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Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.
All right, you have hit one of my pet peeves, because I hear this shit all the time from my nice progressive friends. It's just repeated ad infinitum, as an article of faith, as a proven, established fac, that JK Rowling "hates trans people," that she "wants to slander and eradicate them," etc. In unrelated hobby spaces, I've seen it argued unironically, in all seriousness, that she literally advocates "genocide of trans people" (and also that Harry Potter goblins were intended to be metaphors for Jews because she also hates Jews).
I have been a Rowling fan since before she got on Twitter. Yes, I actually like the Harry Potter books (despite being way too old for them). I've read all her Cormoran Strike novels, and even The Casual Vacancy. I follow her on Twitter and I read her blog. So I know whereof I speak, though I won't claim I can remember every single thing she's ever said in public.
I have never seen her say anything that approaches "hate" or "wanting to eradicate" trans people. She has said the opposite many times. She is a standard issue very liberal second wave feminist.
What does she say?
I think all of these points are reasonable, and even if you disagree with some or all of them, none of them resemble anything like "hate" or wishing for a "trans genocide."
I would love it if you could point to me any public statement of hers, or even a reliable second-hand account of some alleged private statement, in which she's said anything that resembles what you are claiming.
Well, someone has to, if this forum is going to be anything other than a complete echo chamber.
Also 'reflexively' and 'intentionally, as an intellectual exercise' are different things.
First of all, there's a reason I said 'People like Rowling' and 'they' in that sentence. The whole post, if you read the rest of the post and not just that sentence, is about different factions on the conservative side of this issue, and the differences and disagreements between them.
While it's mildly true that Rowling plays a careful balancing act with her public image by not being too extreme in her own personal rhetoric, she is very much a part of a faction that does use rhetoric of that level of extremity (including onstage at national political conventions), and she very much supports and promotes (through valuable social media links and personal defenses and endorsements on her hugely popular accounts, through partnerships and collaborations, and by selectively endorsing and promoting the rhetoric of) people who famously do express those extreme views.
One could argue that in the early days of her involvement with this topic, she was just a useful idiot who didn't realize how extreme the people who were being nice to her and defending her were while other groups were attacking her for her views, and that she instinctively supported the people who were nice to her without realizing how extreme they were when not talking to her.
But this many years later, that's not a tenable position. She's not that dumb, at this point she understand who her bedfellows are and what their political program is about, and wholeheartedly assists them at every turn. At this point, the fact that she maintains a veneer of respectability in her own public statements is more cowardice and manipulation and intentional pipeline-creation than it is a sign of a mild position.
And, like, come on, you're obviously underselling what she says herself and what the implications of that are. She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans to prey on women in women's spaces. She says that she is glad trans didn't exist when she was growing up because she might have been socially infected with it and it would have ruined her life. Etc.
These types of things are the blood libel of the trans debate; they are all part of building a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them, and where trans identity is merely an infectious meme that needs to be stamped out before it takes more lives.
The fact that, after establishing that worldview and narrative, you don't vocally take the next step of saying 'and therefore we need to eradicate transgender people from the culture as a whole' is sort of irrelevant. You've spent decades carefully constructive a narrative in which that is the obvious and inescapable conclusion, if you convince people of your narrative then they will come to that conclusion without you needing to say it, that was the whole point of the narrative.
Anyway, if you want me to go find you links on all the Breadtube Rowling videos so you can comb through them for receipts, I guess I can. But I've done that a lot and people mostly say 'I'm not going to watch that'. Names to search would be contrapoints, shaun, philosophy tube, I don't remember probably lindsey ellis or big joel or someone talked about it, etc. Honestly I bet if you google 'JK Rowling anti-trans statements' you will find a comprehensive list pretty quickly, if you actually want to know it doesn't take me to do the googling for you.
Yeah, because watching video of people I hold in contempt is not something I'm going to subject myself to. That's your hobby, not mine.
If this is blood libel, then jews really do drink the blood of Christians. You can't say that the rapist isn't a pervert, that he isn't trying to prey on women by being imprisoned among them instead of other men, where he belongs. We know he raped a little girl. We know that he doesn't actually believe he's a woman, and he's doing it cynically. ou can't just say something true is blood libel, when I can see how true it is with my own lying eyes. You have to do more to actually convince me that these trans men aren't perverts, because they sure do look like it to me, and simple denial doesn't move the needle.
Eradicate? No, fix. But you're right that in an ideal world, the number of trans people is 0. It's a perversion, too, and not one that I like to see spreading.
Eh, that’s the motte-and-bailey, isn’t it?
gets watered down to
No shit, the convicted rapist of this example is a pervert grasping at any opportunity to keep hurting women. His credibility went out the window because of the crime.
Is the least sympathetic rapist representative of the broader category of trans people? Keep in mind that many of them are aggressively disinterested in sex, perhaps on account of the long-running hormone therapies. Are the dreaded trans youth all rapists, desperate for an excuse?
I don’t think so. You’re making the same judgment as the woman who, after a bad date, concludes that men are scum. Not all men. Not all transwomen.
Side note: I agree with you that YouTube videos, especially those made by your opponents, are incredibly unappealing. No matter how succinct and reasonable it is, the argument would be better served by a text document. And there is zero incentive for wannabe documentarians to make their work short.
Is the edge representative of the axe? No, of course not. But it is part of the axe, and the most dangerous part.
Is the least sympathetic rapist protected by the broader category of trans people?
No, but their demands for rights and respect are directly impacting the criminals, and the women who have to deal with them. Trans women are not women, have never been women, and will never be women. Saying they are, combined with saying that anyone who claims to be trans is trans, directly leads to this outcome. It obviously directly leads to this outcome, so much so that it was dismissed as a straw man before these policies were implemented. Well the scarecrow came to life, and we're not in Kansas.
Transwomen aren't even transwomen. In their quest to deconstruct gender in order to grant themselves accommodation within that same genderscape that they disavow they have inadvertantly demonstrated that it's transgenderism itself that carries no semantic water. That is to say; there's no such thing.
Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man. Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.
Either it's real, and they're not it. Or it's not real, so there's no it to be.
[Obligatory olive branch that I don't care two iotas (iotes?) about men rendering themselves maximally feminine. Obligatory post script that this all applies vice versa too.]
This is literally assuming the conclusion. You can't build an argument to support your opinion that starts with your opinion.
OP does go on to say:
Seems to me the argument is not circular, just compact: without a concrete definition of man and woman, there is nothing to be "trans" in comparison to.
This sort of argument is not new - a common variant is to argue that trans and non-binary are inherently in tension for this reason.
Fair enough. But then isn't this just answered by "man and woman are not actually clean natural categories"? With transpeople being exactly the cross-boundary cases, and then still, the "a man who" argument fails to be convincing. The extended form of the counterargument then is just "you're concluding group membership by using as an argument your choice of group criteria", which is still just as circular.
(This is not a "pro-trans" view: "trans women are women" were just as silly, for the same reason, if it were an argument and not a cudgel.)
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