PicoBlog

So, down here on our little sinking ship where our government is just shuffling the deck chairs around, bigger cultural trajectories sometimes feel very far away, like, The World out there is heading for the moon while we’re on a road trip to the Northern Cape and about to run out of petrol.

Trans identity politics is one of those things for me. Let me say if you are reading this and you are affected by, going through your own transition, or knowledgeable of the Trans Agenda, this post will probably annoy you. Because it is going to be me puzzling through some messy shit that touches on everything from belief to parenting to identity politics.

      If like me, you don’t know what the words TERF, 4chan and cishet refer to, and when the word ‘trans’ comes up you shrink back in terror of saying the wrong thing, but also want to know more, and be allowed some voice when the topic comes up, then maybe this post is for you.

Earlier this year I listened to The Witch Trials of JK Rowling.

     ‘The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling is an audio documentary that examines some of the most contentious conflicts of our time through the life and career of the world’s most successful author. In conversation with host Megan Phelps-Roper, J.K. Rowling speaks with unprecedented candor and depth about the controversies surrounding her — from book bans to debates on gender and sex. The series also examines the forces propelling this moment in history, through interviews with Rowling’s supporters and critics, journalists, historians, clinicians, and more.’

     ‘Megan Phelps-Roper is a writer, host, and producer with The Free Press. Born and raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, Megan left a life of religious extremism in 2012. She has spent the past decade using her experiences to work with schools on anti-bullying campaigns, with law enforcement organizations investigating   deradicalization, and with tech companies on the intersection of safety, free speech, and the value of dialogue across ideological divides.’

This podcast has received mixed reviews, but it absolutely consumed my mind while I was listening to it. I talked to everyone I knew about it. My husband rolled his eyes every time I fiendishly leaned towards a dinner guest and said, ‘Have you heard of The Witch Trials of JK Rowling’. Phelps-Roper ends the podcast saying that if you found her show interesting, please talk about it with friends and family, anyone that will listen, so we can get back to dialogue and move away from the defence-combat that has become the norm when discussing difficult subjects. And I was like, Amen Sister! I hear that call and continued my relentless search of interlocutors, this post being the last in a long line of confused conversations. But I think there is value in confusion, so I’m forging ahead.

       While I loved Harry Potter as a teenager, surprisingly, I knew next to nothing about JK Rowling the person, and even less about the Trans community, and certainly nothing about the fallout between the two. I think this went someway to explaining my fascination with the podcast. I was less coming to it to ‘hear her side’ or ‘take a critical stance’ so much as just plain old curious.

       In case you didn’t know, like me, this is my summary understanding of things. A few years back JK Rowling took a clear stance on Twitter (now X, who can keep up?) and other social media platforms that Trans rights should not contravene the rights of biological women. And that biologically female women have a qualitatively different claim to protection than trans women and that she does not want does not want sex distinctions abolished. I would have to go and look it all up to give you clear references, which I don’t have the time to do now (I’m writing this while my husband is at a kids’ party with the cherubs, so speed is of the essence. If any of this piques your interest please google, listen to the podcast, there is tonnes out there), but her claims were badly received (understatement) by many in the Trans community and allies of the Trans community. A furore ensued, leading to JKR being ‘canceled’[i]. JKR maintains that she is not transphobic, and it was all a profound misunderstanding. Her opponents say she is acting in bad faith, she claims she is being straw-manned.

      A Washington Post piece [ii] asks of JK Rowling, ‘If she knows and loves trans people, I’m wondering why she doesn’t dedicate equal space to retweeting articles where trans folks are the heroes, not the villains of the story. Or the victims of violent crime — as they disproportionately are — rather than the perpetrators.’ The article continues, ‘She is exactly the kind of voice that decent people who have not paid much attention to transgender issues might decide to listen to, which gives her voice outsize power.’

      I think this a fair assessment. But I think Phelps-Roper’s intentions in the podcast are something different. I believe Phelps-Roper genuinely wants to have a conversation about how and why things get so messy in ideological contests. And she takes the long view – going back to when JKR first came on the scene and extreme Christian communities were burning her books, accusing her of promoting the occult.

      Phelps-Roper is saying, isn’t it interesting that the extreme right wing (here, conservative Christians) and the extreme left wing (here, the trans community) are all wanting to cancel the same woman, but at different times for different reasons? The form is the same, the content different. I think this is a good question to ask.

