NotThatSoph
lemons are annoying
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2019
- Messages
- 4,411
as an aisde, the subreddit where i wasted my last 3 years was banned a week ago for hate speech. i am censored!
Post hog.
as an aisde, the subreddit where i wasted my last 3 years was banned a week ago for hate speech. i am censored!
Post hog.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics...-cancel-culture-free-speech-internet-ugh.html
thread:
as an aisde, the subreddit where i wasted my last 3 years was banned a week ago for hate speech. i am censored!
Great article but I'm disturbed at the possibility of having to throw out my Hawaiian shirts
You should be cancelled for owning and I presume wearing them.
Essentially getting people fired/cancelled/put out of business because they do something or believe something the twitter hivemind don't like. In some cases it might justified but with most vigilantism there's a tendency for it to get out of control.For the less streetwise people like me, what exactly is Cancel Culture?
For the less streetwise people like me, what exactly is Cancel Culture?
https://slate.com/news-and-politics...-cancel-culture-free-speech-internet-ugh.html
thread:
as an aisde, the subreddit where i wasted my last 3 years was banned a week ago for hate speech. i am censored!
For the less streetwise people like me, what exactly is Cancel Culture?
For the less streetwise people like me, what exactly is Cancel Culture?
Yes!
Been saying this for years. Social media is warping people’s minds. On both sides of the political spectrum. Cancel culture wouldn’t exist without Twitter and Facebook. And Donald Trump wouldn’t be president.
Basiclly people being fired or punished for saying or doing something deemed offensive and shows being cancelled or censored for offensive content.
That's not a new thing, people have been fired or punished, shows have been cancelled and censored for offensive contents since the beginning of times.
Very normal behavior
Well yeah, that's why the conversation about freedom of speech and individual freedom is ongoing neverending discussion since what is deemed offensive is redefined all the time.
This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. You can say what you want but when you said it people are free to have the relationship that they want with you, you have no right to impose yourself on them.
Edit: Also freedom of speech isn't absolute or uniform.
Well I agree, but when discussing cancel culture we are discussing quite broad. Like the "don't mention the war" episode being cancelled on UKTV. That is not really about imposing yourself on anyone.
And it has nothing to do with freedom speech and no one asked them to do that and was reinstated.
There are those who deny that the current chilly climate amounts to censorship, as censorship is only something that can be imposed by the state. Some concede that it is also something that elites can impose. But both positions deny that censorship is something that the crowd can impose. Yet there are many cases that involve independent schools, so this plainly cannot be the action of a state, even as this is quite clearly censorship. And the Islamic conservatives at Goldsmiths could in no way be described as elites. So to suggest that ordinary people cannot participate in censorship or inculcation of an illiberal environment is to be blind to the ways that such attitudes can operate at multiple levels in society.
....
One might expect the liberal-left to be among the strongest defenders of free speech at work, and of the right of workers to say what they wish, but too many have enthusiastically called upon employers to fire workers for alleged reactionary speech outside of the workplace, in effect cheering on at-will termination of employment, and embraced the multibillion-dollar human resources department–organized and employer-supervised “sensitivity training” industry, imposing top-down workshops, where workers are petrified they might say the wrong thing.
.....
Meanwhile, too many on the liberal-left, like turkeys voting for Christmas, urge ever-greater de-platforming of “hate speech” from these tech companies, only to discover how easily their own expression gets categorized as hate speech and taken down (as when various left-wing groups were kicked off Reddit along with pro-Trump ones).
.....
Some of these examples are plainly worse than others, but we do not win or lose our right to free speech at the advent of the most extreme and obvious cases of censorship. It is already lost with the smallest of infringements, at the edge cases, and the ones where all reasonable people would agree that the speech is indeed hateful.
David Goldberger, the Jewish ACLU lawyer so committed to free speech that he represented a group of Chicago Nazis in court in 1977 to defend their right to march through Skokie, Illinois, recognized that it was even or rather precisely in these sort of cases where the struggle for liberty is won or lost.
......
As a result, too many modern progressives, particularly younger ones, have become indifferent to free speech, or, worse, come to view the defense of free speech as something foreign to the Left and a weapon of oppression.
