While Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling specializes in fiction, she has learned the hard way that disputing fashionable fiction posing as reality can be costly — even when you’re willing to accept half the tall tale.
At issue is, of course, Rowling’s opposition to the MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status or “transgender”) agenda, a stance that has perhaps earned her almost as much publicity as her novels. The issue has recently landed her back in the news, too, with an accusation that she has caved to the MUSS mob.
In reality, though, her weakness here isn’t in her wrists but her reasoning, which, tragically, she shares with millions.
The Rowling row began shortly before Christmas 2019, when the author tweeted the following:
For this, of course, she joined other liberal MUSS critics such as ex-tennis star Martina Navratilova in becoming persona non grata among the arts and croissants crowd. But her tweets continued even as former fans swore off her books and swore at her; they continued even though she was doxxed “(i.e., her home address was revealed, which is a way to encourage people to terrorize her) and the entire Harry Potter infrastructure (studio and actors) has sought to erase her,” commentator Andrea Widburg reminds us.
Now Rowling has taken to Twitter again, ending 2021 with a series of posts (below) on her MUSS position — and inspiring Widburg to write that she is caving to the mob.
In reality, though, the above position is nothing new for Rowling, but is merely an elaboration upon what was implied in her 2019 tweet. She has been half wrong all along, espousing a position as viable as a proposal to become half-pregnant.
The point at issue here is as important as it is poorly understood. While the average person regards “gender” as synonymous with “sex,” social scientists and the MUSS lobby generally define the terms very differently. “Sex” is just what you’d assume it is: the biological quality of being male or female.
“Gender,” on the other hand, is your perception of what you are. And since there can be as many perceptions as people, there can be, by this logic, innumerable “genders.”
In other words, the sexual devolutionaries first co-opted the term “gender,” which once was used to reference grammatical categories almost exclusively. They then applied this normal-sounding word to disordered thinking (psychological phenomena) to facilitate the re-branding of mental problems as normal variation.
So “Scott has a delusion he’s a woman” has become “Scott has a different gender: He’s a woman” — and those opposing this “normal variation” are now characterized as abnormal, at least socially.
The lesson here is simple: Words have “gender”; people have “sex,” as in being male or female. And effectively combating the MUSS agenda requires controlling the debate’s language and using these terms in just those ways.
Now, it’s not surprising that Rowling, a writer, would know the terminology; if only she knew the science or the reality.
As Widburg puts it, Rowling’s position is “a no-can-do stance. Accepting that transgenderism exists puts you in a binary situation (pun intended). Either biological differences between women and men are real, in which case transgenderism is utterly delusional; or transgenderism is real, in which case assertions that women exist as a defined sex and have specific rights are delusional. Rowling is trying to dance around and obfuscate these two options.”
True. Again, however, Rowling has millions of dance partners in this — including many conservatives.
As I pointed out in “The Acceptance Con,” conservatives and Westerners in general often have an instinct to be “reasonable,” to compromise, to adopt a live-and-let-live attitude stating, “I don’t care what you do; just don’t shove it in my face.” With the MUSS agenda, this translates into Rowling and many others trying to split the baby, not realizing the sexual devolutionaries won’t accept this because it would kill the agenda they’re suckling.
(Then there’s the psychology at work: Departing profoundly from reality, MUSS individuals’ illusion is most fragile; thus, they can’t and won’t tolerate any questioning of it.)
It’s much like telling Islamic jihadists, “Embrace your theology to your heart’s content; just don’t try converting me by the sword.” This naively overlooks that they consider violent conversion a divine enjoinment.
Likewise, simply looking at what the MUSS activists actually believe reveals the untenability of Rowling’s stance. Their position isn’t just that they’re playing pretend and would like the rest of us to, as when indulging a child dressing up and making believe he’s a monster, play along to make the game more fun.
Rather, their central claim is that, for example, if a man says he’s a woman stuck in the wrong body, he must be considered a woman just like any other female. It follows from this that if you deny him the opportunity to play sports, use restrooms or locker rooms, or to be put in a prison (if he’s thus sentenced after a crime) meant for women, you’re violating his rights. If you label him with the wrong “pronouns,” you’re launching a sort of verbal attack just like a mean little boy taunting a girl in school by likening her to a lad.
Rowling’s position is a bit like comforting an emaciated girl with anorexia nervosa by saying, “You can consider yourself Jabba the Hut’s lazier brother. You can buy plus-size clothing. You can think you have more chins than Chinatown. I’ll even call you ‘fatso.’”
“Just stop dieting.”
You can’t accept half a mental illness, and the sexual devolutionaries won’t meet you there, anyway. So why not try reality?
