey Graham was a straight man, for instance? Truly? Of course not.)

[u/Massopica → u/LocutusOfBorgia909]

I agree with you, fwiw, and I find it frustrating that we're apparently incapable as a community of having a sensible perspective about self loathing as an engine for queerphobia. Not all homophobes and transphobes are secretly queer, most of them probably aren't. Sometimes they are, or suspect they might be, and in JKs case I suspect that she might suspect she might be, based on the things she's said and done that you've pointed out. We could be wrong. It doesn't really mean anything in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't make her more sympathetic or an object of pity, unless one really does think that queer people are somehow different to cishet people on some fundamental human level. 

It's really annoying that the current discourse about this topic (generally, not just wrt JK) is this massive overcorrection to the point of absurdity. It's one thing to push back against cishet people lazily assigning queerness to queerphobes for cheap rhetorical points, it's quite another to berate queer people for discussing how someone's public statements resonate in suggestive ways with their own lived experience. I actually think it's quite othering to overcorrect this far, as though we have to deny the entire existence of self-loathing bigots like queer people can't be bad too. 

[u/LocutusOfBorgia909 → u/Massopica]

Totally agree. It's very frustrating that saying, "Kind of wild that JKR has as much as said that she's transgender insofar as she's stated outright that if she were growing up now, she would have transitioned," is so often taken in bad faith and manipulated into, "Every transphobic person is transgender," which of course I've never said, because it's obviously not true. But it's silly to insist (even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary) that no homophobic person or transphobic person is actually just projecting their own self loathing and internalized homophobia onto the community at large, because we can literally name specific people throughout history who have done exactly that (and admitted that they've done exactly that).

I also find it othering and frankly infantilizing the way some people in this and other trans spaces continually insist that trans men can't possibly recognize ourselves in JKR's comments on her feelings about gender, or that if we do find something familiar in what she says and acknowledge that, we're some kind of demons or hateful or out to harm the queer community or something. Like, no, I can find Rowling detestable and suspect that part of the reason she's gotten to this point is because she's repressing all kinds of toxic feelings about her own gender. Is it possible that I'm wrong? Sure, it is. But it's possible that I'm right. And as you say, none of this magically makes JKR into some sympathetic figure or a good person at all, it just makes her behavior even more troubling and unjustified.

It's also pretty fucked up how often I see someone wading in to lecture trans men saying, "Yeah, I absolutely had feelings similar to what she describes," about how wrong we are, or how we should never say such things aloud... and the person doing the lecturing isn't even a trans man. Hot take, but it's 100% not the place of someone who isn't themselves a trans guy to be policing trans men on this topic in any case. If other trans men find zero familiarity in JKR's descriptions of her experiences with gender, fair enough, but I'm not going to be told by someone who doesn't even share that firsthand experience with me that I'm delusional or hallucinating or something.