This is a historic disaster. Throughout the twentieth century, from Stalin’s purges to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Killing Fields of Cambodia, it was precisely when the Left abandoned civil liberties and embraced groupthink supposedly in the service of some “greater evil,” that those who claimed the mantle of emancipation perpetrated their greatest evils.
......
There is a need to let progressives who support free speech know that they are not alone and to give them confidence to speak out against censorship and illiberalism on their campuses, in their organizations, in their communities, or wherever someone imposes it, whether this comes from the right, center, or left, from the state or civil society.
But beyond the need for the Left to recognize that freedom of speech and civil liberties are the prerequisite for our own ability to organize, we cannot leave the discussion at the level of liberal principle.
@berbatrick what's your take on this article - https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/cancel-culture-harpers-letter-free-speech
Points I specifically agree with in this piece
Cancel culture isn't a thing.
I think it's definitely a thing, but it's not quite real...it seems to exist on the internet but real life people don't actually believe a lot of the crap spouted on social media. I enjoyed this video about the J K Rowling stuff, comforting to know I'm not completely mad!
Are you gaslighting me?
I think it's definitely a thing, but it's not quite real...it seems to exist on the internet but real life people don't actually believe a lot of the crap spouted on social media. I enjoyed this video about the J K Rowling stuff, comforting to know I'm not completely mad!
Blaire White is such a tabloid weasel. A false premise (it wasn't "this fiasco" that "officially labeled J.K Rowling transphobic" and the accusations don't stem from just "three tweets") followed by a bunch of "most of us", " almost all trans people", "most think". I guess that structuring an argument doesn't really matter when you're trying to appeal to the socially-progressive wing of the Pepe gang, but It's still an ear-sore to listen to.
You can break down the three tweets mentioned and debate the scientific validity, transphobicness and truthiness of these statements in isolation if you want to but that doesn't address the Rowling issue.
Doesn't it? Because even before watching the Blaire video I'd tried my own search to find Rowling being transphobic...I couldn't find anything, other than some tweets that aren't transphobic.
Now, quite aside from the trans issue -- which we'll be getting to in a sec -- there are plenty of issues with what she said. If her objection is to them replacing the phrase 'People who menstruate' with 'women', the article was specifically about the provision of sanitary and menstrual supplies around the globe; if her objection is to them using the word 'people' instead of 'women', there are plenty of cis-females who we wouldn't count as 'women'. (Menstruation normally starts at around age twelve, and it's not unusual to be as early as ten -- not a 'woman' by any reasonable definition.) For a lot of people, then, it feels like Rowling went out of her way to make a transphobic shot at an article that made the barest effort to include non-cis women. (Quite literally the only reference to non-cis women in the article is the following line: 'An estimated 1.8 billion girls, women, and gender non-binary persons menstruate, and this has not stopped because of the pandemic.' That's it. This is not an article that's doing its best to wade into the trans debate, and it's very much been dragged there.)
(Berns died of a brain tumour in September 2019. That's not really relevant to the story here, but if you're wondering why she hasn't chimed in over this, there's your explanation.)It’s not clear what Rowling’s motivations or reasons were for the follows and likes highlighted by Fairchild and others, and it’s not clear what Rowling’s views are on trans issues. As such, the claim that she had “confirmed [her] stance against transgender women” was false on two grounds. First, Rowling had not herself made substantive public utterances about trans issues, so there was no clear “stance” to be confirmed, and second, even if there had been, Rowling’s following of Berns’ account in June 2019 would not constitute relevant reliable evidence, since it had several possible explanations.
This was probably her most divisive tweet since she tweeted that wizards used to just shit on the floor and vanish the evidence.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 #ThisIsNotADrill
If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.
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 - ie, to male violence - ‘hate’ trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences - is a nonsense.
Now, if you conflate sex and gender and don't draw a line between them -- as is common in the TERF movement, then what Rowling says seems to make at least some sense; if you don't draw any lines about sex, how can you meaningfully discuss things like 'same-sex relationships' as being distinct from straight relationships? How can one struggle be different from another? (I didn't say it made a lot of sense, but still; there's at least a veneer there.) Additionally, there are issues that are related to sex and not gender; transwomen, for example, generally don't need to be concerned with ovulation, menstruation and getting pregnant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_wordWell, maybe it is the truth? at least in her friend group. She also pointed out the overwhelming support Rowling got but nobody listened to it...is that false too?
