J.K. Rowling’s Penis Problem: A Polemic
What TERFs and historical white feminism have in common
J.K. Rowling’s Penis Problem: A Polemic
There’s a troll in the dungeon... and it’s JoAnn Rowling.
In light of Rowling’s most recent shenanigans,[1] I’ve written something I’ve been meaning to write for years. I’ve finally had time to do the research. All sources cited in footnotes, loosely aligned to MLA.
TLDR Thesis: Refusing to work for the rights of all of us and fabricating an idea that trans rights take away from women’s rights is, quite frankly, collusion with patriarchy.
Author’s note: I am a CIS white woman, and as such, I am particularly fascinated by the harmful history of white feminism.[i] My doctoral research specializes in social and political philosophy, including feminism, ethics, and philosophy of race.
Trigger warning: Sexual and physical violence (including rape and murder statistics), racism, infertility, gross thoughts from white women
Many of us are not getting along with J.K. Rowling these days. But you know who would have? Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Let me explain.
You probably know Gilman for “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” a staple of assigned feminist reading from your high school days. We political philosophers often know her for Women and Economics, a work that reveals some of her problematic beliefs and preferences, and once you’ve read it, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” hits different.
You see, Gilman was a bit of a Darwinian. The fittest survive and they deserve that privilege. She thought that there were “degrees of humanness.”[2] Some things were just in our blood, inherited... rightful.[3] One specific race was simply better stock than other races. I bet you can guess which race. (If you need another hint, she wrote an essay in 1913 called “Race Pride.” Gross.)
Sure, Gilman was a feminist. She was just a particular kind of feminist. The kind who thinks feminism belongs only to a certain group of people.
Sound like anyone we know?[ii]
Here, I do not intend to accuse Rowling of any kind of racism, because I don’t believe that she exhibits any evidence of this. I am simply comparing her exclusionary feminism to that of Gilman, though each of their particular exclusions fall on different planes.
Gilman’s exclusionary feminism would have excluded not only women of color, but also women who, perhaps, were a bit nonbinary, a bit unreligious, a bit... untraditional.[iii] These differences were less public during Gilman’s time than they are in ours, but had there been a movement for the rights of such people, we can bet that ole Charlotte would have defended the sanctity of sex (as gender, which it is not, of course.)
Historically, white feminism was exclusionary based primarily on race (though not entirely.) Today, exclusions center around a myriad of other factors.
Let’s play a game of Who Said It?
Who said it? Gilman or Rowling? (Answers in the footnotes.)
“In a wig, a bit of lipstick… they think you’re harmless, odd… maybe queer… You’re the nice man who’s safe.”[4]
“A man’s honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.”[5]
“This is the woman’s century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place.”[6]
“If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.”[7]
“The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way.”[8]
Surprise! This last one is Elizabeth Cady Stanton and some of her friends, including Susan B. Anthony. They’re basically saying that white women have it as bad as people of color. Yikes. Keep reading to find out why that’s not true.
Stanton, Gilman, and their cohorts were primarily worried about the same thing that seems to plague Rowling: “the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights.”[9]
The Scarcity Principle
“Disquieted by fears that some ‘other’ will take whatever small or great privileges we have garnered, [we] compete furiously, often turning our backs on our own gente,”[10] says Gloria Anzaldúa.
It’s always been “you or me” with white feminists. Their motto is: I’m concerned about the rights of my group, and giving rights to any other group will take rights away from me.
You know who told y’all that? White men.
It’s called the scarcity principle, and it’s propaganda. Someone tells you that there is something in very limited supply, so you have to get as much of it for yourself that you possibly can, before there isn’t any more left to get.
So the story goes: Human rights are in limited supply, depending on how many rights white men are willing to allow for the rest of us, and therefore, we fight amongst ourselves to get the most rights that we can, before they run out. Who cares if only some of us get them, as long as that “some of us” includes ME!
That’s the game of patriarchy. Don’t you wanna be like us, the people in power? Here’s a little taste, a little crumb. And that’s all you get. But at least you’re better off than the losers who didn’t get any rights, amiright?
