J.K. Rowling is a Hero

My Political Coming Out Part 2

I wrote the following a month or more ago and did not post it for fear of consequences. Now, in my post-Trump endorsement time, I’ve come back to it and decided to send it forward. It’s a wee bit out of date, but not much. Since I wrote this, the courts have upheld the English ban on puberty blockers. And people who many believe are men are dominating women’s Olympic boxing. So, things are still kind of at a cultural standstill.

I’m not the biggest fan of the Harry Potter books.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked them.

I shared them with my son. I stayed up all night reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when my dad was in the hospital and asked me to stay in his room because, in his illness, he thought someone might try to kill him.

I got pleasure from reading Rowling’s work; as a professor of English, I have always admired how she got an entire generation of kids into reading just as the Internet was dawning.

But they are kids’ books, and I didn’t read them as a kid, so I don’t have the same love for them I have, say, for The Lord of the Rings or Watership Down. And I remember some years ago rolling my eyes when Rowling declared post ipso facto that Dumbledore was gay. It seemed like a big fat retcon pander.

But let me say it plainly and loudly. She is my hero. She has stood up to the thought police, suffered the slings and barbs of Twitter mobs, put not only her legacy but also her personal security in jeopardy, and has even risked going to jail in opposition to an ideology that has run roughshod over science, common sense, free-speech, medical ethics, and basic fairness.

A few years ago, when she tweeted her first trans-skeptical tweet that turned so many people against her, I thought to myself she has done a brave and powerful thing. She has done what no other person in her position has done, what no other person in power has done, called bullshit on a false ideology that has bullied into submission an entire culture.

It was something that perhaps no one else could have done because no one else had her credibility, a credibility built on millions of loyal young fans worldwide, including a large LGBT fan base grateful for her support and readers inspired to spread what they considered to be her message of tolerance and inclusion. She had a lot of cultural capital, huge sums of goodwill, and not a little money.

She would need all of it over the next few years to survive the onslaught of hate and vitriol that would be hurled her way as a result of her questioning the current gender orthodoxy.

I wasn’t sure she’d make it—especially when my students went from worshipping to calling her a “terrible person”—but I thought, if she did, her voice would be at the crest of the tide turning against the lies and distortions that have been fed to us since the transgender movement went from asking for tolerance to demanding belief and obeisance.

And now, in the wake of The WPATH FILES revealing that “gender-affirming” physicians knew their minor patients weren’t capable of giving consent; following Britain’s NIH’s determination that puberty blockers have not been proven safe and effective and its subsequent ban on them for minors; now after the release of the Cass Report that not only “confronts the shaky evidence for youth gender medicine” but also shows that several medical and scientific organizations have, essentially, been running a transgender Ponzi scheme; now that the claim that puberty blockers are fully reversible has been put to the lie; now that the fact that most kids grow out of gender dysphoria is gaining acceptance; J.K. Rowling is taking a well-deserved victory lap.

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And I’m feeling some shame.

Because, outside of friends and family, I’ve kept quiet about this for years.

No, I’m not a biologist or an “expert,” but I’m not your run-of-the-mill layman either.

For starters, like all my fellow grad students from the 1990s, I was forced to read Judith Butler’s execrable tome, Gender Trouble, that and Foucault’s slightly less annoying History of Sexuality.

But I went beyond that; I wrote a dissertation examining male identity from a relational psychoanalytic perspective. And to do that, I had to read a fair amount of gender theory, both philosophical and “scientific.” I read Denise Riley’s Am I That Name, which interrogates the category of “woman”; I read John Money’s Love and Love Sickness: The Science of Gender Differences and Pair Bonding; John Stoltenberg’s Refusing to be a Man; Robert Stoller’s Presentations of Gender . . . . And don’t get me started about Kraft-Ebbing and Heinrich Ulrichs and Otto Weininger, and all the other late 19th, early 20th century sexologists who taught me about “inversion” and the “third sex” and a “woman’s soul trapped in man’s body.”