A pretty comprehensive summation of many of the instances of Rowlings run-ins with the trans community. However I see it is missing at least one case of liking a transphobic comment ( that Rowling later claimed to have accidently clicked on) and it doesn't mention the representation issue with one of her characters in one of her books (google outoftheloop rowling if you need the link because redcafe hates it):
J. K. Rowling (author of the Harry Potter book series) has... somewhat of a history of statements that have been construed as being anti-trans (and promoting people whose statements are definitely anti-trans). In this particular case, she tweeted in response to a specific article entitled Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate:
Now, quite aside from the trans issue -- which we'll be getting to in a sec -- there are plenty of issues with what she said. If her objection is to them replacing the phrase 'People who menstruate' with 'women', the article was specifically about the provision of sanitary and menstrual supplies around the globe; if her objection is to them using the word 'people' instead of 'women', there are plenty of cis-females who we wouldn't count as 'women'. (Menstruation normally starts at around age twelve, and it's not unusual to be as early as ten -- not a 'woman' by any reasonable definition.) For a lot of people, then, it feels like Rowling went out of her way to make a transphobic shot at an article that made the barest effort to include non-cis women. (Quite literally the only reference to non-cis women in the article is the following line: 'An estimated 1.8 billion girls, women, and gender non-binary persons menstruate, and this has not stopped because of the pandemic.' That's it. This is not an article that's doing its best to wade into the trans debate, and it's very much been dragged there.)
But this fits into a larger pattern of behaviour for Rowling, which is why people are so willing to crack down on her now. This is not even the first time this year she's been embroiled in a story like this; there was also the case of the #IStandWithMaya hashtag. (I wrote a long, long breakdown of that story here, which goes into more detail; I'm re-using some of that material now to explain Rowling's history rather than typing it all out again.)
A Brief History of Rowling and TERFs
There's a bit of history with J. K. Rowling and cases of potential -- or at least rumoured -- sympathy for TERF causes. (TERF, in this case, stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism; it's a big sticking point within feminist movements, but it's usually not considered a compliment.) For TERFs, one of the main points of contention is with the idea that trans women (here defined as 'people who were assigned male at birth, but who don't identify with being male now) aren't 'real' women. As such, there's a general opposition to specific rights and access to things like female-only spaces and workplace protection based on gender; it's illegal to discriminate in employment based on sex in the UK, and that includes cis/trans status. (For anyone who's confused about the specifics of sex and gender, and exactly what the difference is between the two, I wrote a BestOf'ed piece that touched on the topic here that should serve as a primer.)
Rowling isn't unique in this, by any stretch. There have been a number of relatively high-profile individuals on Twitter who have found themselves at odds with the trans community based on what are often views as regressive views. Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd, regularly courts controversy with his TERF views, and Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts has his work cut from a then-upcoming story anthology because of anti-trans tweets. Rowling has been singled out, perhaps because she has a reputation for being progressive -- or pandering to progressives, depending on which side of the argument you fall down on -- but also because she hasn't publicly come out and said her views either way. There was minor outrage when, in March 2018, Rowling liked a tweet that said that 'men in dresses' were treated better than women; however, her representative later said it was an accident, stating: 'I’m afraid J.K Rowling had a clumsy and middle-aged moment and this is not the first time she has favourited by holding her phone incorrectly.'
In June of 2019, a viral blog post suggested that Rowling was a TERF based on her following a notable YouTuber who aligned herself with the TERF movement, Magdalen Berns. Berns has said some stuff that many people didn't agree with, including that trans women are 'blackface actors' and 'men who get sexual kicks from being treated like women'. (Berns, it's worth noting, was a lesbian and intimately involved with the LGBT activist community; conflicts around the issue of whether trans women are somehow contrary to the idea of lesbianism, or whether one is inherently exclusionary to the other, have been pretty significant.) Snopes gave this a rating of 'false', but it was with the -- entirely reasonable -- caveat that retweets and follows aren't the same as a full-throated endorsement of all of someone's views:
(Berns died of a brain tumour in September 2019. That's not really relevant to the story here, but if you're wondering why she hasn't chimed in over this, there's your explanation.)
