Sports Controversies and DSD

The following podcast was recorded before the EHRC guidance was published on the twenty first of may twenty twenty-six . Get the new fix and fall tariff from British Gas, where prices can only slide down. If energy prices climb up, no worries, you'll be fixed for two years. But if later the market falls, so will your tariff. A win-win, sorted automatically by us . Price cap, taken care of. Fix your prices today. Search British Gas Fix and Fall. T's and C's eligibility and limitation supply. Price review based on the off-gen price cap after 12 months see britishgas.co.uk slash verify for more Hello, welcome to Origin Story. It's the show where we take an idea, person, event, or institution from history, explain its origins, and discuss how it influences how we talk about politics. I'm Dorian Linsky. And I'm Ian Dunn. So this is part two of the story of uh J.K. Rowling and her transformation from widely beloved author to divisive anti-trans activ ist. We left this last time with this sort of crucial tweet in twenty nineteen where she comes out the closet, so to speak, with her Incredible Choice . Yeah. With her gender critical views and uh mayhem ensu es. But this is uh this is only the beginning. Um so we're now in June uh 2020. Yeah, we are. So she posts a link to an article headlined Creating a More Equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate. Her comments are people who menstruate, I'm sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumbin, wimpened, womaned, if sex isn't real, the lived reality of women. I know and love trans people. This kind of language will soon disappear. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of so many to meaningfully discuss their lives. Now, I read this article which refers to girls, women, and all people who menstruate. Right. So the headline, obviously it meant something else, but it suggests that if she'd read it, she would have realized that it does not replace the terms girls, women. Yeah. And similarly, you probably have come across people complaining about words like chest feeding and cervix haver. I tried to find the original sources for these and I couldn't because everything was just Her comment on it. I'm not saying these words have never been used, presumably they were. But the idea that they're being widely used as a replacement for women is not true.. Yes Although, you know, the headline is always bad headline. But look at how effective and reasonable she is at this point, right? Like she's she's focusing as you you know, as you want to if you're involved in a political campaign on the sort of like the most absurd elements on the other side, right? You know, and hopefully the thing that'll be most easily talked about over coffee the next day, you know, in groups of friends, um, a stance to reason conversation. You can't even say woman anymore. You can't even say you're English. Then a little bit of humor, which doesn't really work for me, but might work for some people. Then she makes sure that she says, I know and love trans people. You know, there's that reaching out thing of like you recognize that they exist, you care about them, and then you make you know the ultimate argument of the sex isn't real the live reality, you know, you make your your fundamental intellectual. When she goes, I'd march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans . Would you think She has never obviously done that. But it was very important for her to say it. And in the witch trials podcast, which we referred to last time. She says, I'm amazed that I was pretty measured because I wasn't feeling measured at this point. A lot of things had come together, which suggests that she really was editing her language there. She didn't warn her management this time, like she did with the previous tweet. Uh, she says it was like dropping a hand grenade into Twitter . And not just Twitter, right? This extraordinary backlash. Well, the thing to remember about this stuff, right, is that at the time I mean less so now, though to a certain extent, but at the time, Twitter was the starting point for a series of media conversations. You know, and nowhere more so than on daytime television. So daytime TV, you know, which I think has a really underanalyzed relationship with kind of radicalization and tribalism, loves these kind of things. Oh right, you know, does a man have a penis? Does a woman have a penis. And then off you go, and you can just use that for like half an hour of debate on your sofa . And so with each of these, it was on the evening news, it was on you know local radio stations, it was the start of huge conversations that were taking place in all sorts of media, just by virtue of starting on Twitter, like most of the news discussion in that period. Trevor Burrus And the sort of the generational split that we were talking about comes out in a very vivid form with the Harry Potter actors, right? So Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Wats on speak out, beginning this I think this ridiculous suggestion that because they owe their careers to her, they shouldn't criticize her. It's very much like celebrities shouldn't speak out, they don't know what they're talking about, except J.K. Rowling and any celebrities that we agree with. You know, it's very petty . Anyway, Danny Radcliffe posts transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional healthcare associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Joe or I. The expertise issue is very interesting because actually all of the main voices on the rolling side of things do not have medical expertise. Right. You know what I mean? It's not. And so there is actually some humility th shown by Radcliffe there. Eddie Redmane, I disagree with Joe's comments, trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary identities are valid. Leading fans like The Leaky Cauldron accuses her of promoting harmful and disproven beliefs about what it means to be a transgender person. And Stephen King tweets trans women are women, which he doesn't like at all. And on the other hand, you get the I stand with J.K. Rowling hashtag, which really transforms being a fan of J.K. Rowling into a political statement. Yeah. As opposed to being a fan of Harry Potter. Yeah. Which broadly continues as it was before. I mean, I I I think at exactly this moment I was in Orlando at the wizarding world of Harry Potter or whatever, which you make obscene amounts of money from, like at things. Of course. You know, nothing everything seemed completely unchanged there. And broadly it has been. We should say that, you know, for all the attempts at sort of boycotts, a bit this is a sort of conversation that takes place in the political space. But there's been no impact, no discernible impact that we're aware of on sales of video games where a boycott was called for, on visits to theme parks, on purchases of the book. Oh yeah, yeah. No, I think the boycott was basically people who felt very strongly about this choosing to remove themselves from that fandom, which is completely legitimate.. Yeah Because boycott can mean two things. One, it can mean I am personally boycotting this. And then the other is a concerted campaign which is designed to, you know, seriously dent the popularity and you know profits of something. And of course, that was n has never really been attempted and would not work. Then she follows this with the essay. The essay. Yeah. So this is a 3, 600-word blog published the same month on her beliefs about sex and gender, one of her longest sustained pieces of nonfiction writing. Like full stop. Yeah. Basically. You know, it's you'll be re it's really telling in all this. There's just very few public interventions by her, you know, even in the nicer Harry Potter period. She reads something at the Olympics, she did an episode of Who Do You Think You Are, she did that Harvard speech for graduates. That 's kind of it. You know what I mean? There's a book review of a Mitford, the Mitfo book, you know, she talks about she writes something in a Gordon Brown, in a collection of Gordon Brown essays. Yes, because she's friendly with Gordon and Sarah Brown. Sarah Brown, yeah. Um and that's kind of it. And so suddenly here is where you actually get really is the only point in the whole story where you get anything that's not just a snippet, apart from I guess, this long the long interview that you're describing in the in the witch shows. So she takes on a very sympathetic tone. She speaks about the violence that she experienced in her first marriage. She speaks about her respect and care for trans people. Although I do need to say that every single time in that blog that she says something nice about trans people, either individually or as a group, she feels the need to caveat it immediately after. So there are signs there that this may be more diligent than it is heartfelt. Aaron Powell Well, she does this thing where and this happens, you know, with a lot of groups, right? Where you she separates the good scarequotes trans people who sort of know their place, who know they're not really the other gender , from dangerous trans activism. So she talks about, she opposes the activism, the movement, the ideology rather than the individuals. Which of course is a false distinction because well, who's in this movement then? And she suggests that the activists are not actually working in the best interests of trans people . And this was also said about campaigns of civil rights in America or women's suffrage. It's just like, oh, these people, oh, they're too demanding, oh, they're making too many enemies. They're letting down the real, you know, black Americ ans or the or the real women. So it's kind of where you go, oh, I don't dislike the people, I dislike the ideology. Aaron Ross Powell What I think we get from her though is that there is still something in her , either by virtue of political necessity or genuine sentiment that means that she needs to say that. So she says, I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people. I want to order this sort of said because later on she will not say these things and the things that she says will directly contradict them, and it's important to sort of spot the point where one changes into the other. Um I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who's older than I am and wonderful. Although she's open about her past as a gay man, I've always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe and certainly hope she's completely happy to have transitioned. Then later she says, I believe the majority of trans identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I've outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Now, as I said, there are there are all sorts of