JKR’s Claims Part 5: Education, Safeguarding and Freedom of Speech
Recently JK Rowling, author of Harry Potter, tweeted some transphobic statements and dogwhistles on Twitter that I have addressed here. After a few days silence she wrote a lengthy post trying to justify her position on her website. This is part 5 of my series addressing the claims in her piece. You can see the full thing here.
Education and Safeguarding
The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.
I grew up in the era of Section 28, a horrible and oppressive law that made it illegal for schools to even acknowledge that LGBT people even existed. This meant my only understanding of what an LGBT person was was from American films where trans people were presented as perverts or a joke, and from my classmates who told me that being gay was bad. Every British LGBT person my age that I have met suffered with shame, low self esteem, internalised LGBTphobia and/or bullying directly from this, and it often delayed their coming out by years or even decades. General, non-specific “concerns” about what might happen if we were to teach children about LGBT people have been used to oppose LGBT rights for decades and beyond, and it comes from the fear that the reason anyone is LGBT is because they have been tricked or brainwashed into it — this is unambiguously and demonstrably false. You are born LGBT or you are not. Teaching kids about LGBT people, who may be their parents, teachers, friends etc, or even themselves, is clearly only beneficial to children. Letting kids be kids requires letting LGBT kids be LGBT kids.
Edit: it might also be worth noting that the co-founder of JKR’s children’s charity, Lumos, is Baroness Nicholson who is vocally opposed to gay marriage and who has been bullying LGBT people for weeks.
Freedom of Speech
Freedom of speech is a hugely important issue and one that is regularly weaponised against trans people. In 2018 Canada added trans people to its laws around hate crimes, adding them to a list that already included “include age, race, sex, religion and disability, among others”. Plenty of people were quick to declare a law against harassing trans people as “the end of free speech”, something they didn’t say when the laws were first introduced for every other demographic of people covered. This was used to imply that trans people uniquely don’t like freedom of speech, which of course isn’t true. Trans people are finally, for the first time in centuries, being allowed to speak freely about what and who they are. Freedom of speech is what has allowed us to gain rights at all.
I personally know several trans journalists who were forced out of their jobs for either being trans or for opposing an editorial decision to run a fabricated story about trans people. The Guardian Newspaper forced three trans people out of their jobs this year due to transphobia in the workplace. Trans people’s rights and even existence is debated on TV by rooms full of cis people almost every week. Trans people don’t have a voice.
It is also worth noting that the Gender Critical side has a huge platform, many newspapers have published (often entirely fabricated) anti-trans articles every single week without respite. The BBC even gave someone a platform to go on TV and say that the NHS doctors helping trans children were Nazis without offering any trans or expert a chance for rebuttal, an action so extreme and unhinged I am still surprised it was allowed.
It is, of course, ironic that JKR talks about freedom of speech in an article she posted with comments turned off, and tweeted with replies turned off, days after silencing someone with a legal threat. She is not the first rich GC person to use legal threats to silence a trans person, having experienced it myself from someone else, and I am sure she won’t be the last.
Full post | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10