#RowlingStandsWithMaya
So Rowling has been on a lot of people's TERF-radars for a while now. This came to a head recently with the case of Maya Forstater, a visiting fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), an international thinktank that campaigns against poverty and inequality. This is a charitable organisation based in Washington and London, where Forstater was a tax expert. Her contract expired and was not renewed in March 2019; Forstater claims this is as a direct result of several tweets she made opposing the idea that sex changes were even possible, or that trans individuals should be seen and referred to as the gender they claim. She lost an employment tribunal where she claimed that she had been unfairly discriminated against due to her comments. (Forstater had actually doubled-down on her comments; when she first heard the complaints against her, in December 2018, she noted: '“I have been told that it is offensive to say "transwomen are men" or that women means "adult human female". However since these statement are true I will continue to say them.') You can read an absolute smorgasbord of anti-trans statements from Forstater in the judgement, so the idea that's being touted is that it's just because of a few tweets and no action is... flawed, at best.
Earlier this year, Rowling tweeted:
This was probably her most divisive tweet since she tweeted that wizards used to just shit on the floor and vanish the evidence.
So what does Rowling believe?
The biggest issue with all of this is that Rowling steadfastly conflates biological sex and gender. This goes against the current scientific understanding, as well as as progressive cultural trends. This is one of Reddit's bêtes noires, as you'll see by people in pretty much any thread that discusses the issue of gender when some wag decides to point out that there are only two. (Source: check the comments on this thread in an hour and you'll see what I mean.) This is false -- and before any of you decide to get snippy, I'll point out that I am now a) safely out of the top-level and b) factually correct -- and it's almost always either a misunderstanding of the terms or a wilful effort to troll. The thing is, sex and gender are different concepts, albeit ones that have a lot in common.
Sex is a biological characteristic: generally speaking, it's determined by the 23rd chromosome, XY for males and XX for females. (There are other chromosomal variants, such as XO, which leads to Turner syndrome, or XXY, which leads to Klinefelter syndrome. I'm not going to wade into that in any detail right now -- not because it's not important, but because I'm trying for a broad-strokes approach -- but for the moment just know that more than 98% of people will likely fall into the chromosomal category of either XX or XY.)
Gender is a cultural characteristic. In the west, we generally have two genders, which we also often (somewhat confusingly) call male and female. (This is also not helped by the fact that, outside of humans, gender is occasionally also used to refer to biological sex. Language is messy like that sometimes.) In this sense, 'gender' is often used to encompass both 'psychological sex' -- that is, the way you feel you are, also known as 'gender identity' -- as well as 'social sex' (the gender role that you're socialised into).
Sex and gender have a lot of crossover, but they don't line up 100%. There have been numerous studies that indicate that gender and sex are not the same thing. To what extent the former affects the latter is an important question, and one worthy of study, but there is strong scientific evidence that the brains of transgender individuals generally have more in common with the gender they identify with than the sex that is on their birth certificate, or whatever they've got going on downstairs.
(It's important to note that this post is generally going to discuss trans issues from a binary perspective, male or female. There are also individuals that feel as though they don't fit into either of these groups, and are usually described as 'non-binary'. In several countries, such gender identities are legally recognised, and several non-western cultures have had the concept of a third gender since time immemorial. This is not, despite what people might have you believe, an entirely new concept.)
Rowling's Response
After receiving a lot of pushback about this, Rowling tweeted:
Now, if you conflate sex and gender and don't draw a line between them -- as is common in the TERF movement, then what Rowling says seems to make at least some sense; if you don't draw any lines about sex, how can you meaningfully discuss things like 'same-sex relationships' as being distinct from straight relationships? How can one struggle be different from another? (I didn't say it made a lot of sense, but still; there's at least a veneer there.) Additionally, there are issues that are related to sex and not gender; transwomen, for example, generally don't need to be concerned with ovulation, menstruation and getting pregnant.