caveats , but she fundamentally behaves as if trans people are a moral end. So it's that's quite a serious it makes her point the whole argument much more compelling. It's a much better piece by virtue of having done it, in the same way that she becomes much less convincing later on by virtue of not saying these things or thinking them. But it's clearly a core part of how she either feels she needs to present or how she actually does present. She then goes on to make a series of arguments. And the first argument she makes is the argument for social contagion. So here's what she says. Most people probably aren't aware, I certainly wasn't until I started researching this issue properly, that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4, 400% increase in girls being referred to for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers. She then quotes the American physician, Lisa Lippmann, who said that she had found, quote, multiple friends and even entire friend groups become transgender identified at the same time. She speaks of, quote, social contagion and peer influences. So there are, you see that like you've mentioned one of them before, but like there are three claims here: the gendered autism link, the increase in female to male transition as a as a percentage of overall transitions, and social contagion. Yeah. So let's have a look at them. On autism. I actually I need to premise everything that we're going to say in this episode by just saying that universally on this issue, the data is terrible because there's very little of it around. Partly because the popul the transpopulation is so small, partly because there just aren't enough studies and many of the things that we want to look into. So I just think but when anyone tells you anything with a huge degree of confidence, I'll signal them in some cases where there really is. You know, you can be pretty confident. Most of the time you want to be pretty careful with all the stuff here. There is a lot of literature, however, on her claim on autism. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in the numbers. So the systematic literature review and meta-analysis and the journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders in 2022 concluded. The review of the evidence is suggestive of a link between autism spectrum disorder and gender dysphoria. Taken together, results from the literature review and the meta-analyses indicate that the chances there is not a link between autism and gender dysphoria are negligible. The rate of autism in the general population is around 1%. Among those with gender dysphoria, it is 11 times higher. I mean I I like this one because it's a it's a full review and it's a meta-analysis. So it in some cases it's higher, but exactly in some cases in fact in several studies that I looked at, it was around that eleven percent. Because I think what we should also think about when when they use the language of of of percentages . It's still small numbers. She goes gone up 4, 400%. It's still not many . It's still really, really small numbers. But they started from really, really tiny numbers. So sometimes you hear four thousand five percent and you think this is like millions. No, exactly. And it's not you should also remember that whenever there's a public health campaign about if you do this that it's gonna like you've got four hundred times more chance of getting cancer and you're like and what's the overall likelihood? And you're like, yes, I should factor that in. On female to male trends that you mentioned earlier, and you mentioned the London study that had been looked at there, she is again correct in this. It is also global. So there's a specialised gender identity clinic in Toronto and another one in Amsterdam that were part of studies. With a total sample size of seven hundred and forty eight. It's not bad for this kind of area of um study, but obviously it's still laughably small in any other context. Uh it compared data between two cohort periods, the years leading up to 2006, and then the period 2006 to 2013. Its conclusion was in both clinics there was a significant change in the sex ratio of referred adolescents between the two cohort periods. Between 2006 and 2013, the sex ratio favoured natal females, but in the prior years, the sex ratio favoured natal males . And we don't, again, we don't know why that is you know the the argument that Browning's making is that this is fundamentally a kind of sort of almost like a social hysteria or a kind of fashion really but ultimately that many of the cases you're seeing are social rather than the child or an adolescent or a teenager coming up with a full account of their own issue there. Um, there are many other reasons to believe that this could be the case. What we're seeing in all these cases is a huge rise in the number of referrals, almost certainly because of an increase in social awareness around this issue. Right, which is of course social awareness is not the same at all. Exactly . And where there is a rising number overall, there's no reason to think that that would break cleanly, or that some of those social factors that have led people to be able to talk about it more might lead to particular times for you know changes in the percentages of one cohort or another Well think for decades, what was the image of a trans person in the public eye in in a movie or on TV? It was a trans woman.. Yes, that's so true There was so little awareness of trans men. Yeah. So you can say, of course, that the the the the increased awareness is actually going to sp tilt more in one direction. And e even now I would say that the bare because they're not part so prominent a part of the political debate, because essentially they're less useful to use as a as a sort of scare puppet, you know. Then you they're barely ever discussed. Well look because so much of this comes from is the idea that this is inherently a problem. So what happens is that uh one thing is the number of referrals is conflated with the number of people actually transitioning. Right? Yes. Another is the sort of implication of misdiagnosis. So it's like there might well be proportionally more uh aut istic gender questioning. But that doesn't mean that they're they're not really gender questioning. They shouldn't be, they're not really trans. It's not like, oh, it's misdiagnosed, and actually what's really going on there is autism. Because you know these people are the they're being referred. They are they are the they've got these questions about their gender. It doesn't mean that they are all being like rushed down the trans tunnel to a direct transition. I think that's entirely correct. And in fact, none of the studies looking at the autism link suggest that this somehow one disqualifies the other. It is simply a scientific evaluation to be like, okay, so there is some kind of mechanism we don't understand here, there's a link we don't understand yet. There is also a lot of people, you know, especially in sort of in the autism journals, sort of going like, not particularly surprised by this. You know what I mean? Like what you were talking about is like adapted roles, socially adapted roles. You know, in one in one particular vision of what it is to be you. We're not particularly surprised that autistic people have a more complicated relationship with that than than the general population. When Rowling gets herself into real trouble here is when she mentions the American physician uh Lippmann. Um, and this is the social contagion piece. So this is a health expert at Brown University who in August 2018 published a paper on a new condition, which she called as, you referred to earlier, rapid onset gender dysphoria . She based this finding on a 90-question survey completed by 256 parents of transgender youths with an average age of 16. She recruited these parents from three websites frequented by parents who were concerned about their children's transgender identity. Fourth Wave Now, Transgender Trend, and youth transcritical professionals. I don't know. You tell me if you think the names of those websites might provide a problem with your methodology. Her results found that none of the parents said their children had symptoms that matched professionally defined diagnoses of gender dysphoria during childhood. Therefore, many children are incorrect in believing they have gender dysphoria. Therefore, it may be social. Her most explosive finding. She finds 83% of the young people were designated female at birth. Over a third have friendship groups in which over 50% of the youths identify as transgender within a similar timeframe. Okay, so the problem - I mean the problems are obviously Legion, and this is just complete amateur hour. So the first problem is that you've recruited a completely non-representative set of parents who already believe strongly in the phenomenon that you are trying to prove. In general, it's completely unrepresentative. The parents were 82.8% female, 91.4% white, 66.1% aged 46 to 60, and seventy point nine percent had attended university. As one academic study of the study put it, these are not just worried parents, but rather a sample of predominantly white mothers who have strong oppositional beliefs about their children's trans identification and who harbor suspicions about their children having rapid onset gender dysphoria . She then crammed, this is incredible, her conclusions for the study into the consent document. So at the point where they sign up and they have to sign off on it. Oh my god. First they have to read the following the following passage. The phenomenon is in the context of increased social media internet use, and or being part of a peer group in which one or multiple So by that point, I mean as any poster will tell you, this is kind of a leading question, and it's quite clear what answers you think you're gonna get. It also really asks the wrong people. Parents obviously feel that they know their kids very, very well. In many of these cases, the parent will be the last person to hear about many of the things that have taken place over these years. The child is very often not going to share those feelings uh with them. And even if they were being told everything, they're eminently not qualified in order to make these sorts of judgments. Well also, I mean, has she checked the facts here? Because if somebody says all, right, there is a group of a friendship group where 50% are trans , implying presumably that they're actually transitioning as opposed to thinking, oh, I might be saying I might be trans. I mean, that's absurd. Nobody like and it's one percent in the country. But they seem to have found friendship groups where it's fifty percent. She she's found the spring from which all trans flows. So I mean clearly