J.K. Rowling, B.Weiss & N. Chomsky Among Dozens Sign Open Letter Calling for End to Cancel Culture

[FunkyLeprechaun]

58. As a person that has read her tweets/essay repeatedly

I’m baffled as to what the “anti-trans” views are.

She has praised trans people and has sided with them. She has many who agree with her.

There are two things that she is rightfully concerned about, and they’re absolutely line with Democratic principles:

1) Women’s rights- women all over the world are still discriminated and abused on the basis of their sex. Femicide in Mexico, menstrual huts in Nepal, women are still subjugated in the Middle East. Women have fought for decades to participate in sport fairly (Title IX, the Boston Marathon, equal pay in soccer and tennis etc).

She has criticised the skirting of the word women whilst talking about important issues regarding women’s bodies (one tweet she criticised the term “people who menstruate”). We need to talk about how we can be inclusive to BOTH women and the trans/nb community while talking about issues surrounding the health of the female body.

We’re all generally well educated. I have two degrees, so I’m fairly aware of what the language surrounding menstruation and other health issues means. However, there are women who may not have had the same access to education and may not understand what it means (perhaps due to sex discrimination). In fact, the link Rowling discussed was talking about period education in the third world.

2) Children’s rights. Rowling’s latest tweets cover this quite well.

Before I got into this debate, I was actually a bit annoyed with how incredibly gendered toys were. Regular electronic toys and PINK electronic toys. The “girl” toys were in an aisle awash in pink. The toys were in an aisle marked “Boy” had toys I would have played with as a little girl. Even some of the baby clothes I got for my daughter came from the boy section because I thought to myself , “A girl can wear this!”

The deeper I got into this, I finally understood why everything became so gendered compared to my childhood. There is an organisation called Mermaids, initially founded by parents of gender nonconforming children (I was definitely one as a child). The current CEO, Susie Green talked about when she decided that her son was actually a girl (I’m going to use female pronouns from then on here), started her on puberty blockers and then finally took her to Thailand to have bottom surgery at 16.

That alone appalled me. Who thinks their 2 year old son is a girl? Who thinks it’s okay to give a child medicine to stunt their puberty? Who thinks it’s okay to take a 16-year-old child to another country to have a body part removed?

I then looked some more: Mermaids gives talks about how you can tell a child is trans. If a girl plays with GI Joe and refuses to wear dresses, they must be a boy and vice versa for boys. They were essentially saying my 8-year-old self would have been trans according to their guidelines, I was a dress-hating, dinosaur-loving, Lego fanatic at 8 and my bedroom was awash in blue, train sets and pirate ships. My parents left me alone, in fact, they indulged me in my hobbies. They never thought once that I was trans (my mum was pretty much the same at 8- dress-hating and played with “boy” toys).

Recently, the NHS (quoted by Mermaids and Stonewall) said that If you stop puberty blockers, the effects are reversible. They’ve now removed that from their guidelines. Medical professionals are worried about what effects these medicines have on the brains of children. Anecdotally, detransitioners such as Sinead Watson and Keira Bell, who is suing the Tavistock Centre, have said they’ve suffered from the effects. Trans people such as Buck Angel have talked about how cross sex hormones have negatively impacted their bodies. They all are vehemently against children getting hormones.

There’s a very good programme called Newsnight and they talked about The Tavistock Centre (one of the UKs few gender clinics)

I was so incredibly disappointed to hear about Rowling’s initial tweets but after I read her tweets, plus reading the constant abuse she got, made me change my mind on the issue. The multiple trans people I followed on twitter who explained why they supported Rowling made me understand the issue better. There is a very good “story in images” essay on Medium documenting her tweets and the replies she got from those tweets.

https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-activists-a-story-in-screenshots-78e01dca68d

Recently, she’s been getting hardcore porn/dick picks from TRAs on her tweets in which she praises children for their artwork for her upcoming book. This is constant male harassment on a woman.

I thought this site would have sided with her, especially since we talk about women’s issues quite a bit and often criticise countries that have limited women’s rights. Children’s rights as well.