The problem is that it completely breaks down if you view sex and gender as distinct definitions with a crossover. No one's saying 'sex isn't real'; they're just saying that sex isn't important in this particular instance. (This is important because you can see a shift in the terminology over the past fifty or so years; 'transgender' is now massively preferred in the community to 'transsexual'.) When Rowling says 'my life has been shaped by being female' and 'I do not believe it’s hateful to say so', what she's really saying is that her life has been shaped by her female sex and her female gender, but she's refusing that same category to other female-gendered individuals (such as trans women), and lumping people who are not female-gendered but chromosomally XX (NB individuals and trans men) in the same category as her by virtue of their genetics. (For example, not many people are going to see these guys in a relationship with a femme-presenting woman and treat them as though they're in a lesbian relationship, nor would they see them in a relationship with a male-presenting individual and call them 'straight' just because of their chromosomes.)
Why do people even care?
For a lot of people, Harry Potter was a formative part of their childhood. Fundamentally, it had somewhat of a progressive stance as a series of books -- 'blood purity' is bad, anyone can be a hero, acceptance of people is important -- but in the years since the last book came out Rowling's views have been shown to be considerably less than progressive in a couple of ways. (There are also arguments that the books aren't particularly accepting of minorities, but that's... really a question for another time.)
The cohort that grew up with Harry Potter are more likely than older generations to accept trans issues as significant and meaningful; acceptance of trans issues is correlated with age (among other things); the younger you are, the more likely you are to have a favourable view of trans rights and trans equality. Now they're collectively seeing that the person who wrote a book that was important to them growing up may have views that do not align with -- and in some ways stand in direct opposition to -- other views on social equality that they hold deeply.
A Note on Gold
This is one of those posts that occasionally takes off and gets gilded. Please don't. I've got something like eighteen years of Reddit Premium at this point, so I get absolutely zero benefit out of it.
If you have Reddit Coins that you'd want to spend on this post, I'd appreciate it if you'd instead use them to highlight other posts that emphasise trans rights or the access to sanitary products to all people who need them. If you wanted to spend actual money on this post, please consider instead donating to an organisation like Freedom4Girls which works to eliminate period poverty around the world for everyone who menstruates, no matter their gender identity.
[/s]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
A pretty comprehensive summation of many of the instances of Rowlings run-ins with the trans community. However I see it is missing at least one case of liking a transphobic comment ( that Rowling later claimed to have accidently clicked on) and it doesn't mention the representation issue with one of her characters in one of her books (google outoftheloop rowling if you need the link because redcafe hates it):
J. K. Rowling (author of the Harry Potter book series) has... somewhat of a history of statements that have been construed as being anti-trans (and promoting people whose statements are definitely anti-trans). In this particular case, she tweeted in response to a specific article entitled Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate:
Now, quite aside from the trans issue -- which we'll be getting to in a sec -- there are plenty of issues with what she said. If her objection is to them replacing the phrase 'People who menstruate' with 'women', the article was specifically about the provision of sanitary and menstrual supplies around the globe; if her objection is to them using the word 'people' instead of 'women', there are plenty of cis-females who we wouldn't count as 'women'. (Menstruation normally starts at around age twelve, and it's not unusual to be as early as ten -- not a 'woman' by any reasonable definition.) For a lot of people, then, it feels like Rowling went out of her way to make a transphobic shot at an article that made the barest effort to include non-cis women. (Quite literally the only reference to non-cis women in the article is the following line: 'An estimated 1.8 billion girls, women, and gender non-binary persons menstruate, and this has not stopped because of the pandemic.' That's it. This is not an article that's doing its best to wade into the trans debate, and it's very much been dragged there.)
But this fits into a larger pattern of behaviour for Rowling, which is why people are so willing to crack down on her now. This is not even the first time this year she's been embroiled in a story like this; there was also the case of the #IStandWithMaya hashtag. (I wrote a long, long breakdown of that story here, which goes into more detail; I'm re-using some of that material now to explain Rowling's history rather than typing it all out again.)
A Brief History of Rowling and TERFs
There's a bit of history with J. K. Rowling and cases of potential -- or at least rumoured -- sympathy for TERF causes. (TERF, in this case, stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism; it's a big sticking point within feminist movements, but it's usually not considered a compliment.) For TERFs, one of the main points of contention is with the idea that trans women (here defined as 'people who were assigned male at birth, but who don't identify with being male now) aren't 'real' women. As such, there's a general opposition to specific rights and access to things like female-only spaces and workplace protection based on gender; it's illegal to discriminate in employment based on sex in the UK, and that includes cis/trans status. (For anyone who's confused about the specifics of sex and gender, and exactly what the difference is between the two, I wrote a BestOf'ed piece that touched on the topic here that should serve as a primer.)