she's found the fucking epicenter of where this phenomenon is birthed. One academic said, unless parents in this paper received formal training and have licenses to conduct clinical psychiatric diagnoses, parents enrolled were not qualified to classify any persons, including their children 's, gender dysphoria. And the report is like utterly discredited. But it's just taken up. And you and I see this, we see this all the time. Trevor Burrus, it's cited over and over again in states when they're pushing anti-trans bills. It's pushing as if this is an established scientific phenomenon. It's just extraordinary. It's on podcasts, it's in books, it's in magazines, it's in newspapers. In 2021, the American Psychological Association and 61 other health care providers sign a letter doing their best, just denouncing the validity of rapid onset gender dysphoria as a clinical diagnosis. Doesn't really do any good. Look, we've there's now just a big body of evidence showing that this is not real. And the reason we can tell it's not real is because when you go to sort of clinic after clinic, and in fact, there's been studies on this, looking, for instance, in Canadian medical centers in the journal of pediatrics, what you'd be looking for is just thinking, like, why are we would expect two cohorts. If this is true, we would expect one cohort which has been laboring under these feelings for years, and another cohort, if given that it's rapid onset, that have only had it in the last year. That's not what you see. You only ever s really see the first class of people. Given the extent of the studies, we know this is just not a thing, it is essentially invented and yet taken up extremely enthusiastically by the mainstream. Then she moves on to talk about her first marriage that we talked about, the one in Portugal. Histories like mine, who've been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces. I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make Natal girls and women feel 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 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. So this view obviously assumes that trans women and cis men have similar patterns of criminal behavior. That is the core of it. That's pertinent because criminal activity and violent crime is more common among men than it is from women. Of course, yeah. And then it will go on to obviously say there's a particular danger in bathrooms, which has become extremely pertinent in this country now where we're really fighting to find out whether trans people will be able to use bathrooms at all . The key line in this debate is male pattern criminality. It's like do trans women demonstrate male pattern criminality? And that line comes from a 2011 study in Sweden which assessed mortality, morbidity, and criminal rate after surgical sex reassignment. It's a dataset of 324 sex-reassigned people split into two cohorts, nineteen seventy-three to nineteen eighty-eight, the first cohort, nineteen eighty-nine to two thousand and three. Quite important, the distinction between those two groups. Court's convictions. Its conclusion was: Regarding any crime, males to females had a significantly increased risk for crime compared to female controls, but not compared to males. This indicates that they retained a male pattern regarding criminality. The same was true regarding violent crime. This suggests that the sex reassignment procedure neither increased nor decreased the risk for criminal offending in male to females . It's not a very good study. It's not really their fault. This is not the same as the kind of just like clown car amateurishness that we've just seen on social contagion. It's just that the study wasn't meant to be passed down like a stone tablet to Moses, you know, incited by everyone. It was, it wasn't even really on the subject, it was on a bunch of different sort of things. But it's not great. I mean, it's a very, very low data size. The conclusion on male pattern criminality is based on eight outcome event payings. That's eight. This is the thing. Like if you've got three hundred and twenty-four people in your data set and you're looking at criminal levels are obviously very, very low. Yeah. R?ight That's the kind of data set that you're talking about. I mean, fine, mention it in the conclusions, but don't let's start pretending that we've come up with some truth about human affairs, you know, on the basis of that data set. And at the time, it's not it's also not helped by the fact that Swedes prosecutors would treat sex work as a sexual crime and that that sexual crime under this report falls under violent crime. And that's an issue because we know that trans people are massively overrepresented in sex work. And obviously, when we're talking about violent and sexual crime, what people are not thinking about is sex work or something like that. Problem three is the finding only appears in the nineteen seventy three to nineteen eighty eight cohort. It is not there in the nineteen eighty nine to 2003 cohort. Now that's really quite telling. Because of course, we're now talking pretty far back in the distant past when access to healthcare, when access to treatment, when social recognition was significantly worse in the country than it would have been. And you would expect different attitudes and different attitudes from the authorities in that period. You wouldn't want, with a small data set, to come to really firm conclusions about prosecutions in late 70s Sweden, you know, that would apply somewhere else. Here's the sociologist, uh, Dr. Ruth Pierce. The study was not focused on investigating criminal behavior, was drawn from a small cohort in one country, and only indicated a statistically significant increased risk of conviction for trans people who underwent sex reassignment before 1989, a time when fewer opportunities and resources were available to trans people in Sweden. Or as the reports' own author put it, as she basically has run around trying to tell people to stop misusing. Right. I didn't realize this report was so important. This report was huge, yeah. As to the criminality metric itself, we were measuring and comparing the total number of convictions, not conviction type. We didn't control for that, and we were certainly not saying that we found that trans women were a rape risk. What we were saying was that for the nineteen seventy three to 1988 cohort group and the cisgender male group both experience similar rates of convictions. As I said, this pattern is not observed in the nineteen eighty nine to two thousand and three cohort group. But again, it spreads like wildfire. So even in twenty twenty one, ten years later, it is being cited by Professor Rosa Friedman as, quote, a well known Swedish study, and Professor Kathleen Stock incorrectly as quote Swedish studies I'm gonna round this off with a quick discussion around toilets. And toilets really is where you've just got I mean, it's easier because there's just zero evidence. Right. Like this idea of, you know, the sort of trans predator that's waiting to break into toilets is based around media reports of extremely isolated instances, which don't even show the thing that it is trying to demonstrate. There was huge press coverage, for instance, of one individual um who grabbed an eighteen year old who identified as female, Katie Dolotowski, who grabbed a ten-year-old girl by her face and forced her into a cubicle in Morrison's and Kilkedi . I mean, again, the problem would be it doesn't really matter who you let into those story cables, you can't just grab 10-year-old girls and drag them in somewhere. But really, when you start looking at studies and people have looked, there is no evidence of there being an increased risk to users of female bathrooms by virtue of inclusivity programs. So one major US study looked at criminal incidents reporting on assault, sex crimes, and voyeurism in public restrooms, locker rooms, or dressing rooms in Massachusetts. This was over a period in which non-discrimination legislation was introduced and enacted. It found no evidence of any significant change and no difference between areas with or without discrimination laws. The study was expanded nationwide. It found no evidence that states or counties with or without non-discrimination laws had different victimization rates. It found no evidence that victimization increased when transgender people had access to bathrooms of their choosing. What it did find was that trans people were subject to significantly increased harm when they were not allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity. So a 2008 survey in Washington, D.C. found 68% of trans people reported being verbally harassed in a public restroom, 9% reported being physically assaulted. A 2022 survey found six percent nationwide in the US found six percent being verbally assaulted, physically attacked, or experiencing unwanted sexual contact. Well Rowling's argument is it seems to be that even if it's you know like one person that does it, then the risk is too bad. You know what I mean? So she says I'm very compassionate about trans people, but it's like even if more trans people are being harassed or hurt than are being harassed or hurt by trans people. That doesn't matter. Yes. You know what I mean? So it's sort of there's so much about presenting compassion, but not enough about sort of the implications at Kathleen Stock, for example, and in in her book, which I'll get to, suggests sort of a third space for trans people, right? Which is one, it's kind of like a segregation form. Two, it treats trans women and trans men as one group. Yes. And three, it's almost impossible to achieve. It's just why don't trans people lobby for their own public toilets and changing rooms and sports uh leagues and scouts, or version of the scouts, the guards, it's good because they're half percent of the population. Like you know what I mean? I think when you start probing into the implications, I I can never understand. I remember asking some people on this side of the debate back then, where trans people go? What's the solution? Yeah. And they would just go, I don't care, basically. Yes. And that is because and the way that it's framed here is that Rowling was going, Look, I've suffered this appalling, controlling violence from my ex-husband. But okay, that does not that explains why she feels that way. It doesn't explain So she writes I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. I couldn't shut out those memories . I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with women's and girls' safety . So of course you have compassion for what she experienced, but there's what is playing here is there is trauma, there's fear, rage. She talks about being like scared if someone comes