Author J.K. Rowling has published a new essay standing by the position on sex and gender she first laid out six years ago, saying her views “haven’t changed” even as she has faced what she describes as “an avalanche of death, rape, and torture threats.”
The essay, published Wednesday, updates her June 2020 piece titled “J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues.” Rowling first spoke out in 2019 after a British woman lost her job for refusing to use certain pronouns when referring to a biological man who identified as a woman.
In the new essay, Rowling writes that “the landscape certainly has” changed since 2020, and that her own involvement in the issue “has become practical as well as theoretical,” prompting the update.
She restates her objection to what she calls “the current, dominant strain of trans activism,” which holds that a man who declares himself a woman should be treated as a woman in every context.
“Where women go to undress, he, too, should go to undress. If there’s an award or job advertised as exclusively for women, he should be eligible. Should he wish to play sports, he must be on the women’s team.”
Rowling also writes that “no breast-feeding or rape support group should be allowed to exclude him,” that lesbians should be expected to include him in their dating pool if he is sexually oriented toward women, and that if convicted of a crime, “even rape,” he should be locked up with women.
She is careful to say that “without question” there are vulnerable transgender people, and that trans people should not face discrimination in housing or employment, nor be “stripped of their human rights, or denied personal safety.” But she argues safeguarding measures for women are grounded in statistics rather than hostility.
“Men as a group pose a risk to women and girls, as a group. Of course, all men aren’t rapists, voyeurs or flashers, but enough are to make safeguarding necessary. That’s why women and girls want separate changing rooms and public bathrooms.”
She adds that women need “male-free spaces when seeking to recover their sense of self and safety after rape,” not out of hatred for trans people, but because “women and girls have specific issues and needs that men do not, even if they’re calling themselves women and even if they’ve taken cross-sex hormones.”
Rowling draws a sharp contrast between today’s trans activism and the civil rights, gay rights and women’s rights movements of the twentieth century, which she says were built by “ordinary people who had little to no individual power” organizing at the grassroots to challenge entrenched institutions. “Twenty-first century trans activism is the very inverse of those movements,” she writes. “It is elitist to its core.”
Last year Rowling established the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, a private organization she personally funds to support women “who don’t have deep pockets or expensive lawyers on speed dial” in legal cases involving sex-based rights and single-sex spaces.
She closes the essay by vowing to “continue to speak out, continue to use my money to help women who otherwise couldn’t afford to go to court, and continue to ensure that women in my area can still access female-delivered, female-centered support after rape.”
“If a man can be a woman, there is no such thing as a woman. That might not matter to you personally, but it matters to millions of women who don’t have the luxury of pretending that their sex doesn’t matter. I remain on their side.”
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