Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse wrote a column this week that is another attack on JK Rowling dressed up as a serious consideration of JK Rowling. The prompt for this column has to do with the podcast/interview with Rowling which I’ve written about before. In the first episode we learn about Rowling’s own history as a married woman whose husband became increasingly controlling and abusive. He hid her first Potter manuscript and even threatened to keep their daughter. The relationship culminated in physical fight which left Rowling bruised and seeking help from the police.
All of that is relevant to Rowling’s story and her views but feminist columnist Monica Hesse never mentions it. She’s not interested in understanding, she’s interested in finding a way to label Rowling a transphobe. And really, it’s not that hard if you cheat, which she does. It starts with the pretense that you’re asking a question rather than offering justification for an opinion you clearly already hold.
Is J.K. Rowling transphobic?
That’s why I was listening to the podcast to begin with. It promised that Rowling would “speak with unprecedented candor and depth about the controversies surrounding her — from book bans to debates on gender and sex.” Since 2020, Rowling’s status as a celebrated liberal and literary icon has taken a nosedive because of tweets and references that supporters of trans rights view as transphobic but that Rowling says are merely trying to protect women and girls.
Don’t believe for a moment that Monica Hesse hadn’t made up her mind on this issue long before the arrival of this new podcast. In 2020, she wrote a column about Rowling titled “J.K. Rowling’s Twitter comments about transgender women treat equality like it’s a zero-sum game.” Here’s a sample:
Rowling, who has a history of questionable statements on this issue, believes that what makes someone a woman is a collection of certain chromosomes, plus a collection of certain life experiences: someone who was identified as male at birth cannot have the same life experiences as someone who was designated female, she suggests. And therefore, a trans woman represents a threat to Rowling’s version of womanhood.
Her main assertion, the core of her anxiety, is that the acknowledgment of transgenderism somehow erases her own experiences. That if transgender women are women, then she cannot be…
J.K. Rowling can still be a woman. She can still call herself a woman. The pronouns she uses to describe herself are entirely intact. Frankly, after scrolling through her Twitter mentions for a few hours this weekend — if I were her, I wouldn’t be worried what pronouns people were using for me. I would be reading the anguished, angry responses from fans, and I would be worrying about my adjectives.
So I think it’s safe to say Hesse already had an opinion about all of this, one she’s already shared in the Post. So the idea that she was listening to the podcast with an open mind is just not very credible.
I won’t dissect Rowling’s every tweet or retweet of the past three years — Glamour magazine has a good general rundown, if you’re interested — but I’ll fast-forward a bit to say that Rowling’s Twitter account in the past few months has returned multiple times to one particular British case: a transgender woman who was convicted of rape before she transitioned, and who was now set to be transferred to a women’s prison. Rowling’s attention to this story appeared to be in service to a broader argument that it is grievously dangerous for cisgender women to have to share spaces with transgender women.
Again, this might have been a good moment to bring up some of the details in that previous podcast mentioned above. Why is Rowling so worried about women being forced to share space with violent men? Possibly because she’s been trapped in a violent marriage? But again, Hesse doesn’t want to lead her readers anywhere except the predetermined conclusion.
You might have seen a recent column written by a British writer named EJ Rosetta. Rosetta claimed to have been assigned a piece called “20 Transphobic JK Rowling Quotes We’re Done With,” but said that, after months of research, she hadn’t been able to find “a single one.” Rowling, according to Rosetta, “was saying ‘there are downsides that I feel should be discussed’ not ‘I hate trans people’.”
There, truly, is the whole issue in a nutshell. If your bar for bigotry requires Rowling to say out loud, “I hate trans people,” then that bar will never be cleared. Even if Rowling feels that way, I doubt she’d ever say it that way; even conservative pundits know not to say it that way. There is simply nothing to be strategically gained by uttering such an obviously prejudiced sentence.
Having granted that Rowling has never said she’s a transphobe, Hesse is left doing the thing she already said (in the previous excerpt above) she wouldn’t do, i.e. dissect Rowling’s tweets. And that brings us around to my favorite part of this, the aptly named fuzzy auras.
Journalism is a business for sticklers. Reporters are discouraged from calling anyone transphobic, or homophobic, or racist, because doing so requires knowing what’s in their hearts when the only thing we can know with certainty is what comes out of their mouths.
So what I can say is that what comes out of her mouth, or goes onto her Twitter account, has a fuzzy aura of harmful rhetoric. Rowling might indeed believe she has transgender friends. But taken as a whole, her body of communication on the issue, such as the things she chooses to retweet and the provocative language she uses while doing so — cumulatively, it sucks…
I do not know what is in Rowling’s heart. But reading her Twitter feed, this is the overall effect: Her Twitter feed does not ask its readers to think. It asks them to fear. It creates phobias. Of trans people. It creates trans phobias.
And there it is. She can’t call Rowling a transphobe because she might get herself in trouble for saying that (Rowling recently had her attorneys contact an online activist who labeled her a Nazi). But what Hesse can do is read the fuzzy auras of her tweets and determine that she’s creating “trans phobias.” Wink, wink, say no more.
Of course the case that Hesse refers to, involving a convicted rapist who announced “she” was trans after being arrested is a real case. And Hesse can’t actually show how highlighting this one outrageous case does any harm to trans women who aren’t convicted rapists looking to game the penal system. In fact, it’s about as harmful to law abiding trans women as feminists who highlight cases of violent male rapists are to my personal life, which is to say not at all.
Hesse also doesn’t mention that even former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon agreed the situation was untenable or that she struggled mightily to explain how to square the statement “trans women are women” with her concern about sending a convicted trans woman rapist to a woman’s prison.
I don’t know about you, but excluding women from women’s prisons just because they’ve got penises, male pattern baldness and have committed a couple of rapes seems awfully TERFy to me. https://t.co/1OtW8KVcFN
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) January 30, 2023
I’d love to put the same question to Hesse herself. Does she believe trans women are women even when they’re convicted rapists with male anatomy heading to a woman’s prison? That case is instructive because it reveals there are some situations where sex does matter, at least for most people.
If Monica Hesse was serious about looking into any of this with anything approaching an open mind, she might mention some of these things. She could give her readers a fuller picture of why someone like Rowling feels the need to transgress (pun intended) the received wisdom on these topics. Instead all we get is some name calling to reinforce a position Hesse staked out nearly three years ago.
Finally, it’s nice to see some of the commenters are not siding with Hesse.
The attacks on Rowling, including this one, are oddly personal. Rowling is no DeSantis, who is doing actual harm. Rowling’s detractors seem to see her as somehow worse than people who actually do hate trans people and seek to harm them.
Rowling has made the reasonable argument that women have been oppressed and the victims of violence throughout history and need protection…mainly from men.
As a result of this protection, Rowling believes that women need safe spaces.
Hesse’s main criticism, besides the belabored point about Milo Yiannopoulos, is that Rowling dares to say that trans men are…trans men. Rowling would like society to think a moment before thoughtlessly adopting the mantra “trans women are women.” Maybe there ought to be a conversation given that there are so many people believe that trans men are not identical to women in their needs and concerns as women.
She is demanding that women include trans women in their fight.
Have trans men been active in defending women’s rights, such as the right to abortion? If so, I must have missed it.
Rowling is asking for a conversation.
I would urge readers to actually listen to the podcast. The conversation about Rowling is dominated by people who stridently attack Rowling based on what they have heard on the internet rather than what Rowling has said and done.
The amount of lazy, biased journalism on this story is depressing.
Read and listen to her words and think for yourself.
Well said.
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