Rowling herself writes, “I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe.”[11][iv]
I read this as: There’s only enough safety for one of us, and I want it.
Even her seemingly random attack on ace people recently is rooted in the scarcity principle. She says their oppression is “fake,” because there’s only so much oppression to go around, apparently. It’s “what-about-ism.” Oh, ace people want to be recognized as living in a world that isn’t made for them? Well, what about how hard it is to be a CIS woman? As though any attention that isn’t focused on the oppression of her particular group of women is saying that her group doesn’t matter at all.
#blacklivesmatter became this too. Well, don’t ALL lives matter? These people are missing the point - that we can care about all injustices. Care, if we do it together, is an endless well of benefits and good trouble.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton said something that isn’t dissimilar to Rowling’s admittance, despite it regarding race and not gender: “What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?”[12]
The era of women’s suffrage was similar to the post-war era, in that white women were making grabs for power that prioritized their own exclusionary agendas. With laser focus on this ambition, “the white women-led suffrage movement concentrated its efforts on making political alliances that would maximize its chances of achieving gender rights - especially voting rights, regardless of whether or not it enhanced, retarded, confounded, or dovetailed with the objective of racial equality.”[13] Giving the vote to people of color could posit a threat to white supremacy. Therefore, white men responded with a fear-induced ultimatum: “either black men or women… might be enfranchised, but not both.”[14] White women chose to buy into the lie that they would be permitted equality alongside white men, if they only turned their backs on people of color.
Selling ourselves for crumbs to the scarcity mindset promoted by patriarchy is “suicide,”[15] Adrienne Rich writes. And this is what all of these women I’ve mentioned, including Rowling, are doing.
By refusing to work for the rights of all of us, by fabricating an idea that trans rights take away from women’s rights, you are complicit in patriarchal rule. You are excluding everyone else as much as white men are excluding you, even if you’re a white woman. You get to buy into a little whiteness power, but you’re still inferior to them (when it comes to rights), and in the midst of that, you’re helping them to retain power over other people. You are letting them make you into their tool, a tool that ensures that only they – white men – get to be at the top of the power tower. Meanwhile, they take away your rights and tell you that it’s a gift. The abortion debate is entirely this.
So why do we – white women – do this? Because there’s an older, deeper, darker story that they sold to us, that we still believe in: We need their protection.
The Penis Problem
“When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he is a woman… then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.”[16]
It’s a scary world out there, and it’s full of penises, and who can keep us safe from these dangerous penises? The white male savior, of course![v] (Nevermind that 60% of sex crimes are committed by white males, in both the UK and the US, and I bet most of them have penises.[17][vi])
Historically, white women were conditioned to fear the savage man of color, to rely solely on their white husband to keep that supposedly hypersexualized monster away. “White men cast themselves in the role of protectors who must defend the honor of white women from black men... White women are viewed both as objects of white male protection and as people unable to control their own sexuality.”[18] What is sold to the white woman as a promise of security is simultaneously a regulation of her social movements (including her sexual notions) and an induction into dangerous habits of white fear. The white woman then operates in the world from this place of subjugation and fear.
These policies preach that the white woman and, hence, the white traditional family, are under constant threat from nonwhite people and cultures; the loss of political and social power must always be feared and must be vigilantly protected and maintained at all costs:
“The nuclear family… fosters the sense of biologically determined alliance against an outer world which is perceived as ‘a polymorphous mass’ rather than as a potential community which might be available for mutual help and generosity and mutual transfusions of psychic energy. But this tiny unit, presumed as a sheltering environment, a safe harbor from the violent and aggressive world of the Strangers, is in fact often also dangerous for the psyche. Freud’s own work suggested (though not to him) that the patriarchal family was a source of psychic disorder.”[19][vii]
Indeed, the patriarchal family was designed to perpetuate this psychic disorder, which convinces white women that they need the protection of white men, for themselves and for their children, or they risk exposure to the savagery and debauchery of the Strangers.
