Do you believe in magic
“Charlotte” Clymer, who gained fame as a patronizing male “feminist” under the name Charles Clymer, has a piece in the Washington Post telling JK Rowling what to do.
Woven throughout the narrative is an insistence on love and community and integrity and inclusion, which is why it has broken my heart in recent years to see Rowling’s inexplicable replacement of justice-minded imagination with a bigotry-driven rejection of science and reality.
So Team Trans gets to claim both imagination and science & reality, while taking them away from Rowling?
In her tweet, Rowling effectively dismissed [the judge’s ruling in Maya Forstater’s suit], suggesting that Forstater was being fired for “stating that sex is real,” a common transphobic assertion that has been dismissed by medical experts and other scientists.
It’s transphobic to say sex is real? So sex is not real? What is it then? And medical experts and other scientists agree that sex is not real?
I naively held out hope that Rowling was probably confused about transgender identities and simply needed someone to clue her into the reality of our lives, helping her cut through the disinformation pushed by bigots. I have seen people with impeccable progressive credentials somehow be unaware of basic facts about the trans community; was it not possible that the most beloved children’s author of my generation, someone who consistently seemed to operate from a place of empathy, simply needed better friends who could help allay her lack of knowledge?
But it isn’t a matter of disinformation and lack of awareness of basic facts and lack of knowledge. It’s a matter of having a different understanding of information and facts and knowledge, different from the jargon-spouting fanatics like Clymer.
I couldn’t concede that a writer famous for creating space for marginalized people in an imaginative world (even if it was often retroactive, as when she belatedly announced that Dumbledore was gay after finishing the series) could ignore the universal consensus of medical experts and other scientists, from the World Health Organization to the American Medical Association to the Royal Society of Medicine, validating and affirming trans people in our authenticity.
Like that. That’s what I mean. It’s just jargon. “Validating and affirming trans people in our authenticity” – that’s not medical expertise or science, it’s just political jargon.
I was left realizing that transgender people embody the magical world of Harry Potter better than almost anyone.
Indeed! The magical, fictional world of Harry Potter. That’s rather our point.
Universal suggests all of them; from what I see, it’s actually a rather small minority. The rest are either not committed either way, playing along, or disagreeing with trans dogma.
Yes, you have PZ Myers, and some other biologists, but my experience is that not everyone has drunk the Kool Aid. J.K. Rowling is being more scientific in her thinking than the trans community or any of their allies.
Please quit claiming that all the scientists agree with you, because many do not. They do know better than to speak up, but some are, definitely.
*citation needed
It’s not just that it’s not actually universal. It’s that there probably isn’t a single scientist who asserts that “sex is not real.” I’m sure there are plenty of scientists (and novelists and dog walkers and grocery store clerks) who would say something like “trans people are whatever gender they say they are.” But I’m not seeing how this is a scientific hypothesis, observation, or conclusion.
It’s like saying, “Science has proven that adulthood starts at 20 years, 3 months, and not at 21 like many people used to believe.” It hasn’t. It can’t.
‘It’s transphobic to say sex is real? So sex is not real?’ If sex isn’t real, then wth are trans people?
Oh and sort-of apropos this post, I’ve been noticing for some time that it seems no longer possible to just say ‘I disagree’. You’re not allowed to simply disagree–with someone’s facts, or their interpretation of the facts, or the structure of their arguments; any difference of opinion inherently implies that the other person is evil, stupid, ‘arguing in bad faith’, ‘intellectually dishonest’, or something. I’ve had a few conversations online and IRL over the past several months that went something like ‘if you believe x you’re wrong/a bigot/ignorant/etc.’ to which I calmly reply, ‘I don’t believe anything in particular about this, I just disagree with what you said.’
Does “sex is not real” mean “Sex is not a basis for discrimination or oppression or sexual attraction or the kinds of experiences different groups of human beings are likely to have”?
If so, that’s a dumb thing to say.
Yes, Ben, I fear it does. Doing away with all sex-based protections of women is as much a logical extension of the trans agenda as persecution of homosexuality.
TRA is just MRA of a different color.
Do I detect just a hint of hyperbole in that ‘broken heart’ claim?
Translation: Just you wait, Rowling. We’ll have the first of our re-education camps up and running soon.
Arrogant bastard! It’s not enough to tell us all what we must believe, they are now working on choosing our friends for us. Not at all like a religion, though. Especially not like one of the more insular, controlling religions; LDS, Scientologists, JWs, and so-on.
I think trans ideology agrees that sex exists; they just disagree that there are only two immutable sexes. You can be male, female, or part male, and part female. You might be none of those. You might be mostly one and become mostly the other. Why — it’s the *opposite* of denying the existence of sex, because it’s so enriched with permutations and possibilities.
Sastra, what they believe is hard to tell, because what they say changes. They do say “sex is not real”. That can have multiple meanings. But they do seem to think that there is no reality to our biological sex, continually conflating it with gender, except when it is useful for them to separate it from gender, and then accusing us of conflating sex with gender.
Whatever they believe or don’t believe is actually no longer relevant to the discussion, because they will say wildly contradictory things, often within the same sentence, without any apparent cognitive dissonance, and then when we try to interpret what they have said through a reality filter, they accuse us of saying something we did not say, misunderstanding the incomprehensible message they have just given us (incomprehensible being my word, not theirs; they seem to believe they are perfectly clear).
Sex is not real is a nonsense statement, no matter how they mean it. Biological sex is real, and yes, there are two sexes. They move from gender to sex and back again in a whirlwind. They are creating a vortex that sucks every bit of logic in and twists it into an unrecognizable mess.
I don’t think anyone is being unfair by taking the statement “sex is not real” through all the possible manifestations of such a statement, since they probably do mean that sex does not exist; at least, they believe that on Tuesday. On Wednesday, they mean something else all together, and by Friday, they mean everything and nothing.
If biological sex exists, but people’s sexes can shift over time, then… How can biological sex exist?
Again: if gender and/or sex is not a function of anatomy, and it’s not a matter of cultural assumptions, then what the hell is left? The answer: gender identity. Which is what, again? If it doesn’t correspond with anything outside of your own skull, how can you know how to interpret it? How could you ever know that this feeling/sense/belief is best captured by the label “woman” or the label “man”?
The “that has been dismissed” bit links to that idiotic “Scientific” American article declaring that the idea there are two sexes is “phony science”. Groan. Supposedly scientific publications like SciAm do a real disservice when they publish crap that gets referenced over and over.
Trans-semantics. Concept-fluid. Used to be called “equivocation,” I think.
Here’s the thing I keep seeing. There’s a lot (apparently) of trans women wanting to have sex with women and some trans men wanting to have sex with men. They call themselves lesbians and gay, and yet their sexual attractions seem to match the norm for their sex.
That’s a bold claim. I’m sure there are individual scientists taking that view, but what does the majority of the field say, hmm? I’d love to see a poll.
@Ben #11:
There are animals that are sequential hermaphrodites. Humans are not such, but nevertheless.
More relevantly, how can someone’s sex be retroactively different. There are many TRAs who will tell you that Tammy, who was Tommy until yesterday, was always a girl/woman/female.
You’re asking for objectivity. That’s (apparently) a mistake. The type of intersectional critical theory from which all the trans nonsense flows has basically disavowed objectivity as a tool of the oppressor. (For example.)
It’s quite possible that the majority of trans-people do have some level of authenticity that could be validated and confirmed. But then you have White-Yaniv-McKinnon-this mook. They are obviously not authentic by any measure.