J.K. Rowling Has Turned Transphobia Into a Celebrity Cause
And it only reveals the power she has to control the narrative
One Sunday morning a few weeks ago, I woke up to an endless barrage of Twitter notifications. One of my tweets, “Women’s history belongs to trans women,” had already received over 400 responses. My tweet was part of a longer thread, where I had also typed the four-letter acronym for transphobic pseudo-feminists: trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs for short. I had forgotten that TERFs tend to word-search Twitter so that they can dogpile trans and nonbinary people, like me, who use that term. No wonder they spotted me.
The responses I got were, well… not so feminist. “Stupid cunt,” said one man. “Go fuck yourself, bro,” another exhorted. I was called a “rapist,” a “retard,” a “racist misogynist sad prick” (that last insult came attached to four different hashtags, most notably #WaronWomen). It wasn’t my first such social media swarm, nor will it be my last, and I am far from unique: This is the baseline level of harassment anyone experiences for being visibly trans online.
Thus, we come to J.K. Rowling, whose celebrity defenders have recently been portraying her as the victim of “hate speech” and online harassment. Rowling self-declared as a transphobe this summer, with a rambling…
