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Of course it is. Can you imagine if suddenly everyone started dressing in blue and someone writes an article about how concerning it is that young women are dressing in blue en masse? The only people who would care would be those who were against blue.
Defining "woman" as "adult human female" is already the anti trans position, so by (it seems?) implicitly ascribing this definition to Rowling you are proving my point.
It does seem like a terrible idea to me. Did you just assume my
gendermy position on trans issues because I corrected you about Rowling's position on trans issues?It's simple and there's no motte and no bailey and no ruse. Being anti trans is to not believe that trans men are men and trans men are women. This is because the entire trans project is to be treated by society as their target gender, so if you are against that, you are against the whole thing.
I am not aware of anyone laboring under another definition, least of all JK Rowling, who as far as I know, has never claimed to not be "anti trans", but I admit I haven't done a comprehensive survey here.
The difference is that we Jews don't demand that everyone else should subscribe to our metaphysics. Now, Christians do, and while they don't think that someone who doesn't believe in the trinity is anti-Christian, they do believe he is the next best thing.
1 John aside, I would suggest that the standard Christian approach is to distinguish non-Christian from anti-Christian, such that 'non-Christian' means not being within Christianity or disagreeing with Christianity to some extent, and 'anti-Christian' means possessed of specific, active malice towards Christianity.
(If you read all of 1 John, that letter appears to be talking about schisms within a particular community. 1 John 2:18-19 would seem to indicate that the 'many antichrists' are those who 'went out from us'. The 'liars' in 2:22 are presumably then those who were part of the Johannine community but who have since gone around denying the constitutive dogmas of that community.)
This approach seems consistent with how we talk about other religious groups as well. As I am a Christian, I naturally disagree with parts of Judaism and parts of Islam. I sincerely believe that religious Jews and Muslims are, ipso facto, in error about certain facts. This does not make me anti-semitic or anti-Islam/Islamophobic, just as I do not consider those Jews or Muslims to be anti-Christian. We distinguish between disagreement and malice.
The whole criticism of trans activism here is that they are treating disagreement as malice. There's no 'neutral' position. You either affirm the whole platform or you are a transphobe.
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If the proportion of people wearing blue multiplied by an order of magnitude or more virtually overnight, that would be weird to not notice.
If wearing blue also resulted in a lifetime of medicalization, I would like to think people should care!
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At least initially*, she definitely did claim she was not "anti-trans." She repeatedly said she supported trans rights inasmuch as they had a right to be respected and live their lives as they wished and not be harassed or abused. She just didn't think trans women should be treated as actually biologically women, housed with women in women's prisons, young girls should not be encouraged to have mastectomies and put on T, etc.
Yes, that's "anti-trans" by the reductive trans activist perspective that anything less than unconditional validation is anti-trans, but it's not a reasonable definition to anyone else.
It's absolutely crazy-making to me, that people read everything she has written, in which she has laid out her beliefs with care and nuance, and what they come away with is "She's a hateful bigot who wants trans people put in camps."
(Part of the reason it is so crazy-making to me is that I basically share Rowling's views. And yes, there are spaces and social circles where I know I simply cannot say this if I want to maintain those relationships.)
* Admittedly, after years of being dogpiled in public, I think her rhetoric is a bit harsher and more mocking nowadays, but I think she'd still say she believes basically the same thing, that trans women have rights which should be supported, but that doesn't include the right to be treated as a biological woman.
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