Rowling isn't unique in this, by any stretch. There have been a number of relatively high-profile individuals on Twitter who have found themselves at odds with the trans community based on what are often views as regressive views. Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd, regularly courts controversy with his TERF views, and Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts has his work cut from a then-upcoming story anthology because of anti-trans tweets. Rowling has been singled out, perhaps because she has a reputation for being progressive -- or pandering to progressives, depending on which side of the argument you fall down on -- but also because she hasn't publicly come out and said her views either way. There was minor outrage when, in March 2018, Rowling liked a tweet that said that 'men in dresses' were treated better than women; however, her representative later said it was an accident, stating: 'I’m afraid J.K Rowling had a clumsy and middle-aged moment and this is not the first time she has favourited by holding her phone incorrectly.'
In June of 2019, a viral blog post suggested that Rowling was a TERF based on her following a notable YouTuber who aligned herself with the TERF movement, Magdalen Berns. Berns has said some stuff that many people didn't agree with, including that trans women are 'blackface actors' and 'men who get sexual kicks from being treated like women'. (Berns, it's worth noting, was a lesbian and intimately involved with the LGBT activist community; conflicts around the issue of whether trans women are somehow contrary to the idea of lesbianism, or whether one is inherently exclusionary to the other, have been pretty significant.) Snopes gave this a rating of 'false', but it was with the -- entirely reasonable -- caveat that retweets and follows aren't the same as a full-throated endorsement of all of someone's views:
(Berns died of a brain tumour in September 2019. That's not really relevant to the story here, but if you're wondering why she hasn't chimed in over this, there's your explanation.)
#RowlingStandsWithMaya
So Rowling has been on a lot of people's TERF-radars for a while now. This came to a head recently with the case of Maya Forstater, a visiting fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), an international thinktank that campaigns against poverty and inequality. This is a charitable organisation based in Washington and London, where Forstater was a tax expert. Her contract expired and was not renewed in March 2019; Forstater claims this is as a direct result of several tweets she made opposing the idea that sex changes were even possible, or that trans individuals should be seen and referred to as the gender they claim. She lost an employment tribunal where she claimed that she had been unfairly discriminated against due to her comments. (Forstater had actually doubled-down on her comments; when she first heard the complaints against her, in December 2018, she noted: '“I have been told that it is offensive to say "transwomen are men" or that women means "adult human female". However since these statement are true I will continue to say them.') You can read an absolute smorgasbord of anti-trans statements from Forstater in the judgement, so the idea that's being touted is that it's just because of a few tweets and no action is... flawed, at best.
Earlier this year, Rowling tweeted:
This was probably her most divisive tweet since she tweeted that wizards used to just shit on the floor and vanish the evidence.
So what does Rowling believe?
The biggest issue with all of this is that Rowling steadfastly conflates biological sex and gender. This goes against the current scientific understanding, as well as as progressive cultural trends. This is one of Reddit's bêtes noires, as you'll see by people in pretty much any thread that discusses the issue of gender when some wag decides to point out that there are only two. (Source: check the comments on this thread in an hour and you'll see what I mean.) This is false -- and before any of you decide to get snippy, I'll point out that I am now a) safely out of the top-level and b) factually correct -- and it's almost always either a misunderstanding of the terms or a wilful effort to troll. The thing is, sex and gender are different concepts, albeit ones that have a lot in common.
Sex is a biological characteristic: generally speaking, it's determined by the 23rd chromosome, XY for males and XX for females. (There are other chromosomal variants, such as XO, which leads to Turner syndrome, or XXY, which leads to Klinefelter syndrome. I'm not going to wade into that in any detail right now -- not because it's not important, but because I'm trying for a broad-strokes approach -- but for the moment just know that more than 98% of people will likely fall into the chromosomal category of either XX or XY.)
