Proof that hell hath no fury like trans rights warriors
At the top of my Facebook feed last Thursday night was the following sour alert from Jezebel, the formerly brilliant, funny and feminist news website that is now just a sledgehammer of woke. “This is not the first time that [JK] Rowling has expressed or hinted at her transphobic views.”
This was in reference to a tweet from the Harry Potter author: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya.”
Rowling was responding to researcher Maya Forstater last week losing an employment tribunal case after having been sacked from a fellowship at the Centre for Global Development for using “offensive and exclusionary” language on Twitter in relation to trans people. She was accused of retweeting transphobic material and for expressing opinions including “Men cannot change into women” and “It is unfair and unsafe for trans women to compete in women’s sport”. She was also alleged to have misgendered a non-binary-identifying person – a true crime for our ages.
The nature of gender and its relationship to biological sex would, one might think, be a matter universally recognised to be one of the most complex of human society. What makes a woman a woman and a man a man – and where selfidentification and surgery fits into that – is the opposite of the kind of question that has a single, clear-cut and acceptable answer. And yet the discursive terrain around trans people has become the nastiest and most dangerous of our time – one “transphobic” tweet, which can include any critique at all of the you-are-what-you-say-you-are orthodoxy, and you’re done for. Not only that. The sheer vitriol of the trolling and the speed with which the trans rights absolutists move to obliterate those with different views is traumatising for even the most robust.
And so we find that a question of penises and vaginas has become the lightning rod of the culture wars. It has certainly proved amazingly good at dividing people into the virtuous (of course a trans woman is a woman!) and the evil reactionaries, including quite a number of key second-wave feminists, who have dared to state that biological sex is an integral component of womanhood. These women have been branded Terfs (short for trans-exclusionary radical feminists), and the clue to the present madness lies therein: feminists are suddenly the bad guys.
Those who fought so hard for women’s rights, biology
’ n’ all, stand accused of being “exclusionary”. But in what way? Many of the people branded Terfs and transphobes, such as Rowling and the likes of Germaine Greer, writer Julie Bindel and my hero Kathleen Stock, the incredibly measured, thoughtful professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, want to maintain certain female-only spaces as defined by an absence of male genitalia.
They don’t think that penises belong in women’s prisons, changing rooms, refuges and lavatories. But as far as I’m aware they aren’t advocating social, cultural or professional exclusion; nor the prevention of trans people from seeking surgery or living freely in their chosen/ rightful sex (with the exception of unquestioned access to the abovenamed spaces).
Rowling has taken a stand and, in aligning herself with Forstater, has done nothing wrong whatsoever – even if you happen to disagree with her views. That she’s thus Public Enemy Number One shows two things: that hell hath no fury like the PC police when confronted with heterodox views on a sacred cow like this. And that, under their iron grip, free debate in this society is in a deeply parlous state.