Rowling has expressed views that lead me to believe that the traditional patriarchal family is important to her idea of feminism. She is concerned that transitioning “takes away fertility,”[20] which offends me particularly as an infertile woman who lost mine to stage four endometriosis. But it should offend all of us. Fertility is not anyone’s sole purpose on this earth and it certainly isn’t what makes a woman. (Nor is menstruation, but she seems to think otherwise about that, too.[21])
This age-old narrative of the traditional family as a safe haven also promotes, both implicitly and explicitly, fear of the penis that you don’t know. The penis at home is fine; it’s protecting you. But the Stranger’s penis? You’ve heard all about the kinds of things that penis has been up to, and it seems unknowable and unsafe and unpredictable.
I submit that Rowling suffers quite unequivocally from this Penis Problem, and it is particularly evident in her protests against trans rights.
To be fair, the penis has been wielded against women since the dawn of time, or at least since men invented the patriarchy to make them feel all bigly and stuff.[viii] Here, have some proof:
1 in 3 women have experienced physical or sexual violence, almost always from a male, most often from their own partner.[22]
One woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by her partner or someone she’s close to.[23] (Maybe that penis at home isn’t so safe after all?)
Adolescent girls are more vulnerable to sexual violence and sex trafficking.[24]
Only 18% of reported rape and sexual assault cases lead to an arrest, and only 7% result in conviction.[25]
In one study, 93% of sex offenders polled described themselves as religious – hence, they likely support a traditional idea of sex and gender.[26][ix]
Now, here are the trans statistics:[x]
Trans people are more likely to be killed by strangers than someone they know.
Trans people are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than CIS gendered people.[27]
36 trans people were killed this past year, and 7 in 10 were transgender women and 7 in 10 were people of color, an already vulnerable group.[28]
Men commit most of these crimes.[29]
Jo... are we sure trans people are the danger to women?
I’ll be honest – I totally understand Rowling’s concerns that CIS women might receive less help or less empathy, might be less safe. My argument is that these are unfounded concerns.
There have been several published reports that have claimed that half[30] (and some claim more than half[31]) of transgender inmates have been convicted of sex crimes.[xi] Rowling has certainly seen these reports and found validation in them. But here’s the problem: These reports have surveyed incredibly small numbers of respondents. There are around 5,000 transgender people incarcerated in the U.S., for instance, and these polls have surveyed between 29 and 150 people.[32] Not only is this not a significant quantifiable measure, but the reporting has been irresponsibly biased, sometimes even perpetuated in ways that skew the already-unreputable reportings.
Now that we know the fear required to uphold patriarchal structures, we can guess at the motivations behind the intentions with which these studies were publicized.
There is an ideology behind the phallus that I worry is conflated with the possession of a penis. White feminism seems especially susceptible to this coalescence. But having a penis does not subscribe you to the ideology of the phallus. This is why men can be feminists too.
So, let’s talk about the ideology of the phallus.
What comes to your mind when you hear/read the word “penis”?
Todd W. Reeser writes that “manhood” and “penis” are synonymous.[33] The penis is not simply a bodily organ, but a concept that carries connotations of dominance. Dr. K Allison Hammer helps us here: “Many people hold tight to the belief that masculine dominance is based in so-called biology, refusing to see the ways it is constructed and reinforced through culture.”[34] Hence, we associate the phallus with power, with dominance, and for many women, with danger.
Ideologically, then, a woman might hold to the belief that the penis has, can, and will be used as a weapon against her. (Though it’s important to remember that sex offenders abuse all genders and sexes,[35] with statistics differing depending on age groups.[36][xii])
The ideology of the phallus proposes that the penis itself is threatening, when the truth is that it is the cultural conceptions of male possessiveness, dominance, entitlement, violence, etc. that spurn criminal activity from those with penises. If one rejects these conceptions, the fact that someone has a penis does not make them a threat. Rowling confuses the having of a penis with the likelihood of someone being dangerous.
Rowling shares that she has been a victim of physical and sexual abuse,[37] at the hands of a man, and I am sensitive to this, not only because I am a survivor myself, but because I understand the fear of men, and have always understood it. It’s drilled into the brains of all little girls to fear men. We’re told that they only want one thing, they’re lurking around corners and in your backseat and in your bathrooms, they can’t control their urges, they like to hit and throw things. We are told: men are dangerous.