      Phelps-Roper is motivated by her experience of being conscientized by early Twitter, back when people were nice on the internet and it was a community of exploration, and diversity of opinion, not a marketplace where clickbait mentality fosters lowest common denominator mudslinging contests… it was the early 2000s, the heyday of the blogosphere, etcetera. You know, before capitalism (hobbyhorse!) got its grubby little paws on the internet, disfiguring it, making it about money, not information. A point I will come back to.

      So ja, as a Christian, as someone who loves what the internet was and could-be, as someone who loves a good debate, who loves defending the underdog, I was on Phelps-Roper’s page. Most reviewers seem to see Phelps-Roper as some annoying cheerleadery type who ‘just has questions’ while toting a covert agenda, but I found her recasting of this whole issue within the wider context of being brought up in the nineties helpful. (I do take the point that I probably found it interesting because she is mirroring my own identity, and someone else would probably just be like, oh yawn.)

      Her/my historical context looks like this: The economy was booming for most western democracies, a wave of new technology was afoot – the internet, email, cell phones; this first wave of global connectivity also gave rise to a seemingly more tolerant culture. Everything was changing: Ellen came out as gay, apartheid was in its death throes, the Cold War was ending.

      But alongside these cultural ‘wins’, a backlash was mounting, fed by the insecurity of the socially dislocated in this new world. The more conservative saw the advent of gay rights as lasciviousness, Clinton’s indiscretions and subsequent impeachment added fuel to their moral fire. Gangster rap brought girls, sex, and drugs into the mainstream, and for the anti-conformists there was grunge, goth and death metal - Sepultura, System of a Down, Placebo (the mainstay of my husband’s teenage CD collection), with their poster-child Marilynne Manson providing fashion inspiration to the youth of worried parents.

      Myself bewildered by this new world, hitherto only familiar with the teen worship music of DC Talk and Rebecca St James, was startled when the boys in our youth group started smoking weed in the park and listening to scary music. In a fit of frightened self-confidence and worry for their souls, I remember marching up to one of the boys, and holding up his much-loved Antichrist Superstar[1] album in my hands, demanding that he smash it into bits.

      This decade was also the beginning of labelling disruptive children as suffering from attention deficit disorder. Previously an unavailable condition for tired parents and frustrated teachers to blame in their attempts at understanding the bewildering youth in their homes and schools. The pharmaceutical conglomerates laughed their way to the bank, securing lifelong customers (I know it’s not this simple, nothing is, but we’re doing a highlights package here).

       Then of course, there was the birth of the 24-hour news cycle and satellite television. Wherever you were in the world you could watch as atrocities you might otherwise not have been aware of unfolded right before your eyes. Cult leaders in Waco, Texas, the Oklahoma bombing, the Columbine school shooting, were all more familiar to me than the reality of what was happening in my proverbial backyard. Isolated in our privilege, we worried about an evil world we saw through our TV screens but had no way of knowing what our countrymen were enduring, there, in that Other Group Area.

      Okay, so context is set.

      In discussion with JKR, Phelps-Roper looks at ‘the rise of internet message boards and their overspill into the mainstream... The two examined are Tumblr (essentially sweet and lefty) and 4chan (like a racist, Columbine-loving Andrew Tate)’.[iii] It is fascinating stuff – how issues that were niche, fringe, were dragged onto our timelines and made us feel like we needed an opinion on things we never before knew existed.

       Fast-forward: Harry Potter success, Harry Potter backlash, JKR famous, gender debates become more central, messy, complicated, necessary … JKR makes statements about not wanting to abolish biologically based sex distinctions. We all fall down.

       ‘Why is JK such a big deal, well because she’s super famous and so what she says has weight… and that is why trans activists are mad (in part), this is not your average bigot at a Sunday lunch, this is like, someone who has had her books burned… hence the title of the podcast’.[iv]

        I am not writing this post to discuss the substantive issues, because I am still working out my own position on those, but what struck me most was how the debate left me feeling like one can be a seen as only “entirely good or utterly bad”.[v] That can’t be good.

         In an article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian, looking at cancel culture in journalism, she notes that it ‘is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space’, she continues that there is a culture war underway ‘with everyone picking their side according to how they see themselves politically’.[vi] She concludes that ‘Inclusivity doesn’t mean including only those you agree with’.

        So, my question is what is the value of identity, and identity politics, in all of this? Are we crucifying each other on the altar of politics by framing narcissism as a form of ethics? How can we take seriously respect for each other AND still allow for thorough debate?

