“AH’s views are pro-Germany, not anti-Jew. The negative impact on Germany is the reason why she's talking about this at all.”
So it’s really not that far of a stretch to make this association in her case.
In her books the wizards fight against wizard Hitler and his eugenic holocaust. In real life, she engages in her own form of eugenic crusade where she believes the sex organs you are born with define your personality, identity, and your criminal tendencies.
What on earth compelled you to equate the most evil mass-murderer of the 20th century with a children's author and feminist who says sex is real and matters for women's rights and safety?
JKR doesn’t believe trans women deserve rights that normal people have, and believes that they are inherently threatening to women just by existing.
She wrote a book series about how your bloodline doesn’t define who you are as a person, and then turned around and decided that the sex organs you’re born with determine your propensity for criminality.
For some reason she scapegoats a group of people representing less than 1% of the population for crime against women and it doesn’t make any statistical or logical sense to those of us who haven’t been living in a moldy flat sleeping on a bed of cash.
She's simply arguing that women shouldn't have to surrender the few hard-fought protections that were carved out to help level this unequal scenario in the first place.
Most people see this as basic fairness, not hate.
She literally wants it to be an impossible paradox.
Trans women can’t use the ladies room because they’re a “danger” to women. Trans women can’t use the men’s room because they look like women.
For people like JKR who hate trans women, trans men don’t exist, intersex people don’t exist, and non-binary people don’t exist. Trans women are just easy to hate for various psychological and political reasons.
She just wants them to be punished. That’s it. All of these other excuses that have to do with violence and crime are no different than when my MAGA relatives justify the ICE Gestapo’s illegal kidnappings by the supposed criminality of immigrants. We don’t need due process when they’re “illegals” who are “more likely to be criminals and are in gangs.” They “don’t have rights” for various stupid-ass reasons.
Again, it is a statistical and logical fallacy to consider a population so small to be a threat to women.
JKR has not proposed taking away any rights from men, only trans women.
Women aren’t surrendering anything. The list of things they’re surrendering has a length of 0.
It was certainly a better excuse for creative writing than Cho Chang or Seamus Finnigan but she did a very poor job of convincing me that her main focus isn’t dehumanizing trans women.
https://www.them.us/story/barbra-banda-jk-rowling-gender-att...
She's made a pattern of this behavior, and I think it clearly reveals her transphobia. (I also am not sure what the right solution is for trans people in competitive sports! I think that's a very tricky subject. But attacking cis women for looking too masculine is certainly not part of the answer.)
Also, her twitter rants about trans people are pretty shocking.
One would have thought the BBC could have picked a better candidate for Women's Footballer of the Year than a player who had been withdrawn from competition for not being female. You think JKR shouldn't comment on this?
But sure, I guess we can consider that hormone requirement as just an extremely crude approximation. JKR's comments are still repugnant.
Banda hasn't been excluded for doping and is apparently fit and healthy. Therefore the most reasonable conclusion to draw is that Banda is male.
This is almost certainly another Caster Semenya type of situation.
> women and girls need single-sex spaces
It follows that you should designate a person with female-typical testosterone and estrogen levels as female, whether or not they have XY or similar chromosomes, a penis, etc. Those people should then use female bathrooms, right? Including trans women taking hormonal treatment? And those trans women should be able to compete in women's sports, since they pass your hormone test?
Or maybe, just maybe, sex is more complicated than that.
I also wonder how women with minor hormone irregularities feel when people like you dismiss them as men in denial.
Banda was withdrawn by FAZ from WAFCON because CAF had started testing athletes in the female category for male-typical levels of testosterone. Barring serious illness or doping, a failed test implies presence of testes which implies male.
Some male athletes who want to compete in the female category have suppressed their testosterone, either through pharmaceutical means or surgical excision of their testes. This doesn't mean they aren't male, nor does it remove the physical advantages conferred during male sex development. Which is, fundamentally, what the female category in sport exists to exclude.
So there is no contradiction as it all leads back to this principle.
Women with minor hormone irregularities, like PCOS for example, aren't affected by the above.
And yes, women can have high testosterone without testes. Again, it's bizarre that you're clinging to a testosterone standard that would declare a decent percentage of healthy, normal women to actually be men. I'm sorry, but sex is more complicated than that. You're not doing anyone any favors by trying to impose neat definitions on a messy reality.
Women with PCOS or similar are highly unlikely to exceed the testosterone limits that some sporting bodies implement as proxy for detecting male advantage, and indeed are explicitly exempted in such policies and have never been barred under any DSD regulation.
The true edge cases aren't athletes like Semenya and Banda, but the very rare individuals with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS), who don't respond to testosterone at any point in their development. Most sporting bodies carve out an exemption to exclusion for them.
What I do care about is your insistence that a single hormone test lets you exclude someone from being a woman, and JKR's dismissal of Banda. That's just so messed up, and ironically feels very misogynistic.
JKR was commenting on the BBC giving their Women's Footballer of the Year award to a player who had been withdrawn from competition for not being female, and how disrespectful this is to the many female footballers who would be deserving of this accolade. This is the opposite of misogynistic.
But if you insist on this standard, I suggest you get your all your friends and family tested. You can't tell by appearance alone! And then, if your loved ones have that hormone imbalance, you should call them men, use he/him pronouns, interfere when they try to use women's spaces, etc. See how misogynistic it feels then. Otherwise, you're clearly only targeting Banda because she looks masculine.
And lastly, for the record, you were swapping between three different definitions of male. Having elevated testosterone, having testes, and having gone through male puberty are three very different things. You say you've settled on "having gone through male puberty" as your final definition. Great! So men that haven't gone through male puberty should be permitted in women's sports and women's bathrooms? Or will you introduce a fourth definition?
We can agree to disagree on whether Banda is in the same category as Semenya, Khelif, etc. But consider that when news articles report a purportedly female athlete embroiled in controversy over competition eligibility as having "naturally high levels of testosterone" or similar, what this actually means is the athlete is male with a DSD. There has been a considerable amount of obfuscation on this topic and those who lose out are actual female athletes.
Unfairly elevating males like Semenya to the heights of female competition excludes women who would otherwise have had the opportunity to showcase their athletic excellence. This is the real misogyny.
I skimmed over your hypothetical about sex testing of family and friends because it didn't really add anything to the discussion. If any were found to have testes and male levels of testosterone (which in this scenario would not be a "hormone imbalace", as you put it) then yes, they would be male.
You did not. Once and for all, what is your definition for "male"? It seems like you don't want to stick with a single definition so that you can continue transvestigating any woman who looks too masculine to you.
Again, if you stick with the definition of "someone who has gone through male puberty", that excludes many people with penises you would probably identify as male, making your argument incoherent. And that's ignoring the ambiguity of what going through male puberty actually means.
> If any were found to have testes and male levels of testosterone
Again, you can't reliably predict the results of these tests from visual appearance alone. So, does this include your daughter or wife or mother or sister or friend? You would force them to use male bathrooms, even if they've been presenting as feminine, identifying as feminine, with feminine external sex characteristics, for their entire life? Congrats, that's misogyny. Your argument is incoherent.