So, for Rowling, if penis equals man, and man equals dangerous, then it follows that penis equals dangerous.
But we know that this is a false correlation, and that the danger comes from the ideology, not the organ, not the man-ness. We also know that trans women are not men. And —
IN FACT – they are (generally) also scared of men. (See Statistic #4 above.)
IN FACT – they also (generally) subscribe to feminist ideals of equality and safe spaces and justice.
IN FACT – and this is the one she really doesn’t get – they also (generally) reject the ideology of the phallus.
Trolling with Rowling
Rowling seems to think the problem we all have with her is that we (feminists who are not exclusionary) think trans rights are more important than women’s rights.
But she doesn’t see that our rights are innately tied to one another. Excluding trans women harms all women. We need to be in this together, through our shared belief in justice and equality, through our shared resistance against the ideology of the phallus.
Ours is the opposite reality from the one in which Rowling is operating. She is reinforcing the very epistemic structures that she’s scared of.
And she’s doing it via a massive platform (and bank account), through which she is spreading misinformation about sex and gender, and she’s being downright hateful about it.[38]
For a woman who wrote a book series about a boy in a closet who feels unseen and unloved and unwelcome, this all felt pretty off-brand to me at first.
Like reading Women and Economics after you read “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”
In her many efforts to die on this hill, Rowling has said, “The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades, feeling kinship because they’re vulnerable in the same way as women—i.e., to male violence—‘hate’ trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences—is a nonsense.”[39]
Yet, if she felt that they were vulnerable in the same way as CIS women (and they’re actually far more vulnerable), why does she spend so much time and energy invalidating them in ways that bring further harm to their very existence?
She claims that her life has been “shaped by being female.” And she’s right that gender does shape our lives. But it’s not because of what is between our legs. It’s because, as Judith Butler told us in their pivotal work, Gender Trouble, gender is just something that we’ve made up, due to our instincts to use negation (binaries) to navigate our world. And in attempts to make it real, to solidify our own identities, we perform our gender. Butler explains, “Because there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes, nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.”[40]
So gender... may not be real?
Wait. Is Rowling right about sex being real, if gender isn’t?!
Well, in hopes that we can assuage some of the harm done by people with massive platforms and misleading personas, let’s talk about it.
Sex is material. It is our being in the world as subjects amidst a collective that opens the door to the possibility of understanding sex in new modes – culturally, personally, publicly, and scientifically. In this contemporary moment, when the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences is publishing fascinating work on the erosion of the Y chromosome in mammals, “leading to rapid degradation of the sex-specific element,”[41] (Terao, et all.), conversations emerge around the possibility of evolution toward new sex-determining chromosomes.
Christopher Breu’s work on sex[42] is a reminder that human bodies don’t exist in binaries, but are caught up in an ever-evolving process of natural life, even (and especially) in the face of cultural productions. The book explores varied meanings of the word “sex,” but the focus is on materialities (with an articulated acknowledgment, of course, that not everything is material), and nowhere is sex proven nonbinary more undisputedly than in an intersex body.
The interACT website of Advocates for Intersex Youth reports that there are over 30 possible combinations of intersex traits,[43] though some posit that this number is higher. There is a wide spectrum of chromosomal groupings that determine a body’s development, and hence, assigning a body male or female designations based on a binary is not justifiable. In light of this, Breu insists that intersex and trans need to be theorized together, as they both represent bodies that resist dominant ideologies and that understand the material as ambulatory process. I think it’s important to note that, though intersex and trans theory are mutually beneficial, the embodied experiences are wholly different. A considerate and honest look at both independently is necessary to honor those experiences and also to theorize them together.