I lived and breathed gender for years just so that I could get permission to argue that writers like James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence had something interesting to say about being a man at a time in the history of literary criticism when people were already starting to question whether “being a man” was even a thing.¹

So by the time Caitlyn Jenner got on the cover of Vanity Fair, I knew a thing or two about this subject, and I knew from the start that a. it was full of self-contradictions and incoherencies and b. that it was going to take off. I knew because I saw it happening firsthand. I won’t go any deeper than that, but let’s just say I was sounding the alarms to friends and family long before this whole thing went mainstream, as far back as 2013.

I saw that people were playing fast and loose with the terms “gender” and “sex.” One moment, we were told that sex was biological and gender cultural; the next, we were being asked what gender we were and were being taught that sex was culturally constructed. I knew that, on the one hand, activists like John Stoltenberg argued there were no differences between men and women—that whatever differences there seemed to be, they were like the differences between people with brown and blond hair, that a penis was just an enlarged clitoris and vice versa; and I knew that on the other hand, dysphoric people would argue that they were “in the wrong body,” they were meant to be in the body of another sex, that their brain was “gendered.” And I knew that somehow no one would call anyone on these contradictions.

I knew that you could not construct a functioning artificial penis; I knew that vaginoplasty for men results in a wound that wants to heal; I knew that “bottom surgery” results in infertility and often in loss of the ability to orgasm. Before anyone talked about “men menstruating,” I knew there were “trans-women” fathering children.²

I sometimes talked about, even raged about, this with a family member, who kept asking me, “Why does it bother you?” as if I shouldn’t be bothered that the neighbors are sterilizing their children or that doctors are cutting healthy body parts off of adolescents whom I don’t know. I guess if they start removing healthy eyeballs from teenagers who want to be blind, I shouldn’t bother about that either. . . . It’s not my kid, right? And hey, that mom on the WhatsApp group is so proud of her now blind-identifying girl. Who am I to vocalize my narrow-minded notions?

But I didn’t write about it, not on Facebook, not on Twitter, and certainly not in any mainstream publication.

Why? Because I’m a fiction writer trying to shop around a novel and a trunk full of short stories, and I didn’t want to get blacklisted by agents and publishers. Because I’m a college professor, and I didn’t want students picketing my office and calling the Dean to get me fired. Because I didn’t want to lose friends. Because, once I started on Substack, I didn’t want to lose subscribers. Because I didn’t want random nutcases on Twitter doxing me and threatening my family.

Now, I guess I feel a wee bit saferbecause J.K. Rowling seems to be winning, so now I’m writing and publishing this. It might have been brave to have done so a year ago. Certainly, it would have been ten-plus years ago when I started to see all this coming down the pike.

I can tell myself I don’t have Rowling’s billions to protect me; I don’t have novels sitting on the shelves of Barnes and Noble; I don’t have a loyal fan base large enough even to stand hand-to-hand down my driveway. And that’s all true. But I still feel a little late to the game, a little ashamed I didn’t take a public stand over what has been, essentially, child sterilization and mutilation.

That’s all I have to say for now. It’s not enough. It never has been.

1. For a taste of my dissertation and my one academic publication see: Recognizing Masochism

2. Here’s a simple definition of “man” and “woman” for those who are struggling—or pretending to do so. Call it a definition on one foot. If you ever could, ever will be able to, or ever did father a child, you’re a man. If you ever could, ever will be able to, or ever did conceive a child, you’re a woman. All the rest is commentary.

A bit of that commentary: my definition settles the issue for 98.3% or more of questions regarding sexual identity. The other 1.7 percent or so involving people with DSD, once known as “intersex,” may indeed be more complicated both biologically and philosophically (though, in truth, that 1.7 is probably a high estimate if you’re talking about truly puzzling cases; one estimate puts the number much lower at .0018%). But/, if we could clear away the nonsense about people in biologically unambiguous categories, then we could have a more intelligent, useful, and empathic discussion about the people who are not—as well as those who are.