Updated June 7th, 2020 at 10:57 IST
JK Rowling faces heat for stand on transgenders, says 'it isn't hate to speak the truth'
On Saturday, 'Harry Potter' author JK Rowling sparked major controversy on Twitter for her opinion about 'people who menstruate' by claiming that 'sex is real'.
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Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been facing major backlash from netizens and the LGBTQ community for a series of allegedly anti-transgender tweets that she posted on Saturday. She sparked controversy when she shared an opinionated article titled “Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate” and pointed out the lack of terminology for 'people who menstruate'. She tweeted, "‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
Twitterati immediately called out Rowling for her comment by calling her “anti-trans” and “transphobic”. They claimed that transgender people, non-binary people and gender-nonconforming people can also menstruate. Rowling followed that tweet by criticizing the idea that someone’s biological sense isn’t real.
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.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling)
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.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling)
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The author stood her ground that she believed in the fact that sex is real and struck out at people calling her a TERF, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Rowling has been in a soup with the community for quite some time now for her binary view of sex and gender. Through another tweet, she has even defended her ideology by pointing out that her life has been shaped by being 'female'.
I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling)
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The celebrated storyteller had recently faced backlash for another tweet that she had accidentally shared while promoting her new fairytale book The Ickabog. While replying to one fan-made drawing Rowling accidentally pasted an explicit message, for which she later apologised. The post which has since been deleted read, "I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth! In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he’d said he wanted to ‘mess up some TERFs’ was just ‘bravado’. #TheIckabog."
The 'Wolf' in the original post referred to Tara Wolf, a transgender woman who was convicted for assaulting a transphobic feminist woman Maria Maclaughlin during a protest in London in 2017. Rowling was criticized for addressing Wolf as a male and not a female. Following the accident, she even apologized for the explicit tweet and later posted multiple tweets defending her action and slamming people for calling her out.
(Sorry about the random and totally unconnected sentence that made its way in there. I accidentally pasted in part of a very un-Ickaboggish message I'd just received 😳)
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling)
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I'm going to say this once and I'm going to say it calmly and politely. I certainly didn't mean to paste a quotation from a message about the assault of Maria Maclaughlin into a tweet to a child, especially given the language used by the person convicted of the crime 1/2
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling)
However, I am not - as many of the people now swarming into my mentions seem to think - ashamed of reading about the assault. You should know by now that accusations of thought crime leave me cold. Take your censorship and authoritarianism elsewhere. They don't work on me.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling)
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Published June 7th, 2020 at 10:57 IST