So yes, sex is material, and gender is material, because they are both actively lived in our bodies. But as for them being real? It’s a spectrum. Not only is it not binary, but it’s so varied that we need new verbiage and perspectives to even talk about it. Like everything else.[xiii]
Legislature like the one in the UK that Rowling is promoting and financially supporting is particularly harmful, because it insists upon the binary, which is not real, neither scientifically or phenomenologically, as we’ve outlined here. And the binary limits all of us - prevents us from living our full truth in our unique position on these spectrums. Enacting policy that limits self-expression means that not only are non-binary people erased from public acknowledgement, but they are further pushed to the margins, scientifically, culturally, and psychologically, and we grow, as a collective, further away from the possibilities of those necessary new perspectives that I just mentioned. Instead, people like Rowling want us to remain stagnant, under the thumb of the white patriarchy, where tradition and oppression rule. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to fight against that. We’re Not Going Back.
I call this piece a “polemic” because I am making an argument and giving you well-researched evidence to support said argument. But as a pragmatist, I am always open to research that problematizes my arguments, so I welcome debate and feedback. We should always be learning and listening.
In the end, this is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of why Rowling has decided to be The Worst. These are just the ideologies that I see in her, as a specialist in this professional field. I hope you’ve found them informative and maybe even convincing.
As Socrates says, “If we closely examine these same matters often and in a better way, you’ll be persuaded.”[44]
Final points:
This was written with love, to educate and inform.
Trans women are women.
Trans rights are women’s rights.[46]
Feminism is for everyone.[xiv]
Sex and gender are not the same thing, both are real, and neither is binary.
If you mess with Daniel Radcliffe, you mess with me.[47]
If you or someone you know is in need of resources to support your livelihood and/or mental health, I recommend The Trevor Project.
With love, Your Friendly Neighborhood Philosopher
[1] Rowling, Tweet: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1908841436981625309, Article: https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/04/17/jk-rowling-terf-ve-day-supreme-court-ruling-for-women-scotland/
[2] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Concerning Children, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903.
[3] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography, Read & Co, 2014.
[4] Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling) – Troubled Blood, Mulholland Books, 2020.
[5] Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography, Read & Co, 2014
[6] Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography, Read & Co, 2014
[7] Rowling, Tweet: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1269389298664701952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1269389298664701952%7Ctwgr%5E3e42f6c96f432792c1e09d5eb1c6aa1a7d18ec0a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwegotthiscovered.com%2Fcelebrities%2Fthe-10-worst-j-k-rowling-quotes%2F
[8] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Ida Husted Harper (1889). “History of woman suffrage”
[9] https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/
[10] Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, Duke UP, 2015, p. 73.
[11] https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/
[12] Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life, Hill and Wang, 2010.
[13] Emeka Aniagolu, Co-Whites: How and Why White Women “Betrayed” the Struggle for Racial Equality in the United States, UP of America, 2010, p. 85.
[14] Ibid, 286.
[15] Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978, W.W. Norton & Co, 1995, p. 309.
[16] https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/answers-to-questions/
[17] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/sexualoffendingministryofjusticeappendixtables
[18] Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, U of Minnesota P, 1993.
[19] Rich, p. 83.
[20] https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/
[21] https://themighty.com/topic/mental-health/jk-rowling-people-who-menstruate-tweet/
[22] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women
[23] https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-release/2024/11/one-woman-or-girl-is-killed-every-10-minutes-by-their-intimate-partner-or-family-member
[24] https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/facts-and-figures/facts-and-figures-ending-violence-against-women
[25] https://www.uml.edu/News/stories/2019/Sexual_Assault_Research.aspx
[26] https://reporter.lcms.org/2015/most-child-molesters-religious
[27] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/ncvs-trans-press-release/
[28] https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/hrcs-2024-epidemic-of-violence-report-fatal-violence-against-transgender-and-gender-non-conforming-people-continues-with-black-trans-women-comprising-nearly-half-of-the-deaths
[29] https://fullfact.org/crime/bad-and-dangerous-know-do-men-commit-almost-all-crime/
[30] https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-prisoners/
[31] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/31/almost-two-thirds-of-trans-women-prisoners-sex-offenders/
[32] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2022/03/31/transgender_incarceration/
[33] Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, p. 16.
[34] K. Allison Hammer, Masculinity in Transition, U of Minnesota P, 2023, p. 29.