up behind her, scared of loud noises, right? Really traumatized by this. What is not you know, and obviously that's amplified, that is brought up again if you get lots of abuse, right, online. And credible, I think the police said there were some of these were credible threats . But then one also has to consider how, and not to excuse that, sort of lashing out, but the role of fear and anger and trauma that trans people feel when they see a massive anti-trans campaign. And I think this is where that continental dissonance comes out, right? Is a lot of the anxious people, they're in America , right? So Rowling sees herself as part of a British feminist movement that is being shut down by loud, aggressive people. Yeah. A lot of American trans people see it as like part of a very powerful calculated campaign of right-wing bigotry where the stakes are incredibly high because they've seen the sort of bills that are passing through state legislatures. So there is a kind of dis there is a sort of uh a gap in understanding there, which perhaps explains, you know, helps to explain why there is so much toxicity. And then that becomes the whole story, doesn't it? For a bit , the abuse is the story. Yeah. If you read a lot of interviews with older Harry Potter actors, they don't go, I agree with her. They go, it's disgusting the abuse she's receiving. Of course it is disgusting that she's receiving abuse. Correct. But it it becomes again about a celebrity online rather than about the actual thing. She tells Good Housekeeping Magazine, a very rare interview. Actually, more than 90% of letters and emails agree with her, including some trans people. I mean you never know who these people are. It's like really says, but many are afraid to speak up because they fear for their jobs and even for their personal safety. It's very much framed as like this is this climate of fear and abuse. But not so much on the implications of not believing in gender identity and wanting to exclude trans people from these spaces. That's where it is in 2020. Like ch you know, she was in perfectly entitled to speak and there was an absolutely vicious attack you know, if you remember Twitter back then, it was just fucking vicious on anyone that expressed any of these kind of thoughts. And you sort of did have to stick up really for her ability to speak. The thing is, what you'd want is just a bat sque ak of recognition that the same applies to the people that over the next few years she will target, who haven't even broken any of the rules that she herself has set for how to be a trans person, that she will launch the dogs of hell on Now she'd after this, there's not that much there's not that much activity for a while from from her. What is happening is that this sort of anti-trans movement is stepping up. Particularly around healthcare. In 2020, you get Abigail Schreier's book, Irreversible Damage. She's a Wall Street Journal reporter. This is the thing that that really helps promote um rapid onset gender dysphoria as a thing. In the UK, a detransitioner called Kira Bell sues the Tavistock Clinic over prescribing puberty blockers at 16, testosterone at 17. So identifying aga in as a woman at this point . The court questions the competence of under 16s to consent to puberty blockers. This is overturned on appeal. But the case does lead to restrictions, the first restrictions on puberty blockers, which rolling compares hormone treatment , which you went on to, which follows, can't follow puberty blockers when you're older, a new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people who are being shunted towards hormones and surgery, which does suggest that it is a plot. The Calicians, rather than trying to help, are actively trying to recruit people as trans and cannot recognize a gay person when they see one. This is you know, there 's not a lot of evidence for this. The government commissions a review of youth gender healthcare under retired pediatrician, Dr. Hillary Cass, not a gender specialist. Pretty much nobody involved in this story is a gender specialist . So that becomes a big, bigger story. Then in 2021, you've got that judgment on my four stat ter, you know, on appeal, where it says her gender critical beliefs were protected as worthy of respect in democratic society. However, the tribunal clarifies this does not mean that people Right. Right? It is very delicate needle. Four studies backed by the new chair of the uh equality and human Rhtsig commission, Baroness Faulkner, who immediately withdraws the EHC from Stonewall's diversity champions scheme and has very clear opinions on this. Trevor Burrus We should probably say that for people that aren't sort of deeply read in this stuff, that organization which you would expect to have a pretty pro transposition at this point just sort of changes completely and becomes probably the leading sort of trans critical organization in the country, but with statutory powers. Then very crucially, Jacob Rowling lives in Edinburgh, the Scottish National Party introduces the gender recognition reform bill in Scotland, which lowers the age people can change their legal gender from eighteen to sixteen, removes the requirement of a medical diagnosis, and reduces the waiting time from two years to six months. This is what has been dropped by Westminster. Yeah. That was what Theresa May was talking about. It has majority public support and passes by 86 votes to 39. However, in January it is vetoed by Westminster as conflicting with the Equality Act, right? The other big story of this of this year is Kathleen Stock, OBE. She's a trustee of the LGB Alliance, which is very much separating the T from the LGB. She resigns from the University of Sussex immediately after a new campaign group called Anti-TERF Sussex Forms to get her fired. So she wasn't fired, but she says that she she had to resign, she couldn't. She is defended by Liz Truss, Kevin Badenock, Baroness Faulkner. All the best people. All the best people. And gendercritical feminists. This becomes a very big moment. I mean we still be still talked about. Yeah. And she publishes a book. So I just need to talk briefly about two books which Rowling clearly read. Right. They're gender critical set texts. Right. Helen Joyce is an editor at The Economist who's been tweeting about this issue since twenty eighteen. She was described trans youth healthcare as child abuse and attacked individual trans athletes. Right. She's she's a strong coffee. So this book, it's basically an alarmist polemic. Of course, you get rapid on set gender dysphoria. You also get the discredited uh idea of autogy nophilia, which is that being a trans woman is a sexual fetish. That's on the real kind of darker end of the trans stuff at one point she talks about a conspiracy of rich trans people funding activism. Sorry, she writes for The Economist. She left The Economist to start to to to to lead Sex Matters, the um the group founded by Maya Forstatter. Jesus Christ. Um who's uh trustee Tim Allen, by the way, later became Starmer's director of communications. So interesting connection. So she writes about a psychic epidemic. This is this more exciting version of social contagion. She highlights outliers, whether they be predators or detransitioners, and claims that the media is overwhelmingly pro-trans and you can't get a look in. Right. Certainly not the case now. I don't think it was the case in in 2021 . She goes on to call gender ideology a godless neo-religion. Fun fact: the phrase gender ideology began with conservative Catholics in 1995 as a catch all conspiracy theory opposed to all LGBTQ rights and feminism , but now is just uh apparently something fine for feminists to use. She opposes a ban on transconversion therapy She says on a podcast she is in favor of reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition, because every one of those people is basically a huge problem to a sane world. Oh wow. So it's sort of mask off. Yes. We want to keep the number of transitioning people as low as possible because I don't like them. Yeah. So Kathleen Stock's book, Material Girls, much more academic and philosophical, uh, largely in argument with Judith Butler. It's quite a gr she's she's like, you know, she's not a bad writer, but it's good it's it's it's quite a dry, it's quite a dense read. Right. You don't get the crankier stuff that you get in the Helen Joyce book. But she does, you know, she says she has friendly sympathy and respect for trans people. They deserve to be safe, to be visible, et cetera, et cetera. The life opportunities non-trans people do. If only the activists wouldn't get in the way. You know, but I always just you know, like like I say, it's like, okay, but wha what does that mean? How are they how do you how does your f disbelief in gender identity line up with friendly sympathy and respect. Like what do you think trans people are? What what rights do they deserve? Because she believes that trans identity is an immersive fiction. She compares it to video game addiction and the Emperor's New Clothes. And she says that this immersive fiction has been institutionalized by the state. Then she goes through all the possible models of gender identity as a philosophical thing. And she dismisses them all. So she's like, well, there is no such thing as gender identity. And and so again, it's in this very moderate friendly way. But I d I've I've never really been able to understand that if you if you completely dismiss the concept that your gender identity is distinct from your sex assigned at birth, where does that leave trans people? Yeah. It's not explained in the book. But but rolling is very much more in tonally in the stock camp than in the choice camp at this point. You could technically just say, well, that's what I believe is happening, but I also believe in the right of every individual to make their own decisions. And of course, it doesn't have to turn you into a you know what I mean. ideological point. And then the other is what follows from that the policy point of okay, but people will think differently to you. Are you prepared to let them just do whatever they need to, you know? And it's like that second part is your secondary illiberal decision, which it doesn't have to be connected to the first. Well if suppose she says they clash, you know, in these areas of medicine, sport, safety. Right. And she says sexual orientation. She says, you know, it kind of makes an absurdity of being lesbian, you know a majority of lesbians disagree with this. Yes. But but you know, it's pursuing a certain philosophical logic to a point where where it seems that it's very hard to understand what trans rights would be. Yes, I see. But you're never willing to say state it outright. Right. Whereas Helen Joyce is is is