       In the second episode JKR says, ‘a sense of righteousness is not incompatible with doing terrible things’[vii] and I think this cuts every which way. She continues, ‘We should mistrust ourselves most when we are certain. In my worldview, conscience speaks in a very small and inconvenient voice. It’s normally saying to you, Think again, look more deeply, consider this.’

       Critics say that ‘Rowling tends to couch her paranoia about “erasing the concept of sex” with placating caveats that attempt to deflect any and all accusations of transphobia. She’s gesturing toward nuance but the net effect is incoherence. She wrote in that [now infamous] June 2020 essay: “It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signaling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity.”’[viii]

        Is JKR being incoherent in her positions on sex and gender? Maybe. But the echo chamber of contemporary non-debate, means all we have left is side-picking, and this seems facile to me. You’re damned if you say anything other than what someone wants to hear, and I have deep sympathy for JKR’s frustration with this.

        In my frenzied dinner guest badgering while I was listening to the podcast, I asked someone whose intellect I respect immensely whether she had listened to it. Her immediate response was, ‘No, but can we just agree that JK Rowling is a Terf’[ix] This was before we had had any kind of discussion on anything substantive whatsoever. The conversation was over before it even started, which seems to be Phelps-Roper and Rowling’s whole point, no?

Okay, last point (I think). One question I keep coming back to, that sits uneasily with me, and I feel I might be hanged for saying this, but here goes. Why gender? What is it about gender that has everyone so up in arms right now and in this way? There has always been a variety of gender expression. That does not seem to me a very controversial point. But the need to pathologise, and to medicalise, gender dysphoria worries me for how it is bound up with pharmaceutical capitalism. When you diagnose someone and medicate them, you are creating a life-time customer. You cannot take a tablet for the discomforts of class and race, for the psychological damage that is done because of prejudice. A tablet cannot bring agreement between how the world sees you and your desire to be seen a certain way. Okay, you say, but this is why we have a mental health crisis, and we are all on anti-depressants anyway. Sure, I hear you, but those meds are dealing with symptoms. Here we are playing with the building blocks of who we are. Maybe we have always done this as humans, and this is just the next thing in a long-line of using scientific invention, human progress, coupled with greed, to produce new ways to sell us new versions of ourselves. But I feel we always need to be alert to the ways the market is able to take our valid concerns, our broken hearts, our needs and desires, package them, and sell them back to us as a solution.

…

I would love your feedback on this post. Please feel free to write to me, educate me, debate with me. All I have written here is provisional.

I will end with this, ‘Love is due to persons, not to ideologies’.[x]

[1] Marilyn Manson’s second studio album, Antichrist Superstar, was released in September 1996.

[i] If you don’t know what it means to be canceled you are even more hopeless than me. Here’s what the Cambridge Online Dictionary defines it as:
[ T ] informal

to completely reject and stop supporting someone, especially because they have said something that offends you:

A celebrity who has shared an unpopular opinion on social media risks being "canceled": they are completely boycotted by fans.

College students decided to cancel her after her homophobic tweet.

[ii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/03/06/witch-trials-jk-rowling-podcast-hesse-column/

[iii] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/mar/04/the-witch-trials-of-jk-rowling-review-dear-daughter-sisters-kaitlin-prest-the-heart-natalie-ken-bruce-vernon-kay-gary-davies-radio-2

[iv] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/mar/04/the-witch-trials-of-jk-rowling-review-dear-daughter-sisters-kaitlin-prest-the-heart-natalie-ken-bruce-vernon-kay-gary-davies-radio-2

[v] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/mar/04/the-witch-trials-of-jk-rowling-review-dear-daughter-sisters-kaitlin-prest-the-heart-natalie-ken-bruce-vernon-kay-gary-davies-radio-2

[vi] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jul/21/what-have-we-learned-from-bari-weiss-we-need-plurality-in-journalism

[vii] https://www.vulture.com/article/witch-trials-jk-rowling-podcast-essay-review.html

[viii] https://jezebel.com/jk-rowling-podcast-review-1850145649

[ix] TERF - Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist

/təːf/

noun

DEROGATORY

"they accused the protester of being a TERF and transphobic"

[x] Abigail Favale, https://threethingsnewsletter.substack.com/p/pronouns-facts-and-why-phillip-doesnt?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=338121&post_id=136271608&isFreemail=true&r=lldpn&utm_medium=email

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