You can also debunk JK Rowling’s latest anti-trans rant with JK Rowling’s own tweets from the days preceeding it and what it reveals about the whole anti-trans discourse is, well, pretty obvious if you’ve paid any attention to any marginalised people ever.
I am not going to cover JK Rowling’s latest anti-trans rant in excruciating detail here as it can ultimately be summed up by a couple of lines from the middle of it. The rest really is just padding, several hundred “big” words of padding, which attempt to make the point sound clever and seem salient – but is ultimately just another example of faux-intellectualism attempting to justify bigotries.
The couple of lines are “in literally no other sphere of human life is it held that a person’s self perception must be accepted unquestionably as true or real“ – this is the point she’s trying to make with the whole tweet. The rest of the three chunky paragraphs are all, in essence, an attempt to make this point work.
It is debunked by as little as saying “I’m hungry” or “my feet are cold” or “I didn’t like that” or almost anything else at all. Self perception is the entire way in which you as a human being communicate with the world around you because you have literally no other way of doing so. You tell people who you are and how you’re feeling all the time and are generally believed when you do so without having to prove it.
JK Rowling’s latest anti-trans rant is also debunked by JK Rowling herself in tweets surrounding this one in which she, rightly, criticises a school for asking for doctors notes regarding students having severe period pain and being absent from school. Admittedly… she is a one-track bigot loser so she couched this in her anti-trans crap as if its our fault that teachers and schools are often horrible little tyrants who want to rule over a group of vulnerable people with an iron fist, rather than treating them as people. Wait that sounds familiar…
Say Rowly, you ever thought of teaching? You’d fit right in.
Because that’s basically what “treating people as people” even is. It all comes back to listening, understanding, learning and not just treating them like shit because you don’t agree they could possibly feel a way you – and your self perception – don’t, can’t or never have.
As I said, you are generally believed when you express your self perception. No one is going to whip out the X-Ray to see if there’s food in my belly when I say I’m hungry. No one is grabbing a thermometer to see if my feet are actually cold. No one is asking me to quantify what specifically I mean when I say I didn’t like a thing. Well most of the time anyway, this gets fuzzier the less privilege you have in our societies.
That’s because the right to your self perception is political. It is gatekept away from the marginalised who are held to much higher standards of proof than other, more privileged, people. Disabled people are routinely asked to prove their disabilities, gay people are routinely questioned about the legitimacy of their sexuality, trans people (in the UK at least) have to literally sit down and have multiple interviews with a pyschotherapist before they will accept that we are transgender and allow us to access treatment (sometimes).
The list goes on and on and on – the examples I could give are longer than JK Rowling’s latest anti-trans rant. It’s probably longer than even her 4,000 word bigot essay. It represents millions, if not billions, of people around the world whose lives would be meaningfully improved if we simply chose to believe them rather than chose to not believe them or otherwise installed systems under which they have to prove themselves in order to be believed.
Take the young people experiencing period pain which JK Rowling somehow made about trans people because that’s all her rancid brain ever thinks about these days. Will some people lie and say they have bad pain when they don’t to get a day of school? Sure probably. Kids are kids and will lie to get out of school sometimes.
But is it worth restricting the ability to take a day off school due to pain just to stop a few kids doing a bit of truanting here and there? No. The harms inflicted on those who are genuinely experiencing pain by this policy vastly outweigh any benefit we could hope to achieve by doing it. 100 kids could play truant using this policy – but if you force even one kid to sit through class in agony that’s monstrous in my view.
It turns out that doing things to support people is much better for everyone than doing things to stop people accessing support. A thing that was plainly obvious to everyone who isn’t attempting to do some kind of bigotry against a group of people they don’t like.