just i boldly antagonistic. There's a really key moment, by the way, in twenty twenty one where J. Renning is talking about the trans broadcaster India Willoughby . And she says, India didn't become a woman. India is cosplaying a misogynistic male fantasy of what a woman is. I think that's an incredibly telling moment. Because until now, she's done all the things that the critical movement would ask for. Right? She's got a gender recognition certificate. Right. She's fully transitioned. You know, she's not self-IDing, you know, in any way, such as she's done all the things, and yet it's still just like, no, you're a parody, you know, you're a free, you know, off you go. So you at that point you're like, exactly what uh uh to your point, really, just a moment ago, exactly what would someone have to do to be in your good books, you know, while still be trans in any meaningful way? Yeah. So in 2022, she steps up her opposition to Scotland's gender recognition bill and Nicola Sturgeon in particular. She wears a t-shirt saying Nicholas Sturgeon, destroyer of women's rights. She writes an article for Sunday Times Scotland where she calls trans women who have not medically transitioned intact males who retain male patterns of criminality. There we go. There's a callback there. She mocks gender-inclusive language on International Women's Day, which she calls She Who Must Not Be Named Day. Her sarcas m is quite heavy. Um she funds a new trans exclusionary domestic violence support center in Edinburgh because the city's existing center is run by a trans woman. Now what's happening in 2022 in healthcare is is enormously important. I'm just going to try and sort of explain this. It's the CAS interim report, right? Yeah. Which leads to the announcement that GIDS, the service at the Tavistock Clinic, will be closed. It eventually closes in 2024. Health Secretary Saji Javit says the treatment is bordering on ideological but the decision is criticized by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Um and eventually it kind of leaves with almost like nowhere to go. Right? This was the only clinic. So just briefly explain what's going on via the Cass Report and Hannah Barnes's book on the Tavistock, Time to Think. I have no expertise in gender health care, but nor does any of the people involved here . So like you said, the main problem is cause it's a relatively new field of medicine with relatively few patients. So there isn't enough data yet to produce high quality evidence, which means high certainty evidence. So constantly what is happening here is they go, well, this this is low quality evidence. This is low quality evidence. So you dismiss almost all every all the evidence that exists is not acceptable. So presumably you'd want to collect more evidence, and Cass actually says there should be a puberty blocker trial. But Hannah Barnes opposes it. Health Secretary West Streeting has paused it. You know, puberty blockers are already banned. It's okay, well, how are you going to get the evidence? This is sort of a bind here. And there's like this the suggestion that lack of evidence is evidence of harm. Yes. Which of course is it is not. So Barnes claims that Gibz was offering care that is too affirming, too medicalized, and too rushed, mostly based on the concerns of of whistleblowers. And she interviews a lot of different people, but the parents she interviews who are opposed to affirming care are quite sympathetic, while the ones in favor, like the ones who set up the charity Mermaids, have undue influence and are sort of dangerous activists. The the bottom line is, in fact, over 15 years, only around a thousand patients would prescribe puberty blockers. So what when we talk about the numbers, we're talking about referrals, which have massively escalated, right? Right. But 75% of the referrals never receive puberty blockers, never receive hormones, never go to endocrinology at all. Trevor Burrus Fascinating. Right. So they get given the time to think, to change their minds, whatever, the stuff that is being talked about. It's very small numbers. Now 95% of children who use puberty blockers go on to use hormones when they're old enough. Now you could frame this as worrying, like, oh, they've been put on this medical pathway. Or you could say, well then they were very effectively screened because they're trans. And so they were put on the right medication. And the truth is regret rates are very low. So detransitioners, they're constantly looking for more detransitioners. I think a lawsuit, a class action suit recently just fizzled out because they couldn't find enough detransitioners. So what comes out of this is the story of a service that is overwhelmed by demand, not actively pushing children down a pathway to transition for sort of ideological reasons. And so a lot of claims get exaggerated that gender affirming care is a medical experiment. Sounds very sinister. Children are being mutilated. Not true. You can't have surgery if you're a child, if you're under 18. That it's conversion therapy for gay kids . And so if you look at how this relates to self-ID and what's going on in Scotland. You've basically got them simultaneously arguing against self-ID without medical transition, and then trying to reduce medical transition as much as possible. So again, it's like where do they go . Okay, it's 2023. The situation here, this is the year that the podcast, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, comes out. Discussed it. It is very, very interesting, and I think the presenter does a very good job. Rowling comes across as quite different as she comes off on Twitter. Same beliefs, but she uses the language of liberalism. I mean very Ian coded language here. She talks about the importance of nuance, of doubt, of uh debate. Well we know Bad. Yes, honestly, I'm struggling to keep up here. Nothing. I know. I know. And you're like, you're too- Oh no, I'm talking what she's not talking about. She's talking about uh the trans rights movement, which is a powerful, insidious, misogynistic movement . Weirdly, the new statesman puts her at number 14 in its left power list, ahead of Tony Blair and Sadiq Khan. Interesting. Because she still identifies as left. It says rolling's high placing reflects her influence over one of the most charged issues of our time at trans rights. He credits her with leading opposition to the gender recognition reform bill in Scotland and pushing Keir Starmer into ruling one out nationwide. So like I said, the UK government blocks Scotland's gender recognition bill in in 23 on the grounds it conflicts with the Equality Act. Now, what has happened here though is a massive spike in transphobia. And I'm not going to say, oh, it's not transphobia, because it identifies as such the, Social Attitude Survey shows the number of Brits actively identifying as prejudice against trans people has doubled since 2019 to 36% . Anti-trans hate crimes at an all-time high. The number of people who think you should be able to change your gender on your passport in this four-year period has fallen from 53 percent to thirty percent. On every issue, the public is dramatically more hostile to trans rights. The first time this has ever happened with a minority group. Yeah. The public has become less tolerant. Why? There's this researcher, Jessica Kant. She writes in February 2024 about Google News Stories, right? She it's lots of stats here on our blog. A query for transgender, just the word, before New Year's Day twenty nineteen, returns between three and four hundred results. The same query after that time returns 51,200, 48, 400 of which are after New Year's Day 2023. It's a year. In January 2024 alone, the Daily Mail published 115 anti-trans articles. Jesus Christ. She said that mainstream news outlets produce news about trans people at a rate roughly a fifth of what the right-wing press churns out. That's led by the Mail and Telegraph. So most of what people are reading about trans people is hostile. It's in these certain outlets. So do you remember the transgender tipping point cover from 2014 and Time magazine? Okay. Laverne Cox . She says, we are at the height of the backlash against transvisibility. We have way more people who are educated about trans folks, but there's also been a rigorous misinformation media machine. Things have got very, very difficult for trans people in 2023 . Wanna know the real story of how Oasis made Britain mad for it? How friends turned us on to coffee culture and super layered hair. The secrets of Nirvana, train spotting, gay hookups, Diana's revenge dress, and what it was really like to be a spice girl? Plunge back into the decade when the world fell for cool Britannia, Bumster jeans, and Lemon Hooch with Talk Nineties to Me. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. And if you use Spotify, you can watch the whole show too. That's Talk Nineties to Me out every Monday. The United States is the weirdest country in the world right now, and it doesn't make any sense to anyone. No, it doesn't, but want to make it a bit less confusing. Oh, I do. Good. Well our podcast can help. It's called American Friction and it's out every Monday and Friday. We discuss all the big news from across the pond and explain it all with world-leading experts. That's American Friction. Listen right now, wherever you get your podcasts right now . American Friction ! Rowling's behaviour declines in really quite staggering and upsetting ways in 2024 . So there are three incidents all to do with sports. Um and I'm not gonna take them in chronological order because they they have qualitative differences. So the first one is uh Lucy Clark, the first openly transgender manager in English women's football. Now, Lizzie Clark is not competing in female football league. There is no argument, no possible conceivable imaginary argument on conflicting rights that you can deploy. This is simply a trans person who's been very successful. Must presumably had to go through quite a lot to go through it. Row ling calls them a straight middle a white middle aged bloke, extremely vitriolic conversation. Essentially her her sort of Twitter trolls, or you know, her backup, you know, um , her bubble of supporters online go after Lucy Clark in a very, very vicious way. And this is essentially the treatment that you're meted out by one of the most sort of famous people in the world at the moment of your greatest professional achievement. Then I want to put that to one side because then she starts talking about very, very different cases. Paris Olympics. Uh rowning attacks the female Algerian boxer Iman Khalif. Could any picture sum up our new men's rights movement better? The smirk of a male who knows he's protected by a misogynist sporting establishment, enjoying the