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I didn't read all of JK Rowling's extremely long essay because I got tired of slogging through bad writing, but the part where she said that if she'd been born later, she might have decided to transition stood out like a blinking neon sign, and yet hardly anybody talks about it.
This isn't a, "bigots secretly are what they hate," scenario speculating about somebody based on no evidence other than the bigotry, this is what Rowling told us about herself to explain why she wants to wall off trans men from transitioning.
JK Rowling explained her motivations, and spelled out that they're partly rooted in panic about what the ability of trans men to transition means about her own identity and sense of self, and yet hardly anybody wants to talk about it.
This is not to speculate about Rowling's gender, just to say that she full on told us that she doesn't feel sufficiently secure in her own womanhood to not feel threatened by the fact that other people question their gender, conclude they're not women, and do something about it.
Anyway, this tweet is what got me thinking about the topic again https://twitter.com/e_urq/status/1341419024568225792
We're watching a very public freakout from one of the richest women on the planet, all because she's decided she'd rather fight to destroy other people's lives than to see a therapist and work through her own issues, because she's afraid of what she'll find if she does.
And the thing is, if she ever actually dealt with her own gender issues, she might very well conclude that yes, she is a binary cis woman, but she's so terrified about the prospect that she might find otherwise that she's decided she'd rather be a hateful bigot.
As a final note, as someone who grew up in the Christian homeschool subculture where my parents were in the minority for teaching their daughters math and expecting college, I think I know a thing or two about growing up in a misogynistic world.
The idea that experiencing misogyny makes somebody want to change their gender is patently bullshit. I spent too much of my childhood and young adulthood pushing back against the idea that womanhood is a limitation to take the time to stop and question my gender growing up.
And lest somebody decides to pop in here and suggest that as a homeschool kid, I was too sheltered to be aware that some people transition because they're not the gender they were assigned at birth, my mom watched daytime talk shows in the '80s, I knew trans people existed.
Not that the trans representation on 1980s daytime talk shows was exactly great, but ever since elementary school, I've understood the concept that not everyone fits the gender they were assigned at birth, and that if that gender doesn't fit, you can do something about it.
Not that I was aware of the concept of nonbinary genders back then, but it's not like the English language even had terminology back then. Just because there weren't labels doesn't mean nonbinary people didn't exist though.
And contrary to what people think, it's not just Kids These Days who are describing themselves as nonbinary and using pronouns like they/them. People felt that way before, they just didn't have words in English to put a label on it.
I mean, comics legend Grant Morrison, who's in their 60s, recently came out as nonbinary by basically saying that Kids These Days came up with a term that fit how they'd always felt, and that that's why it's good language evolves over time.
All that to say that it's a hell of a lot of projection for JK Rowling to argue that there's some kind of social contagion around gender and base the argument on the idea that she might have transitioned if she'd been born decades later than she was.
I want to reiterate that I have no idea what Rowling's actual deal with her gender is and I'm not speculating. I'm just saying that her own words say that this is something that distresses her personally, and that fact needs to be included in the discussion.
