In 2020, author, billionaire, and anti-trans megadonor J. K. Rowling released an essay describing her views on the transgender community. Even at the time, those views were overwhelmingly negative and fearful.
For people well-sourced on anti-trans narratives, it clearly demonstrated that the author had fallen down a rabbit hole of conspiratorial claims about trans healthcare and the trans rights movement, as I wrote at the time. However, those less well versed in anti-trans extremism were able to plausibly interpret it as Rowling raising legitimate questions and concerns.
In subsequent years, Rowling’s combative, hateful posts on Twitter (also known as X) have long since removed any doubt that she is deeply ensconced in a hate movement, one which she has increasingly moved to assume leadership of by funding lawsuits aimed at forcing the exclusion of trans people from public life. In a podcast dedicated to exploring her anti-trans views she even suggested cis men ought to confront and challenge trans women who attempted to use women’s restrooms. That was back in 2023.
I mention this history in order to make it clear that Rowling’s latest essay can’t be considered her mask off moment, because whatever mask she still wore to conceal the ugliness of her views in 2020 has been off for years. The new essay makes the ugliness of her views more widely accessible, though, which makes for a useful opportunity to talk about that ugliness and about how far she’s moved from her 2020 posture of raising reasonable concerns.
In the new essay, Rowling repeatedly makes clear in this essay that she does not believe trans women should be supported, valued, or affirmed in any circumstances. If that’s not hate, I don’t know what is. She is implacably, utterly opposed to people she describes as men who have declared themselves to be women.
Rowling refers to trans women as men no less than 12 times over her more than 2200 words. Here are some examples of the phrasing that she uses:
“we oppose the current, dominant strain of trans activism, which holds that a man who declares himself a woman is, literally, a woman, and is therefore entitled to be treated as a woman”
“the desire of trans-identified men to access those spaces is the progressive cause du jour”
“women and girls have specific issues and needs that men do not, even if they’re calling themselves women”
“the only other rape crisis centre in Edinburgh was run by a trans-identified man”
There should be absolutely no mistake here: This is hate speech. These are slurs. “Trans-identified man” is a slur. It is ugly and hateful and it is designed to engender disgust and suspicion towards innocent trans women for no reason other than that they are trans.
It is hateful to suggest that trans people are illegitimate pretenders seeking to infiltrate cis women’s spaces for the purposes of endangering them. It is also completely untrue, unsupported by literally anything but the conspiracy theories of the anti-trans movement. In the UK, this movement has won everything they ever wanted, from making conversion therapy the only allowable treatment for trans youth to barring trans people from restrooms designed for either sex. And yet this movement, with Rowling as its baying, bloodthirsty leader, still demands more punishment, more discrimination, more exclusion, more blood. It is a hate movement through and through. There are no reasonable concerns, and Rowling has none to share. As a substitute, she mentions funhouse mirror versions of some of the more lurid tabloid stories from the UK press. She has no legitimate concerns to present involving real women experiencing real harms and haughtily claims the only people asking her to present any would be trans women, who she of course refers to only ever as men.
The essay is also hateful, in a more subtly noxious way; it leaves roughly half of all trans people completely out. In Rowling’s vomitous expulsion of transmisogynistic hate there is no room for transgender men, or for any trans person who was assigned female at birth. This despite the fact that this group constitutes slightly more than half of all the people who are trans.
This means that each time Rowling reinforces hateful stereotypes about trans women she is also reinforcing the false narrative that the trans rights movement is a movement by and for trans women, and that its goals are about trans women accessing women’s spaces in particular, not about allowing trans people of any gender to live freely and peacefully as our authentic selves. While leaving out trans men is not the most egregious aspect of her essay, it is telling how determined Rowling is to present a fictional universe where trans men do not exist.
This twisted picture of trans people does not come from a desire to ensure the safety of women. Cis women have never had anything to fear from transgender acceptance, and are more likely than men to endorse trans rights. It comes instead from an irrational all encompassing hatred of trans women, an unwillingness to grant them basic humanity, and a determination to cast them as villains and deceivers when they’ve done nothing wrong. When she calls trans women men, over and over and over again, she’s not describing what she understands to be reality or defending women or making a point about the definitions of words, she’s seeking to create a picture of a monstrous person who should be feared and shunned. While the screed goes on and on, there’s nothing more there, no subtle nuance, no legitimate concerns. There’s only hate, a few weak protestations that it isn’t hate, and even more seething, naked hate.
Rowling hates trans women. Not trans people (though she’s willing to let trans men suffer for her hatreds), trans women. Her essay is open in its disgust, naked in its contempt. There’s nothing left to analyze, no more to say. There’s only hate.