distress of a woman he's just punched in the head and whose life ambition he's just shattered . The female footballer Barbara Bandy is then named the BBC Women's Footballer of the Year. At that point, Rowling writes, presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women's faces. Before we go into the subject of this, I think it's worth noting the language. Yeah. The like what was previously quite gentle and cautious and couched and used words like love and admire and respect.denly Sud it's just like spitting and punching and shattering and it's just really quite considerable. But clearly that's what Yes. What's even going on there psychologically is kind of astonishing. But apparently, by the way, people do say that the same things happen in the strike books, which as you go on, just like the world just becomes darker and darker and more vicious and cynical again. It doesn't mean it but but that there's a real kind of sense of collapse in those books. There's one about the celebrity creator of a much-loved franchise who is unfairly smeared as a bigot and then murdered, isn't there? I mean that's just a thing in one of the books. Um so look, uh trans people in sports, this won't take long because it's not a very hard thing to answer. Um, trans women have been eligible to compete in the Olympics since 2004 . Since then, nearly 30,000 women have competed in the summer games. Of those, one was trans, the New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who didn't finish her event at Tokyo in 202 1. No trans women competed in the Paris Olympics. The percentage of trans Olympic athletes is therefore 0.0034 % . What Rowling is talking about are people with a condition called DSD, that is, differences in sex development. It's a very rare condition where someone's chromosomal or gonadal or anatomical sex develop s atypically. In most cases, they've got XY chromosomes, those are male chromosomes, but their bodies developed in ways that those chromosomes wouldn't predict. It's variations in the genes that are involved in gonadal development, in steroid hormone, biosynthesis, in androgen responsiveness. They were raised as women. They consider themselves women. They present as women. They are women. Yes. And many don't think that there was anything remotely strange about themselves until a sports body tested them. Under the world athletic rules, you got significantly lowered thresholds pretty much year by year for the blood testosterone level that they'll allow. And they're more importantly, extending the period, the continuous period of low concentration up to two years, which really means you've just got to be lowering your testosterone and taking really quite significant drugs all the time. You can't just take it for tournaments. You have to do it all the time. Now I'm not gonna go into the details of it, although I did lose like a full day looking into it. It's it it's sort of fascinating and grim and actually weirdly medieval when you look at the process that's being demanded of these people. It is extremely controversial on several levels. The impact of testosterone on performance itself is highly contested. The scientific validity and the ethics and the process of testing, very critici, highly criticized. The medical ethics of forcing someone to take drugs to help other people rather than themselves is very strange. And whether, you know, whether any advantage, if it indeed exists, is actually unfair in the category, or if it's just comparable to general physical advantages like you know the armspan of Michael Phelps. Yeah. There's a lot of debate there. Most important ly, it is profoundly racialized. So you look at the the women that are affected by this, they are almost exclusively black and Asian women. So it's Casa Semenier in South Africa, Fronti Nibon Seyed of Burundi, Margaret Wambui of Kenya, Barbara Branda of Zambia. Over and over again, it is a highly racialized assessment that almost necessarily contains within it some dist urbing ideas about what femininity should look like. Over the kind that Serena Williams would talk about, you know, in tennis. Although she didn't quite face the level of attack that these women have faced. They are frequently and erroneously referred to as men in may in media coverage. So many A said, quote, the language they used to describe me was a humiliation. In other words, this is an issue that is extremely sensitive. It is highly uncertain , including scientifically. It is deeply humiliating and traumatic for the people involved, and it is utterly racialized. You therefore have to be delicate and careful and judicious and kind. Was Jake rolling those things? I would not come to that conclusion. So this is part I mean this is so weird because like you said, this is someone DSD is not trans. So I don't you know, some I know what is even going on, that doesn't even fit in. But this is the sort of the pattern of behaviour, right? She denies uh that trans healthcare and research were targeted by the Nazis, uh even though they were in nineteen thirty-three. Uh she just calls this a fever dream. I mean she thinks it's a holocaust nine, but I think it's kind of a strange, yeah, an excessive response to that. But it certainly just why why not just accept that that that did happen? You know. On April Fool's Day, uh she she lists several trans women uh from convicted sex offenders to Munro Bergdorf and India Willoughby, celebrates them and then she goes, April Fools, only kidding. Obviously the people mentioned in the above tweets aren't women at all, but men every last one of them. I mean, Jesus Christ. Like putting next next literally next to rapists. She now compares gender clinicians to Dr. Frankenstein. She says there are no trans kids. No child is born in the wrong body. Do you remember before? She was like some people have gender dysphoria and none anymore. There are only adults like you, whoever she's addressing, I can't remember who it was, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined. I mean the language is so , so excessive. When the CAS review comes out , somebody says, Oh, you should, I hope Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson are going to apologize to you . And she goes, celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women's hard-won rights and who use their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatized detransitioners and vulnerable women. Like it's just like lashing out in all directions. And even in the election, right, where this becomes quite a big issue. Remember the what is a woman becomes this gotcha question. Oh yeah. Right? She says Labour has embraced gender identity ideology wholeheartedly, which is quite strange 'cause it's basically back down on pretty much every commitment. Mm. The the only thing it seems to do is delayed the EHRC guidelines, which we'll we'll come to briefly. Starmer in twenty twenty two, by the way, said a woman is a female adult, and in addition to that, trans women are women. Rowling said he can no longer be counted on to defend women's rights. It's just so Yeah. A year later he says for ninety nine point nine percent of women they haven't got a penis, right? When he's asked of that gross question. Twenty twenty five he says a woman is an adult female. I mean he really is a fucking coward. Like who knows what he believes? Yeah, yeah. Also in terms of actions, and this is very important, she donates seventy thousand pounds to Four Women Scotland, a group campaigning to restrict the definition of women to cisgender women. Aaron Powell She was at this point, I mean it's gone so far that she is told by Elon Musk that she needs to chill out. You remember that? He writes to her, While I heartily agree with your points regarding sex slash gender, may I suggest also posting interesting and positive content on other matters? And he's mad Elon Musk, Dave. The most radicalised human being on earth pops up and goes, Hang on, mate. Why didn't you talk about what you've been watching on telly? You sh you should listen to what that guy's saying. Uh son of the lady, Jonathan Chite, critic of youth gender care, says just call people what they want to be called. It's basic decency. So at this point you sort of do get some sense of people peeling off and just very visibly your personality is falling apart. You're turning into a very bitter, myopic, you know, personality. And also losing that political identity, right? She's raging at Starmer. She calls Kenry Badenot the only political leader offering solidarity to win. She's dropped off. I think the new statesmen stopped doing their left power list, but I think she would have dropped off it. At this point. Yeah. Surely. Last pylons I had on Twitter was by her when I criticized Kimmy Badnock. She basically called me a sexist, I think. Wow. Yeah. You know, she was fully behind her. I mean, basically she's on board. I think, you know, at this point, she certainly has much more things to say about her than she does about the Labour Party or the Lib Dems or the Greens. 2025, obviously, the big event here is the Supreme Court's decision on that for women's Scotland case that she helped fund . And it decides that uh under the Equality Act 2010, um it is very much sex assigned at birth, not gender, which creates all kinds of implications that we're still working through, right? The the way that she marks this is obviously making traumatic for trans people. She tweets a picture of herself smoking a cigar and drinking a cocktail on her super yacht with the A-team quote, I love it when a plan comes together. Which is very Gen X coded to just quote the A team. It seems incredibly cruel and gloating. Yeah. And she follows this by launching the JK Rowling Women's Fund, and you can imagine the particular priorities uh there. So she's gonna be fighting funding women who are fighting to retain women's sex-based rights. But then she just seems to go off on one about all kinds of things. Like there is a misreported story about a trans woman offering to help a teenage girl with a bra fitting. In fact, she wasn't offering to do it herself. She was going, Can I find someone who can help you? Right. Roland calls her a boycott of Marlison Spencer. Just so completely insane. Graham Linnehan is arrested for tweeting that if you see a trans woman using a woman's toilet, you should punch her. Yeah, my God, fucking hell. Rowling tweets, what the fuck is the U K become? This is totalitarianism. So I guess violent threats are just fine now. You know, like I am actually pretty extreme on my free speech stuff. Yeah. And I'll go pretty far. At the point that you're literally telling people, and these are people who are very receptive to your messaging and highly, highly engaged with this issue, that they should punch a minority