J.K. Rowling is apparently still fixated on portraying transgender women as predators.
In a tweet on Sunday, the Harry Potter author attacked reporting that police in Scotland would record rapes as being committed by a woman if the assailant identifies as female. “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength,” Rowling tweeted. “The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.”
An error occurred while retrieving the Tweet. It might have been deleted.
The comment is only the latest in a string of efforts by the once-beloved author to amplify a narrative that’s not only essentially false but also ignores the devastatingly high level of violence experienced by trans people.
In June 2020, Rowling published a 3,700-word essay about what her fears around what she called the “new trans activism,” accusing trans people of “pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.” That essay quickly sparked accusations that Rowling was a TERF, or trans-exclusive radical feminist, as Rowling drew on her own experience as a sexual assault survivor to suggest that trans women are a threat to cisgender women.
In the year-plus since, Rowling has sporadically implied that trans people and those who advocate for their rights are dangerous.
But Rowling’s narrative—that trans people are somehow perpetuating an Orwellian takeover—is misleading on multiple fronts. It obscures the fact that it’s cis men, not trans women, who regular commit sexual assault. Only a fraction of a percent of U.S. adults identify as transgender—yet almost one in five women have experienced completed or attempted rape, according to the Centers for Disease Control. (One in 38 men have experienced the same.) For anyone trying to pin the epidemic of assault on trans people, the numbers just don’t add up.
“People will say from one side of their mouth that trans women are an incredibly small part of the population and that the world shouldn't bend to their desires, but will then say that we are so influential and powerful that we must be stopped; specifically to save women from rape,” YouTuber Kat Blaque tweeted after Rowling’s comments.
Blaque added, “Are the only people capable of rape and sexual assault men? Would you define rape solely by penetration? Is sexual violence inherently male?”
An error occurred while retrieving the Tweet. It might have been deleted.
Trans people also face a staggering amount of violence. In a 2015 survey of nearly 28,000 trans adults living in the United States, the National Center for Transgender Equality found that 47 percent of respondents said that they had been sexually assaulted in their life. So far in 2021, at least 50 transgender or gender non-conforming people have been violently killed, according to a tally by the Human Rights Campaign.
Compared to cisgender people, trans people are more than four times more likely than cisgender people to experience what the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, in a 2021 study, called “violent victimization.” That includes becoming victims of assault and rape.
“The biggest threats of violence against women has always been cis gender men,” Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness tweeted. “Not trans women, unless JK’s constant transphobic cherry picked vitriol convinces you otherwise. But as trans women are assaulted, deprived of work, killed, and raped JK is safe in her mansion.”