Gender is a cultural characteristic. In the west, we generally have two genders, which we also often (somewhat confusingly) call male and female. (This is also not helped by the fact that, outside of humans, gender is occasionally also used to refer to biological sex. Language is messy like that sometimes.) In this sense, 'gender' is often used to encompass both 'psychological sex' -- that is, the way you feel you are, also known as 'gender identity' -- as well as 'social sex' (the gender role that you're socialised into).
Sex and gender have a lot of crossover, but they don't line up 100%. There have been numerous studies that indicate that gender and sex are not the same thing. To what extent the former affects the latter is an important question, and one worthy of study, but there is strong scientific evidence that the brains of transgender individuals generally have more in common with the gender they identify with than the sex that is on their birth certificate, or whatever they've got going on downstairs.
(It's important to note that this post is generally going to discuss trans issues from a binary perspective, male or female. There are also individuals that feel as though they don't fit into either of these groups, and are usually described as 'non-binary'. In several countries, such gender identities are legally recognised, and several non-western cultures have had the concept of a third gender since time immemorial. This is not, despite what people might have you believe, an entirely new concept.)
Rowling's Response
After receiving a lot of pushback about this, Rowling tweeted:
Now, if you conflate sex and gender and don't draw a line between them -- as is common in the TERF movement, then what Rowling says seems to make at least some sense; if you don't draw any lines about sex, how can you meaningfully discuss things like 'same-sex relationships' as being distinct from straight relationships? How can one struggle be different from another? (I didn't say it made a lot of sense, but still; there's at least a veneer there.) Additionally, there are issues that are related to sex and not gender; transwomen, for example, generally don't need to be concerned with ovulation, menstruation and getting pregnant.
The problem is that it completely breaks down if you view sex and gender as distinct definitions with a crossover. No one's saying 'sex isn't real'; they're just saying that sex isn't important in this particular instance. (This is important because you can see a shift in the terminology over the past fifty or so years; 'transgender' is now massively preferred in the community to 'transsexual'.) When Rowling says 'my life has been shaped by being female' and 'I do not believe it’s hateful to say so', what she's really saying is that her life has been shaped by her female sex and her female gender, but she's refusing that same category to other female-gendered individuals (such as trans women), and lumping people who are not female-gendered but chromosomally XX (NB individuals and trans men) in the same category as her by virtue of their genetics. (For example, not many people are going to see these guys in a relationship with a femme-presenting woman and treat them as though they're in a lesbian relationship, nor would they see them in a relationship with a male-presenting individual and call them 'straight' just because of their chromosomes.)
Why do people even care?
For a lot of people, Harry Potter was a formative part of their childhood. Fundamentally, it had somewhat of a progressive stance as a series of books -- 'blood purity' is bad, anyone can be a hero, acceptance of people is important -- but in the years since the last book came out Rowling's views have been shown to be considerably less than progressive in a couple of ways. (There are also arguments that the books aren't particularly accepting of minorities, but that's... really a question for another time.)
The cohort that grew up with Harry Potter are more likely than older generations to accept trans issues as significant and meaningful; acceptance of trans issues is correlated with age (among other things); the younger you are, the more likely you are to have a favourable view of trans rights and trans equality. Now they're collectively seeing that the person who wrote a book that was important to them growing up may have views that do not align with -- and in some ways stand in direct opposition to -- other views on social equality that they hold deeply.
A Note on Gold
This is one of those posts that occasionally takes off and gets gilded. Please don't. I've got something like eighteen years of Reddit Premium at this point, so I get absolutely zero benefit out of it.
If you have Reddit Coins that you'd want to spend on this post, I'd appreciate it if you'd instead use them to highlight other posts that emphasise trans rights or the access to sanitary products to all people who need them. If you wanted to spend actual money on this post, please consider instead donating to an organisation like Freedom4Girls which works to eliminate period poverty around the world for everyone who menstruates, no matter their gender identity.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
I read through the Reddit threads. I guess I’m just really struggling to see obvious anti trans sentiment. She’s discussing aspects that are part of the trans debate but it feels like people are trying very hard to spin them into anti trans sentiment.
maybe time will tell if she truly is transphobic but it doesn’t look like it to me so far...yet.
she definitely enjoys trolling though...you see her tweet from a day ago?