After the success of Harry Potter, bestselling author J.K. Rowling announced that her next children's book, The Ickabog, was in the works, a supposedly political fairy tale about truth and the abuse of power.
In Michigan, USA, a trans woman working in funeral services gets fired from her job after coming out to her boss and coworkers, after nearly 20 years of working there. She loved her job, but her boss sent her away, nonetheless, telling her that “it isn’t going to work out.” In 2014, much closer to home, and much more grotesque, a trans woman and a US marine checked into a motel in Olongapo—only for the staff to find her body lying limp in the bathroom 30 minutes later, neck black from bruises.
A question comes to mind, then, of what truths about power Rowling would know, when weeks ago she used, in a tweet, the phrase “people who menstruate,” saying “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” This fed into beliefs that have been harming the trans community for years—a community historically bereft of institutional power—as well as alienating a good portion of her readership. For this she was labelled a TERF—a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
Rowling’s sentiment is not all that new, especially among certain groups of self-avowed feminists that reject the term TERF, and instead prefer to be called “gender-critical”—even though they seem to be anything but.
The rhetoric used to exclude trans women from feminist discourse contributes to discriminatory legislation that impedes on the right to recognition, which is essential to other fundamental rights, such as the right to security, freedom of expression, employment, and access to justice. This lack of legal recognition, as well as the associated rights and protections that come with it, gives each moment of their daily living the potential to become rife with violence and humiliation.
For decades, the inclusion of trans women in the discussion of women’s rights has been cause for endless debate. So-called gender-critical feminists argue against trans inclusion on the basis of the latter, as the reasoning goes, not having experienced “true womanhood,” as they have supposedly been raised as men, and that they allegedly merely play into caricatures of femininity. These self-professed feminists claim that inviting trans women into cis women’s spaces would open the doors to all men.
Though Rowling’s arguments seem to take a different turn, they are still laced with the same misguided essentialism. According to her, her likes are not trans-exclusionary, as they consider trans men to be part of their feminism, born as they were a woman and thus having experienced womanhood. To Rowling, transitioning into a man is less a matter of identity; rather, in her view, it serves as an easy way out of the hardships of womanhood.
This essentialist strand of feminism, however, does more harm to women than the supposed threat posed by the presence of trans women in mainstream spaces. Its normative nature, which seeks to find “a shared experience” of womanhood, inevitably leads to the alienation of certain narratives, failing to account for nuance across race and class and further disenfranchising those without power. More often than not, the narratives of upper-class, straight, able-bodied women become the standard.
Critical as they may claim to be, TERFs also seem to be hell-bent on hinging policies on remote possibilities and what-ifs, rather than probabilities and actual data.
According to latest estimates by the Trans Murder Monitoring project, 3,000 transgender people were murdered over the last decade worldwide, and the numbers have since been rising steadily. On the one hand, there has not been any conclusive evidence of trans women posing harm to cis women; on the other, the reality of violence against the former simply falls on deaf ears.
These notions contribute to abusive and discriminatory procedures—including the lack thereof in legislation—that inevitably make trans individuals more vulnerable to socioeconomic disadvantages. In fact, LGBTQ+ people are most likely over-represented in the bottom 40 percent of the population due to higher unemployment rates among them and their unequal access to healthcare, housing, and social services, according to the World Bank in 2015.
While, in the Philippines, the SOGIE Bill is being pushed in Congress, legislation for the recognition of trans people in the eyes of the law is yet to be seen. Elsewhere, however, parliamentary milestones for the LGBTQ+ community are gradually being realized, as in June 2020, when the US Supreme Court ruled job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity as illegal.
Even so, in countries with laws that allow people to legally change their gender identities, it seems that an assumption persists about the fraudulence of trans identities. In European and Latin American countries, trans people are still forced to undergo demeaning procedures to legally change their gender identities that include multiple medical tests and forced sterilization.
In the Philippines, in 2007, a trans woman was even outright denied the chance to have her first name and gender marker changed even after a gender-reaffirming surgery. The court ruled that allowing it would “substantially reconfigure and greatly alter the laws on marriage and family relations.”
Demented as it may sound, numerous so-called feminists have come to Rowling’s defense, downplaying the fight for trans recognition as being part of the “tyranny of wokeness.” Supporters have even lauded her literary agency after it recently announced, despite clamor to release a statement to the contrary, that it would not be giving in to the demands of certain clients—as if human rights were a simple demand to be met, not at all that different from a product in the market.
Trans women thus find themselves in a precarious position. If they are not outright left out of conversations about women’s rights, dominated by those claiming to be either liberal or conservative, they are instead vilified and accused of perpetuating misogyny themselves. There may be some sliver of truth to TERFs being critical, but their shortsighted object of criticism is trans identity itself, rather than the conventional notions of gender, sex, and the systems perpetuating misogyny that a truly radical brand of feminism should root out.
Despite whatever it is that Rowling is attempting to write about truth and power, the truth is that tales of power are far from fantastical in a world where trans violence rises to unprecedented levels—whether in the form of blatant hate crimes or under the guise of bureaucratic protocols and historically unjust laws. ●
* Apologies to Mary Wollstonecraft. The article was originally published online on June 30, 2020, with the headline “Far from Fantastical: TERFs and the fight for trans recognition.”