[35] https://www.statista.com/statistics/423245/us-violent-crime-victims-by-gender/
[36] https://victimsofcrime.org/child-sexual-abuse-statistics/
[37] https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/
[38] Tweet: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1580639051774054404
[39] Tweet: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1269406094595588096?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1269406094595588096%7Ctwgr%5E9ab363310596e0ddbfea2467d5689225fcf1ccff%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.glamour.com%2Fstory%2Fa-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy
[40] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, 1990.
[41] Miho Terao, Yuya Ogawa, and Asato Kuroiwa, “Turnover of mammal sex chromosomes in the Sry-deficient Amami spiny rat is due to male-specific upregulation of Sox9,” PNAS vol. 119, no. 49, 2022. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211574119
[42] Christopher Breu, In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire, Fordham UP, 2024.
[43] https://interactadvocates.org/intersex-definitions/
[44] Plato, Gorgias, 513d.
[45] Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Aunt Lute Books, 2012, p. 105.
[46] https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/trans-rights-are-womens-rights
[47] Tweet: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1902073069239463957?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1902073069239463957%7Ctwgr%5E3e42f6c96f432792c1e09d5eb1c6aa1a7d18ec0a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwegotthiscovered.com%2Fcelebrities%2Fthe-10-worst-j-k-rowling-quotes%2F, Article (Daily Mail, so take with a grain of salt, but seems like her vibe): https://news.meaww.com/insiders-reveal-how-jk-rowling-got-her-ultimate-revenge-on-og-harry-potter-trio-after-bitter-fallout
[i] I insist on a distinction in this piece between white feminists and feminists who are white, and though, historically, white feminism was contending with race, we see it contending today with gender and sex, as well, with race sometimes not addressed at all.
[ii] I do not intend to accuse Rowling of any kind of racism. I am simply comparing her exclusionary feminism to that of Gilman, though each of their particular exclusions fall on different planes.
[iii] There is some evidence to suggest that Gilman had (especially religious) qualms with homosexuality, but I don’t believe that Rowling exhibits these.
[iv] Reminder: Someone who donates money to policies that infringe upon trans rights does not care one way or the other whether trans women are safe.
[v] Contrary to how this may appear, I do not hate white men. I am a researcher who studies society and history, and hence, there are some facts that must be shared. They don’t look good for white men. But that’s up to them to figure out, not me. My primary motivation for sharing these particular facts is to give you an insight into why Rowling and others insist on throwing trans people under the (Knight) bus.
[vi] There is a higher percentage of white people in both the UK and the US, so that reality is at play here, but this statistic is still proof that they’re probably the primary group that leads us to choose the bear.
[vii] This quote happens to contain my favorite academic joke of all time: “Freud’s own work suggested (though not to him)” – LoL!!!
[viii] Check out what we know about possible matriarchy in Akrotiri, Greece: https://akrotiri-museum.com/women-in-akrotiri/
[ix] This stat is just one that I like to share to remind conservatives that the call is coming from inside the house.
[x] I specifically focus on trans individuals here, as opposed to the LGBTQIAA+ community (of which I am a part) broadly, because the violence against us is vast and well-documented elsewhere.
[xi] I could not find evidence to illustrate the percentage of CIS men imprisoned for sex crimes, so if anyone can, I’d love to see it.
[xii] When looking at people over the age of 12, males are abused almost as much as females, mostly by men. However, when under the age of 12, 1 in 5 victims are identified as female and 1 in 20 as male.
[xiii] To better understand sexuality as a spectrum, take this proud pan girl’s advice and enjoy The Genderbread Person: https://publichealthpost.org/health-equity/genderbread-person/
[xiv] Feminism, clearly, has an exclusionary history that we must understand and recognize, especially if we want to reclaim it for all of us. For more on this, see my article: “White Franchise: The Protection, Participation, and Potential of White Women.” (Forthcoming.)
I’m most interested in why it matters from a policy perspective to even propose legislation that chooses the binary “philosophy” of either gender or sex. It seems an infringement of personal freedom for the sake of protecting exactly what?