when they see them certain context. I'd be like, no, I think I you're you're crossing you're exactly crossing the line that we always talk about , which is are you encouraging violence? You know what I mean? That is the line. She's now calling trans women fetishistic straight male cross dresses. That means that she basically believes in the aut ogynophilia thing, which she certainly did not believe in before, which many gender critical feminists do not. So I think the mood has changed. She has become more extreme, while two things have happened which changed the context. One is Trump's executive orders. Yeah. The other one is the the UK Supreme Court decision, the subsequent EHRC guidelines, right? Pushed by Baroness Faulkner. Right. So Trump, it's extremely obvious the American right began using anti-trans activism as a wedge issue. There's a website called the Trans Legislation Tracker. In twenty twenty-one, 153 anti-trans bills were considered in U.S. state legislatures, eighteen of them passed . In 2025, this is four years later, a thousand and twenty-two bills and 126 passed, and massive onslaught. Also, along with immigrants, trans people, and MAGA's biggest scapegoats, those he'd done in the campaign. Day one priority for him: executive orders on sports, healthcare, the military, gender markers on passports, and driving license, right? And even in the UK, where it is more of a s I guess a sensuous position to be anti-trans, sadly, if you look at the Yeah. I think so. Right. But I mean it's the Labour Party look at what the Labour Party is saying. The Labour Party is saying things that, you know, w would have been considered completely unacceptable just five years ago. Yeah. But there are lawsuits here that have ties to groups in America like the Alliance Defending Freedom, uh the global anti-abortion and anti-gay group citizen go , uh West Streeting paused the puberty blockers trial after a letter from a professor who was then removed from the trial after the discovery of old anti-trans tweets. Was down to having gender-critical men and women in the UK government holding the positions that mattered most inequalities and health. This is largely a right-wing project, and many gender-critical feminists quietly felt that they could no longer separate themselves from the anti-trans right. If you look at Trump's claim there are only two genders and they are immutable, how is that different? He separates the T from the LGB. How is that different? You know, so it the the implications that maybe they weren't facing are now extremely obvious. And some British feminists praise Trump as a feminist hero. Yeah. Many did not, right? So in this an oral history of the gender war , some of the women there say , look, one of them says, I no longer describe or refer to myself as gender critical. I try to avoid using the term since in my view it has been tainted by some shocking associations. It has become clear there are many who share that view who also hold racist views, support extreme, right wing anti women commentators and activists, are homophobic and vocally anti-trans. Another says, I think the wider issues women face are now being lost in the gender critical movement at large, right? So there's a lot of people who are just really backing away from the right . Rowling , since Trump was re-elected, has tweeted about him three times , all praising his anti-trans measures. She says, Trump succeeded where a multitude of British women, including lifelong leftists, failed. And if you claim to hate authoritarianism, as she does , that's an odd- it's just really odd that you wouldn't even, for the sake of appearances, go, oh, I d don't like what ICEs do ing. Yeah. Or this Iran war is crazy. And it's like, no . So I think that really colours how she is seen, which brings us, I suppose, to the the issue of the you know the the death of the author, art and artist. I call it the John Lithgow question. I mean the the trouble look I'm not saying that's bad, but the trouble is you're the only person that calls it that. So if you just jump into the middle of a dinner party and go, so guys, what do we think about the John Lithgow question? I call it that because obviously he's cast his Dumbledore in the new new show or whatever. He recently told the New York Times, every interview I will ever do for the rest of my life, this will come up. Yeah. I f you know I f I do sympathize with that. He's interviewed on New Yorker podcast by David Remnick, who Remnick who's the other two The New Yorker, right? I mean he's a pretty liberal guy, but he's not who would not have thought of him as like a ex overtly pro-trans. And he's just going, huh, this stuff just sounds pretty kind of unpleasant and bigoted. And Lithko goes, I do disagree with much of it. Much of it I think has been twisted and misrepresented and she has doubled down on it to her peril. So even him appearing in Harry Potter trying to be reasonable and it's true some of the stuff she says has been twisted and of course that happens, right But she's like, eh. Remnick goes, what surprises me is the ferocity, and even I have to say, the cruelty in the tone. And Lithgo goes, yeah, and I'm surprised by it too, and disappointed by it.. Okay If somebody like that is not just going, oh, it's fine, it's fine, it's almost like it's almost become the centrist position , regardless of what you think about trans rights, that she is very cruel now. That's not a controversial thing to say. You won't get mobbed anymore for saying that you think J.K. Rowling is cruel and bigoted. No, I think that's completely right because I think it's almost completely impossible to suggest otherwise, just on the virtue of what she herself keeps on saying. Yeah. So I mean things take place on a political space, but they also take place in a sort of personal that you you do get a sense of the person behind the keyboard with social media, especially when they're on social media a lot. Sometimes you just look at it and be like, I wouldn't want anything to do with that. Like I wouldn't want to have a drink with this person. You know, there's like a real sense of decay. This person that came up across is quite sort of quiet and nervous and private and Yeah and impressive. Yeah. And empathetic. I mean the I do come back to that book at that casual vacancy book. I just remember her getting very effectively into people's heads. And you can and it's always a mistake to think that by virtue of an author having that capacity, enough empathy to get in someone's heads, they would be kind in their real life. You know, the world is full of people who are capable of these things, but then are vicious to their partner or, you know, they're they're friends . But you do I did come to that conclusion that she would have been empathetic and vast in her human imagination and that she liked humans, that she was fundamentally quite humanist. And I don't think you could possibly make that case for her now. The core thing with this death of the author stuff and and your own approach with this work for any individual has to start with her use of the funds for political activism . Now, the organization that you mentioned that she set up, the J.K. Rowling Women's Fund, is not a charity . It is effectively a litigation operation. Yeah. And its job is to bankroll cases that, quote, will make legal precedence, quote, force policy change. Now, that all sounds sort of quite formal . But look at what happened. Okay, what happened after the Supreme Court c ase is that one of the questions that was raised, and I'm gonna go into the ins and outs of the Gaudi of it, one of the questions that was immediately raised afterwards was do organiz ations have the right to pick their membership policy now? Right.. So fine So you like about prisons or whatever, or even toilets. But let's say, and this is an example that was used a lot, it was used at the Women Equality Committee. Let's say there is a women's walking group and they want to be trans-inclusive. Yeah. Now you can't make any case for the dangers of what don't even try. You know what I mean? Like, you know, they want to be trans-inclusive. Do they have the right to do it ? And at the at that point, Baroness Christian's thing was like, oh, it's no , that you know, you'd have to you'd have to say that we're open to all males. You know, that's the only way that you could do it. And don't blame me, blame the Supreme Court. By the way, this is this is really such a shameful conclusion. It's so counterintuitive and so mor ally abysmal the idea that you would just prevent people from doing this. That no one ever dare say it's their view. You know, even the head of the HLC doesn't say that it was their view. Those are oh it's the judges that did it. The judges weren't saying that it was their Yeah, so the women's institute and girl guides can't be trans inclusive. It is not just an attack on trans people, it is also an attack on non trans people who wish to be trans inclusive. So you see this at the at the Hampstead Ponds. I know it sounds impossibly twe et for this stuff, but that's where the cut one of the crucial battles right now is there is a woman's pond, Hamstead Pond. City of London Corporation runs Hamster Teeth and it ran a consultation on whether to keep those ponds trans-inclusive. Eighty-six percent said that the ponds should continue to operate as trans-inclusive spaces. The vast majority of these people would use those ponds in the last two months. So these are users of the ponds. So the organization that runs it want trans people to be there. The trans people that use those ponds want to be there. The non-trans people who use it want the trans people to be there. Organizationally and communally and individually, the autonomy says we should be allowed to have an organization where we include who we like. The sex matters bring legal proceedings against it. When they lose, they appeal. That appeal to the High Court is currently ongoing. So when we talk about her J.K. Rowling Women's Fund, this is exactly the kind of litigation they're pursuing. And because the money that she gets from Harry Potter books, from the cursed child play on the West End, from the video games, from the the roller coasters, from the new TV merchandise, from the new TV show, because that money is going to her and she has been very explicit and very clear that she is spending it in that way. That is a much more fraught example of whether you want to contribute to this stuff than the usual cases. You know, where there is no there is no political optimism from buying a Michael Jackson album or buying a Smith album, you know, or watching a Polanski film. That is a qualitatively different case that is being raised here. Aaron Powell Your money is going, you are funding that