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JK Rowling's New Sex Abuse Crisis Center - No Trans Allowed! [1]
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Date: 2022-12-15
Author J.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, launched her own privately-funded crisis center, Beira's Place for survivors of rape and sexual assault in Scotland, UK. It sounds like it should be a moment of good within the context of violence against women. The catch? Women who are transgender are not allowed — both clients and employees. JKR shared the news in an exclusive interview with Suzanne Moore on her blog 'Letters from Suzanne'.
It's telling from the start that JKR selected Moore for her big reveal. Moore voluntarily exited the U.K.'s The Guardian publication in 2020, after more than 20 years as a columnist, when over 300 of her colleagues signed a letter of protest alleging "transphobic content" in Moore's essay from earlier that year (and certainly not her first controversy).
Let's be clear - Moore's conversational interview with JKR is straight-up transphobia. Like many bigots, they attempt to gaslight their way to sounding reasonable. JKR's remarks about doing this to support women ring hollow if she refuses to support women who are transgender - she all but admits that she's doing this to stick it to her detractors. Just like your base Republican voter owning the "libs". JKR and Moore are just more careful with their language - it's more heavily coded and polite. The word "trans" appears only 3 times in the lengthy piece, yet the entire article is devoted to defining women as not to include women who also happen to be transgender.
Who, I wonder, is ‘our team’ these days? Women standing up for women are now routinely considered transphobic, a term we both hate. As she says “I have no irrational fear of or hatred towards trans people in the slightest – as, God knows, I've said so many times. But if you're going to say it’s ‘hate’ not to believe in a gendered soul, then we cannot have a discussion. We can't. There's nowhere to go.”
Apparently bigoted women "standing up to" (in other words, punching down on) transgender women is somehow not transphobic. JKR attempts to deny she's transphobic by use of the literal "phobic" - to have an irrational fear or hatred toward "trans". Whether they hate anyone is debatable, however there's little doubt that they confirm the fear and hate in others. JKR suggests there's no such thing as a "gendered soul" - in other words, JKR is making clear that there's no such thing as a woman being born with a male body, and therefor, a woman who is trans is still a man. In JKR's view, there are women, and then there are transgender woman, and they'll will forever be separate.
Moore goes onto lament "Women who feel bullied into silence for fear of losing their livelihoods by saying the 'wrong thing'." As though she's speaking of the 'wrong thing' not being about the denial that trans women are women just as much as any other woman.
“The contradictions drive me crazy: we’re simultaneously told gender is innate and inborn, and that it's a choice, a performance. All of these things cannot be true. If it’s a choice, then clearly it’s not innate.”
Duplicitous reasoning. JKR speaks of different concepts about gender while conflating them into an unyielding contradiction. As with almost everything JKR speaks of when it comes to gender, she shows a startling lack of understanding and knowledge about what it is to be transgender. Which is a shame as she has apparently decided this next chapter of her life will be playing the villain - the transphobic bully who's too wealthy to have to care, as she herself admits while playing martyr, “It’s going to have to be, me, isn’t it? Because I will always be able to feed my kids, even if everyone boycotts my books for the rest of my life.”
No one knows for certain why a small percentage of people are transgender. But it's not a choice. There are elements of gender that are largely a social construct. There are elements of gender that may not be. But trans people use the words, the language, that's available to them. There are no simple words or phrases in the english language that convey what it is to be transgender. So existing words like "gender" are used as shorthand to convey very complicated concepts about self and identity. Ultimately the reductionism is intended as a dismissal that trans women are, in fact, women.
What follows in the article is much in the way of vagueness - lots of words about misogyny and liberals and the "weaponizing of trauma", and trans women "playing the victim", as though one of the richest women on the planet with millions of fans and followers is not herself playing the "victim" in all this. And what it all boils down to is an intention to convey that women are under attack by men in dresses. And that women are most definitely under attack in crisis centers in Scotland.
