What Your Trans Friends Hear When J.K. Opens Her Mouth

Hi, friends. This post breaks the usual theme of my blog. I'm writing to let you all know that I contributed a guest post to another blog. The guest post started as a Facebook comment in a thread discussing J.K. Rowling's stance on trans rights, and the FB friend whose page it was invited me to expand what I wrote into something he could put on his blog. Six hours of writing later, I ended up with a monstrous piece of writing that could have served as a chapter in a book on the delinquency of Rowling.

He was kind enough to publish it, despite the length. The post is here: What Your Trans Friends Hear When J.K. Opens Her Mouth

The piece goes into detail regarding the repercussions of two specific aspects of Rowling's views on transgender people. I go over the consequences associated with excluding trans women from women's spaces and some of the consequences for spreading the myth of transness as a social contagion in young people.

I wrote that piece for people who do not know much about trans experience and are unclear on why Rowling is being unreasonable--that is, probably no one who reads my blog. Consequently, I took pains to avoid addressing the issue of whether or not trans women should be considered to be "real women", as Rowling's position is demonstrably abhorrent regardless of the metaphysics of gender. I don't think agreeing on metaphysics should be allowed to be a stumbling block when we're working on discrediting oppressors and bad faith interlocutors.

I also wrote the whole piece without using the term "cis" which I have very mixed feelings about doing. I know that people are being fed nonsense about the term cisgender being offensive or rooted in an extreme ideology. Not using the term at all even though it would have been very useful felt like capitulation, but I think that the piece will be more accessible for it.

The blog belongs to Michael Ventrella who is a writer and lawyer out of PA. He's clever, funny, and predicted a big plot twist on "Game of Thrones". You can check his books out here.

Comments

Dear Little Juniper

A Letter to Myself My therapist suggested I write a letter to my younger self as part of the process of grieving the parts of myself I had to abandon for the first part of my life. In the process of writing the letter, it hit me how much I had lost. The difficulty I experienced due to gender dysphoria on a day-to-day basis was really astounding. I had no idea what was going on, but it affected me on a deep level. I was not OK for most of my life. I powered through and made it work, but I was definitely not OK. I think part of coping with having to not be myself was denial of both the root problem (gender dysphoria) and denial of how bad my mental health was. Coming to terms with my gender dysphoria was fairly easy. The realization of how much I've lost in the past 40 years because of my depression and other mental health issues has been much more traumatic. Writing this helped me to come to terms with some of it. There really was no way around it, as I point out to my younger self...

The Lady of Shalott

The Tennyson poem, The Lady of Shalott , has always tugged at my soul . I encountered it while in school, and, at about the same time, I heard Loreena McKinnet’s musical rendition of the poem. The song haunted me, and the The Lady frequently well s up in my imagination , unbidden. Her story is one of tragedy and triumph. She lives comfortably in a tower overlooking Camelot with but one restriction. She is cursed that if she ever looks directly upon Camelot, she will die. While t he curse stops her from traveling there, she can still indirectly watch the city. She sets a mirror against the wall opposite her tower window, so she can sit before it and look at the reflection of the magnificent bustling city. She fills the room with tapestries, woven with the images she spies through the mirror. Surrounded by images from a life that she is barred from, she eventually decides to risk the curse for a chance to live her life rather than watch ing others live theirs. This is her moment of v...

How Coloring a Tree Landed Me in the Doctor's Office

My mom flipped through the small ring-bound book and pointed to one of the pages. “What number is that?” “Uh, 7?” I guessed. “Are you sure?” she asked, her brow furrowing. “What about this one?” She flipped to another page and showed it to me. I glanced at the disk of differently sized colorful bubbles. “There’s nothing in that one,” I said with confidence. While waiting for the doctor to call us into the exam area, my mother and I continued perusing the book. Some of the colorful bubble pictures had numbers in them. In one, a seven made of blue disks stood out against a background of green disks. In another, a red four amidst purple bubbles. Other pages were just fields of different shades of the same color with no recognizable pattern. My mother was clearly flustered by my answers. She stopped at one of the numberless pages. “You really don’t see anything there?” “Nope.” “It’s a three, Daniel.” “What?” “There’s a 3 right there. It’s green. You can’t see it?” she asked, in...

A Mind Asleep

Search This Blog