Dear Ms. Rowling
An open letter to Harry Potter’s author from the parent of a transgender fan
My daughter is ten now. Old enough to have read your books and watched the movies. But not quite old enough to make sense out of why you’re working so hard to demonize the work and progress of her transgender community.
It’s hard to know how much of the world to expose her to. When I’m sheltering her too much. I want her to know that there are people in the world who dislike transgender people, especially transgender women. I want her to be prepared, informed. But I don’t want her to have to feel all the fear and anger that I do as an adult, on her behalf, as her parent.
So from time to time, I write letters to the editor, join a protest, or donate money to transgender organizations. I do it because I care about her, wanting a better world for her to emerge into. At some point she’ll be leading the fight and I’ll be watching her back.
But maybe for one last time I feel like I need to speak out in ways that she can’t quite yet.
The media’s influence
You’ve written about your concerns about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, about the problem of Tumblr, Reddit, and YouTube turning young people transgender. I would like to assure you that when my daughter transitioned, in preschool, she had almost no exposure to Tumblr, Reddit, or YouTube. Her minimal YouTube exposure was confined to celebrities reading children’s books and impossibly cheerful children’s musicians.
Among the hundreds of other parents of transgender children I’ve met through support groups and international conferences, I’d say, partially due to our children being elementary school aged, no widespread pattern of Reddit or Tumblr usage has emerged.
Of course, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, despite it’s ominous capital letters, isn’t an actual diagnosis or condition. It’s an article’s poetic description of a group of parent’s perceptions of their teens coming out of the closet as trans. Which, I can imagine, could feel quite sudden, for those parents.
That’s not natural
I suspect what you’re reaching for with the social-media-turns-kids-trans theory is some sort of explanation for the tremendous growth in visibility and rights for transgender people in the last decade. You’ve referred to it as an “explosion.”
And, like these parents, awareness of trans peoples’ existence may feel very sudden to you. And, like we did for that last several decades with homosexuality, you may be searching for an explanation for it. Is it vaccines turning the kids trans? Cell phone towers? Overbearing mothers?
It seems that merely hearing of the existence of trans people can turn some people trans. Almost like they were already trans, but didn’t know that transitioning was a possibility until… until they learned that it was.
Erasing women
Another concern that you’ve brought up is that acknowledging the existence of transgender people will erode cisgender women’s existence. And while internalized misogyny is a horrific reality that women the world over face, I think that you might find, talking to transgender people, that they don’t primarily transition because of a hatred of the gender they were assigned at birth. Their stories are actually much more three-dimensional, joyful, and rich than that.
If we trust and listen to trans folks, I think you might find that they’re on the bleeding edge of honoring gender, allowing all women to connect with womanhood, allowing all women to be who they authentically are without a prescriptive code about what you have to do to measure up.
And while, even if your numbers are accurate (they rarely are when it comes to trans issues), and more people assigned female at birth are discovering they’re male than people assigned male discovering that they’re female, I don’t think this is going to make a substantial dent on the world’s gender balance. While some people that you assumed were women may turn out not to be, you also have amazing people like my daughter joining alongside you.
And even teens with the highest concentration of Tumblr, Reddit, and YouTube consumption are rarely transgender. Most of the cisgender women you know will stay cisgender women for the rest of their lives.
Dodging gayness
You’ve also brought up concerns about people pressuring their children to transition genders in order to avoid being gay. To which I can only reply: What?
Have you met trans people? Have you met gay people? In precisely which universe are people less bullied for being trans than gay? Are conservative parents more comfortable having transgender children than gay children?
And also, in case no one has brought this up, trans people can also be gay. I don’t have any numbers, but I’d be willing to bet several months of rent that there are less straight transgender folks, per capita, than straight cisgender folks.
Vulnerability of Bathrooms
“I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman — and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones — then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.”
-JKR
I’ve had to talk and write on this topic more than any other transgender concern. I understand the anxiety that rises up initially when the idea of transgender people sharing a bathroom with you comes up. I don’t want to disproportionately go into all of the poor logic involved in trying to confine people to the bathroom that you choose for them, but I’ll try and hit the highlights.
To begin with, transgender women assaulting other women in the bathroom is a nonexistent problem. So is the problem of men disguising themselves as transgender women to assault women. They are of similar pressing concern to the world as quicksand or villains tying victims to railroad tracks while twirling their mustaches.
But, even if this were a problem, you’ve got it backwards. You’re imagining men “dressing up like women” to access women’s spaces. But if you require people to use restrooms that match their genitals at birth, you’re asking transgender men with beards, deep voices, and burly muscles to use the women’s restroom.
And, simply put, it’s a lot easier for a cisgender man to pass as a transgender man than pass as a transgender woman.
Unless, of course, what you’re proposing is that cisgender women use the women’s room, cisgender men use the men’s room, and transgender folks can just stay out of public life altogether.
Not to mention intersex folks. Who, as a refresher, in the likely event your sex ed curriculum completely ignored them, aren’t neatly packaged into the boy/penis box or girl/vulva box.