However, as Rape Crisis Scotland stated to the BBC, "All rape crisis services in Scotland offer support to trans women and have done so for 15 years. There has not been a single incident of anyone abusing this."
Moore counters...
Edinburgh’s one Rape Crisis is currently already over subscribed and somewhat controversial. Its stance that survivors may need to be re-educated about trans rights as part of recovering from trauma does not suit many of its users. The idea that survivors who have “unacceptable beliefs” should have their prejudices challenged, begs the question of who the service is for.
First, Moore frames this as though Rape Crisis Scotland is running a re-education camp - a worn-out trope of the Right. A feeble attempt at demanding tolerance for the intolerant. Not accepting bigotry is not the same thing as attempting to re-educate people, as much as Moore would like to redefine it. And "unacceptable beliefs" is code for denying that a trans woman is a "woman". Would they feel the same way about "unacceptable beliefs" if it was code for racism? What if a cisgender woman with white skin is uncomfortable being around a cisgender women with brown skin in JKR's shiny new crisis center... who is shown the door?
This is Beira’s Place. It is a new support and advocacy service for women who have experienced sexual violence, it has been funded by J.K. Rowling, and it opens today. It has been set up to meet an unmet need from female survivors for a women-only service, as there is not one currently available in the area.
"Women" in this context does not mean all women who have experienced sexual violence. The "unmet need" of transphobes and bigots is apparently a demographic that needs their own exclusive crisis center. It's worth pointing out that Beira's Place is not a "shelter" or "dorm" where women spend the night. Regardless of unfounded notions that cisgender women need to be protected from trans women in sleeping situations, this doesn't even come into play at Beira's Place.
Per PinkNews, "Under the Equality Act 2010, transgender people are protected from discrimination, but services are able to exclude trans people from single-sex spaces if this exclusion is a 'proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim'." How that's interpreted will likely be up to the courts to decide if challenged.
Beira’s CEO Isabelle Kerr argues that these are gendered crimes that cross all classes, cultures and religions: “Effective sexual violence services must be independent, needs-led and provide responsive, woman-centred services free from the pressure of current political agendas.”
In their view, trans women are 'political agendas'.
As Isabelle Kerr explains: “It just doesn't matter what your politics are. We focus on what you can only focus on. So when a woman comes in, we ask them a whole number of questions. But whether or not they answer those questions doesn't matter; that won't affect any support they get.
It doesn't matter what their views are, it won't affect the support they get... unless they are a woman who happens to be trans.
Moore continues...
The story is simply this: they are increasing capacity when and where it is really needed. They are offering a choice. Beira’s Place is offering no “re-education”. It is completely non-judgmental.
They are offering a choice to some women. They are not offering a choice to all women. And speaking of "contradictions", somehow the two feel they can be transphobic bigots while being "non-judgmental". 'All these things cannot be true' is still ringing in my ears. They simply do not view transgender women as women.
“The first stage is about ensuring safety. Somebody has to feel safe here in this room. Because if they don't feel safe, they're never going to be in a good place to start disclosing the trauma and working through it. And that’s the healing process.
Code for 'you can't feel safe if you're in the same room as a trans women'. Maybe it's not even code at this point. It's not like anyone really needs to break out their frosted flakes cereal box decoder ring to find the underlying meaning of JKR's big reveal.
“I was climbing the walls. It's not a political thing to me; this is personal. And then, after two days, I had the lightbulb moment and I thought, ‘I don't have to pace around my kitchen ranting. I can actually do something about this.’ And that's how it started. So here I am.” And here we are. In Beira’s Place, a service for women run by women.
J.K. Rowling has been give every benefit of the doubt for her words. But her actions leave no doubt. The only way to accept her line of reasoning is to deny that trans women are women.
[END]
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/15/2142076/-JK-Rowing-s-New-Sex-Abuse-Crisis-Center-No-Trans-Allowed
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