No need to apologize! I'm just highly introspective and "standing on the backs of giants" is where this discussion brought my train of thought.
I definitely never interpreted you as transphobic, which is why I engaged with you this way. I could see that there was a spark of something in your comment wanting in on my experience, which I tend to offer pretty readily on this platform. Your bewilderment was apparent, so I spoke to that. Harry Potter is kind of a bizarre cultural phenomenon, so it takes a lot of framing to get to the bottom of why so many millennials are horrified by Rowling turning out to be the villain after all.
What a fun twist 😂
In a way, Rowling going this way is pretty insidious given how the core values of Harry Potter are friendship, camaraderie, familial love, chosen families, triumph over an absurdly evil villain, surviving abuse, and the value of working to make the world a better place. The fact that someone who taught us those things thinks that trans people are antithetical to those values? It's disappointing. I would probably feel similarly if it were discovered that Bruce Springsteen voted for Reagan.
And I think that's just it. I'm not mad anymore, I'm disappointed. That seems to be where a lot of trans people are with the whole situation. It's also a bit exhausting that we're not done talking about her. In the same vein, I'm grateful that I have what little platform I have to use her as a springboard to talk about Rowling's particular brand of intellectual transphobia.
I think there are some pretty stark differences between you and JK Rowling for that reason. You're reasonable. If you happen to have questions about trans issues, I'm sure you'd ask them respectfully and be open to trans people sharing their experiences with you without judgment or the knee-jerk desire to question those experiences. Queer people, when we manage to get a platform, tend to be a bit more mindful of it than someone like Rowling ever could be from her enormously privileged position as a cis-hetero billionaire.
But to the meat of the thing — prior generations fought to exist out loud as queer folks, and others still fought for queer tolerance, and that was followed by a fight for queer acceptance.
I think we’re past that need for acceptance now. I believe that we are at the precipice of queer transcendence. Think of it in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Now that more of our community’s base needs are met, we can reach the top of the pyramid which is a privilege we’ve been largely excluded from as queer people.
I think that we are reaching some kind of “critical mass” in society because the youngest generations aren’t growing up having to discover for themselves that there is a universe of possibilities outside of being cisgender and heterosexual. They know that the binary of both sexuality and gender are lies fed to us by colonizers (who, in my case, are my ancestors), and that sex itself doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with either of those things.
It’s radical because it forces us to throw out convention in the biggest way imaginable. It’s transcending the public consciousness on whether or not biological determinism applies to sex, gender, and sexuality. What’s neat is that the answer doesn’t matter, and that’s why so many cis het people are upset.
Those benefitted by the status quo like Rowling are terrified by that.
Queerness doesn’t offer any convenient answers or truths about the universe. Queerness just is. We are. That should be enough for us to have a place in this world.
In a big way, what we’re seeing is the equivalent of Rowling throwing herself in front of an electric bus while screaming that gas-powered was better for the environment. And when the bus ran her over, she claimed that the bus attacked her.
Her ilk will fade out, but it will take time. For the immediate future, I do think that our culture around transphobia is going to get worse before it gets better because of how unsatisfying people find the answer to the “trans question.”
Your average person finds comfort in biological certainties—gender that aligns with dicks and pussies, and masculinity or femininity that goes with the blue or pink bow on your bassinet. A lot of trans and cis people alike aren’t conforming to that anymore, and this is really just the next phase of “the terrifying LGBT sensation that’s sweeping the nation.”
Most of them will get over it will time, since we’re clearly not going anywhere. At some point, I'm sure we’ll look at Rowling similarly to how we now view the “pray away the gay” crowd.