Plus, assaulting anyone in a restroom is already a crime. Harassing or ogling someone in a restroom or locker room is already a scenario that we have rules in place for.
Lastly, you have no idea what anyone’s genitals at birth, birth certificate, hormone levels, or genes are. And hopefully their current genitals aren’t getting inspected as criteria for entering restrooms now or in the near future. Your line of thinking, like so many, rests on the ridiculous idea that you can tell if someone is transgender by looking at them.
Which brings us to gate keeping.
Gate keeping
“The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.”
-JKR
Yes, historically we have required trans women to prove that they are “woman enough” by… wearing dresses. Growing their hair long. Painting their nails. Wearing high heals.
You can see where this list is going. These aren’t definitions of womanhood that have served women very well.
Secondly, the price for hormones and surgery is astronomical. Which tends to be primarily available to wealthy white folks, leaving many trans people who desperately want them unable to access them.
And thirdly, hormones and surgery carry medical risk with them. So maybe something we better leave to… I don’t know… a woman and her doctor?
So while hormones and surgery do much to alleviate the transphobia that rises up in most of us when engaging someone who’s gender and body don’t match up precisely as we’d like them to, they may or may not be desirable or available to all transgender folks.
What if they regret it?
Parents of transgender kids get a lot of hand-wringing and anxiety from those around them about how their children are really just too young to know their true gender. Oddly, no one is concerned whether or not my three cisgender kids are old enough to know their gender.
And then there’s the whispered question: what if? What if your kid is wrong about their gender, and it turns out they’re another gender? What if they had several years of hormones and a bit of surgery here or there, and then they realize it was all a terrible idea?
But that’s the exact risk I’m taking with all four of my kids, trans or cis. Unless we’re going to start universally putting kids on hormone blockers until they’re thirty, we’re going to run the risk that people undergo puberty that leaves their bodies looking different than would prefer later in life.
So we do the best we can. We trust our children’s self-knowledge and support their sense of direction. And if we reverse course, we reverse course.
Detransitioning is rare, but it’s real. And it can be accompanied by intense disappointment and regret. But, statistically, using the most sincere and impartial numbers, my kiddo is a thousand times more likely to regret not using hormone blockers and cross hormones.
Criticism is hard to take
Criticism is hard to take. No one enjoys being called homophobic or racist. But calling out hateful speech, ideas, and attitudes is an important part of caring for the world around us. And please hear that the transgender community believes that your speech endangers trans lives.
I grew up an Evangelical Christian. I was homophobic. That didn’t make it enjoyable when I was called homophobic. I grew up in the same patriarchal culture that we’re all navigating. As a man, having misogynistic ideas, words, and actions called out doesn’t feel good. But it’s an important opportunity for me to identify the ways I’m participating in the patriarchy and burn those ways of moving through the world to the ground.
As Wesley Wade points out in his deeply enlightening article dealing with the pseudoscience and misinformation that you keep spreading, TERF isn’t a pejorative coined by transgender folks or their allies. It’s a term that trans-excluding folks coined.
I don’t know that I have much use for the “R.” But it is noteworthy to me when a feminist excludes trans folks, radical or not. Similarly to feminists who are white supremacists, or anti-racist thinkers who are misogynistic. It feels like someone deserves a heads up.
But the real weight of the term isn’t really about feminism at this point. It’s not exactly getting constrained to use only for discussing radical feminist. TERF has come to represent transphobia. And getting called transphobic isn’t pleasant.
So you go out of your way to deflect it. Your insistence that you have trans friends. Or the patronizing language you use assuring transgender folks that you have their safety and best interest at heart while advocating for public policy that they have told you is dangerous for them.
But be it TERF or another term, the response is clear: your words and ideas are transphobic.
Ms. Rowling, a lot of people you care about have felt the need to publicly speak out to clarify, in the very least, that they don’t share your views on trans people. Or, more helpfully, that they trust transgender people to self-determine their own lives, without the interference and gate keeping of doctors, politicians, or celebrity authors.
If you look at it through the lens of generations, you’ll probably notice those most hurt, most angry, quickest to contradict you, are folks younger than you. And you’ll probably notice that those most likely to stoke your fears of transgender women in the restroom, without a lick of surgery or the courtesy of hormones, those folks are your age and older. There will be exceptions, of course, but generally.
I think that if you thought that through, by itself, it would give you pause. When was the last time the young folks had gender and sexuality wrong, and the older folks were fighting for compassion, humanity, kindness?
Or you could look at your allies. Who most wants to keep transgender women out of bathrooms? Most wants to make it difficult to change legal documents to match your correct gender? Trump supporters. TV preachers. Fearful, small minded folks.
You’re digging your hole deeper the further you go. And this will be a lasting legacy for you. His compositions were amazing, but it turns out he was antisemitic. Her science was brilliant, but we need to acknowledge that she was deeply homophobic.
She wrote the most magical novels in a century. But she was incredibly transphobic.
Seriously, I can’t recommend Wesley Wade’s article The Miseducation and Misinformation of J.K. Rowling enough. It’s amazing.
