The Metamorphosis of Misogyny

Politico's Dire Profile of JK Rowling

“I don’t write the headlines”. You always hear hacks say this when someone criticises them. I say it sometimes because its true and often because it is not reflective of the piece that I  have written. Journalists do not choose the accompanying pictures either which readers often complain about. All of this is done, we are told by editors, to get people to click on the link to the article. As it usually works, its a hard one to argue.

Sometimes you just have to laugh. I once wrote a piece about the strange material loss of CDs, DVDs, videos, photographs that living in the virtual  world entails, and how that loss can feel unnerving with everything flattening out into an eternal present. It got headlined something like ‘I Am Looking for Love in a Supermarket’ or something equally doolally.

When, I saw the title of a Politico article The Metamorphosis of JK Rowling alongside a painting of her being enveloped in blackness, I wondered what had happened as I had been interviewed by its writer ,Sarah Wheaton ,who is the Chief Policy Correspondent for POLITICO Europe and based in Brussels.

She asked to speak to me, saying she was profiling Rowling but more generally writing a piece about gender ideology and the divides within it . Her background was in health reporting.

We met, had drinks and dinner and I could not help her much with Rowling because I had never met her at the time of the interview. What, I thought I could explain was the context in which some of the rows occur and how it is different here to the States. The conversation was easy enough and we talked a lot about anti-Semitism as she is Jewish. My contention is that part of the left’s blind spot to anti-Semitism or downright denial of it, in certain ways, has similarities with its refusal to question the progressive misogyny promoted by some trans activists.

Wheaten either knows or doesn’t know the history of feminism. From her finished piece, I couldn’t possibly comment. As a health journalist though ,I presumed she knew that longitudinal studies on puberty blockers don’t really exist but the evidence that we do have is already throwing up a lot of awkward questions . They are not simply “reversible” as is claimed, especially for natal females.

The other issue is that blocking puberty in boys may mean that they do not grow a large enough penis to make a neo-vagina. Being based in Brussels, I also assumed that she knew that both Sweden and Finland are stepping back from medicalising children and adopting a “watchful waiting” approach because they were alarmed that ,as is also happening in this country ,there is a huge uptick in the number of girls who want to transition. These girls are in distress, but many of them given proper support , end up being gay and not wanting to transition. Wheaten acknowledges this increase in numbers:

“Heightening the tension is an explosion of referrals for gender-dysphoria services for children and young people in the U.K., which have gone from 50 in 2009 to 2,500 annually by 2020. The spike first started in 2014-2015, according to an interim report NHS gender services made public in March; the backlog now totals 4,600 people, who can expect about two years on the waitlist.”

Note here the use of the word people. These people are girls. This is what concerns many of us.

The adoption of the phrase “gender identity” accepted in the States and by many here is where the argument lays. I don’t believe there is such a thing. There is biology and gender is the social construction. I am a materialist, and therefore I don’t believe in souls or gendered “essences”. This new religion is incoherent and simply a faith I do not share. Still, like Rowling. I care not how people dress, express their preconceived ideas about masculinity and femininity or who they have sex with. Everyone is born in the wrong body or no one is. Are disabled people born in the wrong body?

As a feminist I want to smash gender and smash the binary, not reinforce it with clichéd parodies. Nor do I want to create an illusory world where there are those  people whose gender essence is perfectly aligned with their physical body and other special types who don’t feel that way and are non-binary. By these definitions I am more non-binary and special than anyone else. Hooray|!

Never mind, we chatted about some of these ideas. Wheaten seemed to get some of it, but not have a huge background in the theories around this. That’s cool. I gave her the names of some other people to talk to when she got to Scotland.

When I saw the finished piece and the picture of JK Rowling done by an artist called Cat Graffam and her explanation of it “I composed a black mass that envelops her from all sides, creating a sense that she is being overwhelmed by darkness”, it was pretty obvious that this was a hit job. I actually don’t care that Graffam is trans and tweets stuff about sucking her “big fat trans dick” because you know everyone needs a hobby.

The piece however, is so beneath the writer and Politico. It is not a profile but a sloppy attack on Rowling. There is no attempt made to understand the arguments around all this or the differing contexts. Why this now?

Possibly because actually a lot more people are waking up to what is going on. There is no mention that Warner Bros are making it clear they now back Rowling, that many sporting bodies are rethinking their stand on trans athletes, that here The Cass Review is unlikely to recommend the US gung-ho approach to puberty blockers as its interim report said “ There is lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response.”

Stonewall is losing its grip on many institutions. The scandal of the GID services at The Tavistock is finally coming to light. All of this means  that Rowling’s position and that of many gender critical women does not appear to be so eccentric. Nor is it transphobic.

We want the best for young women and we want single sex spaces.

However we all know what has happened to Rowling. Wheaten makes her position clear writing “Transgender women are women ,” proclaimed Daniel Radcliffe, schooling the woman, 25 years his senior” . He schooled her? Really.

Wheaten seems obsessed with legacy when Rowling has made it clear she knows what she is doing and what she believes. She seemed worried about my legacy too suggesting that I did not have much support when I left The Guardian. This was not the case at all.

She calls me “a pariah” which is rather over the top considering I have maintained and furthered my writing career. Bizarrely she describes the lunch we had ,which was a load of fun, in language redolent of the most rancid Daily Mail style “With glossy red hair and a plunging neckline, Rowling out-glammed them all, even as the poses got sloppier with each bottle of wine”.

What is this crap? Was Rowling flaunting her enviable assets? Were we women laughing with wine instead of salad ? Call the police? Has Wheaten ever met a lesbian or women who were not trying to out-glam other women because many of the ladies who lunched were shock horror gay!!

Who knows? This piece on Rowling is sour, ill-informed and silly in so many ways and a real waste of an opportunity to explore the issues.  Hatchet jobs are usually at least sharp. Wheaten’s knife is blunted.

As soon as it was published, we saw the latest death threats to Rowling, with her address and instructions on how to make pipe bombs.

We see what happens when women speak out and if we don’t then you can get some amateur artist to depict them enveloped in what… exactly? “A black mass”, black smoke. This is a portrait of Rowling as one of her own characters. a Death Eater. A Death Eater who is actually the recipient of bomb threats. This is a visual threat from ‘the right side of history folks.’

This is a picture of misogyny.