activism. Trevor Burrus Basically, it's hard to avoid that. And that does put it in a really quite difficult category. Aaron Powell And of course, people continue involved in part of the world, continue to sort of distance them Right. She went, I certainly don't agree with what she's talking about, but it's just sad. It's very sad. She's furious. Emma Watson, it's my deepest wish that I hope people who don't agree with my opinion will love me, and I hope I can keep loving people who I don't necessarily share the same opinion with. Fucking furious. Like other people who've never experienced adult life, uncushioned by wealth and fame. Emma has so little experience of real life, she's ignorant of how ignorant she is. I wasn't a million multi-millionaire at 14. It's like, fuck me, you cannot disagree with her. So it's sort of like okay, to wrap up, I suppose you can speak now. The free speech issue has been resolved. You you what are the consequences of your speech? And the consequences are in America, horrendous rolling back rights decades. In the UK, depending on what the government decides to do with these guidelines, again, this far exceeds opposition to self-ID. It would cover trans people who are fully transitioned, have gender recognition certificates, all the people that roll in claimed to accept , they would also be covered. Nobody you know, like I said, in twenty sixteen a bathroom ban was considered something that like freaks in the deep south wanted to do and failed to do. And now it's just like, oh, okay, this is fine. So I think there's three contextual changes here. One is how do you maintain that victim mentality if your views are supported by governments, most newspapers, you know, Elon Musk. Like, in what sense are you the underdog now? And when trans people are so vulnerable and her venom is escalating, that's very different to people who in 2020 would have gone, oh . She seems to have a point, right? Yes. It's completely a dramatically different situation. And then it does make you think that some of the people that were angry at her back then, it's like maybe they could see some of this coming. Yeah. Maybe what they were angry at was where this could lead if someone that influential got on this bandwagon. And they're not wrong. Well, they've been vindicated by events. Not people who were sending death threats and abuse, but in terms of people who were very, very angry and scared, they were right to be. Yeah. I mean a lot of things had to come together at the same time. And you know, even Morgan McSweeney is part probably if you had a different person right next to the Prime Minister, they might have come to different conclusions on this stuff or handled it differently. So other things had to come together to create this situation that we're in right now . It's sort of a mugs game trying to figure out what's really going on inside of someone's th you know, like that thing I said at the beginning, yeah. Is it coming from cynicism and then projecting this thing or is it coming from radicalization? Or is it coming from not being prepared to face the consequences of the propositions that you're putting forward? Or is it coming from all of these things at once? It's not impossible that you sort of are laboring under a swirl of all of them and you don't really know your own mind on a day-to-day basis when you're attached to this machine. Well, hopefully what we've done is try just try to explain, and I think some of the stuff that she's sort of saying now is so it's really so far out and so unsympathetic. She literally says that trans people it compares them to the death eaters in Harry Potter . Like they are literally the villains in you You don't understand the books. Actually, trans people are the villains. But I feel like at least hopefully we've understood like how she got to that place in terms of what she was reading, what she was thinking, and what she was feeling, that clearly this did come from, starts with a feel a real feeling of righteousness and indignation. And where that witch trials podcast is good is I think the presenter, if not rolling, gets that actually both sides see the other side as like fanatical and uncompromising. And they bel you know, but actually at the moment you say both sides, both sides, but you can see where the power is now. Yeah, exactly. It's not like an equal how it might have seemed in t I don't know, twenty eighteen maybe, in terms of the money behind it, your influence over institutions, you know, what's happening in healthcare, what's happening in in the media. It's a weird thing to have lived through to actually walk through such a dramatic shift and how rolling represents how I think a group of people, and some of them are splintered off, like I said, and they're like, actually we don't want to go down this. This is getting pretty dark. And maybe, this is my theory, listening to her talk about fiction, right? She says it's a way to explore the nuances and contradictions of human nature. Which is true. That's why fiction is good. And maybe what this is, is is almost like she's moved from that to the social media way of looking, which is the opposite. It flattens people. It shows you one dimension and it shows you heroes and villains. Brilliant. And all of this has happened online, all of this drama. And that something has I have something has just been lost, something has gone. A sense of empathy, a sense of self-awareness. All these things that for years she celebrated and said were so, so important. I just, as recently as that 2023 podcast , in the last two, three years, I just don't see where that person is anymore. I don't see how those actions support her professed values There's a lesson here as well, right, in terms of how you conduct yourself, which is the test. You can end up with these opinions, I mean you can. But the test, the moment of complete collapse, is where you stop treating individual human beings as a moral end. You know, and that's the point where you just you're broken. You if as long as you can keep that in your mind, you can have conversations about competing rights. And there may be areas where those exist. In fact, that there are.. There will be prisons You know what I mean? There will be cases where you think you're like, no, actually there was there's conversation to be had here . But you have to keep in mind the idea that each individual is a moral end, that they are not representative of some terrible conspiracy that you just get to unleash your worst sentiments towards. Yeah. And that point, that flip over in that, more than any other, is the point that you start to see the complete deterioration of the moral personality. Well, you do get a kind of conspiracy theorist thinking, you know, from rapid onset gender dysphoria to this idea of like, you know, that trans activism, trans ideology is this kind of is this dark force and it's very powerful and it's got been planned and you know and then you're no longer s you you you forget to to do the bit where you go, oh yeah, I've got nothing against the individuals. Like all of it, all of it comes together, healthcare, changing rooms, some poor woman in MS offering to help someone, you know. It's all part of this awful toxic thing. But I think by hopefully by laying out the steps along the way, we at least we've kind of understood how you could go down that path. Yeah. And that it is a path, I think, not something that suddenly you just sort of wake up one day and choose uh hate, you know. Turn off your phone's kids. Yeah, mate. Read a book. Listen to a podcast. Use some other kind of device for that. I don't know how that's possible. Read a fancy book about a uh uh but be careful which one. Um so look, I hope I hope you found this useful. Yeah, me too. I'm so glad we're gonna look at something else next week. Yeah. And in fact, join us for that because we are going to be looking at the history of evangelical Christianity . Which n isn't necessarily that much prettier than what we've done here. No. Is more distant in time. Yes. At least up until we get to Heggseth and the man like who's in charge of the war. Because this isn't there aren't this, right? And the biographies of JK Rowling are quite basic, right? So I I we're not going to do book club and very patrons, but I am going to recommend three sources if you just want to kind of know more. One is the witch trials of J.K. Rowling, presented by Megan Phelps Roper, the seven part podcast, with some fascinating bits about kind of the early Christian anti-witchcraft campaign against Harry Potter. And it it sort of goes off on something quite interesting. And you know, it was nine hours of interviews with J.K. Rowling that they culled it from. So if you actually want to hear her speak about it, there you go. Ian Parker's New Yorker Profile Muggle March from 2012. I read that, I like that. Really good. Really good. And there's an article by Molly Fisher in The Cut called Who Did JK. R.owling Become? Which is very, very well written. I think it's from 2020. And just gives you more detail on some of this process. If you're interested in any of the sort of studies and the data that we've been talking about here, it's all in the show notes. So we're just going to chuck as many links as we can. So the studies that will help inform you if you do want to just start digging into this stuff and seeing for yourself the kind of evidential basis behind it. Just chuck and jump into the show notes. Yeah, my hope is actually that the the the show notes here would actually be an incredible resource for anybody who wants to understand um a lot of these broader issues and the history and a range of voices in there. For some poor lonely traveller who comes along the mountain path after us and finds our rotting skelet ons with the burnt out torches and our letters. If you want to complain about this episode, please don't. But if you loved it, it wouldn't change a thing. Please tell your friends uh race on iTunes and you know maybe back us on uh on Patreon to help us do um to do all of this work. Yeah, come back us on Patreon, guys. We'd really appreciate it. And we're hopefully trying to shine a light on a world that is a little bit more curious and kind than the current output of the woman who wrote Harry Potter. All right. Thanks everybody. Bye. Cheers, guys. Are you breaking into podcasting and audio? Or are you ready to level up? Audio Train.co.uk is Audio UK's training platform, built for every stage of your career, from your first ideas to bigger, better productions. You'll learn creative, business, and technical skills that move you forward. And you'll hear directly from the people shaping the industry today. Real insight, real experience, real progress. From Audio UK and the BBC, go to audiochain.co. uk