Is JK Rowling Winning Her PR Battle?
Agree or not...Rowling's numbers are up...those for "affirmative care" for minors are down. And they may drag trans and gay rights with them.
Recently, England’s National Health Service moved to stop prescribing puberty blockers for youth who identify with gender dysphoria or trans identities. This continues a trend through most European countries, including those which are otherwise ostensibly very progressive, to step back from the affirmative model of gender medicine. Under the affirmative model, medical practitioners were effectively recommended to take youth at their word if they claimed to be trans and place them on puberty blockers. However, the NHS and other European reviews have questioned whether the evidence supports the effectiveness of this approach.
Not surprisingly, this decision provoked victory laps from one of the UK’s most visible critics of gender medicine, JK Rowling. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter book series, tweeted “Don’t forget the abject cowardice of many politicians, sections of the press and certain members of the medical profession, all of whom allowed themselves to be intimidated by a loud, angry mob that capitalised on their fear of not looking progressive and sophisticated enough.” She later added “idiot celeb cheerleaders” to her list of groups who promoted an activist rather than science approach to gender medicine. I wonder who she might be thinking of?
Once becoming akin to “she who must not be named”, is Rowling actually beginning to win the public relations war on her stance on the trans issue and, if so, why? In 2020, at the height of the controversy over identity, she appeared akin to a lone tree standing in a gale. In 2024, she retains 14 million followers on X, she was the focus of a largely sympathetic and well-received podcast documentary, and there’s talk that Warner Brothers (the producers of the Harry Potter movies) are quietly courting her once again. A tide seems to be turning and the furor via which anyone who raised any question about trans medicine or ideology was instantly labeled a transphobe may be lifting.
A bit of throat-clearing…personally, I think the science on trans individuals is complicated. There probably are individuals who’ve experienced developmental issues, such as over or underexposure to testosterone in utero by which the hypothalamus of their brains develops more similar to the opposite sex than their own…giving them the feeling of being, say, a girl trapped in a boy’s body. However, as with other popularized diagnoses, there are also likely some individuals with other mental conditions such as borderline personality disorder or autism who may be confused and believe they are trans, only to change their mind later. Thus, some youth may legitimately benefit from medical intervention, but it’s essential that an objective, rigorous and data-based regimen of psychological testing be conducted to separate these groups.
The sharp rise in young people identifying as trans in recent years has raised concerns of some sort of social contagion. Although news media and some scholars have downplayed that possibility, such a rapid rise is mostly characteristic of social contagions, not greater acceptance which tends to occur more gradually. Unfortunately, the mechanisms for such a social contagion are unknown. Some have suggested social media as a root cause, but unfortunately there are exactly 0 studies on this (despite hundreds of studies on social media effects…most of which do not find that social media influences mental health in youth…scholars seem reluctant to investigate this directly).
Advocating for trans rights, including the ability of well-screened individuals to access medical care that helps them to feel that their bodies and gender identity are consistent as is medically possible, is reasonable. Of course, it’s also reasonable to worry about the side-effects of medical interventions, the degree to which youth are reliable when claiming trans gender identities, the impact of some pro-trans advocacy on spaces for biological women, etc. Part of the reason public opinion is turning against trans advocacy has been the poor strategy of the loudest trans advocates themselves.
When we look back at the remarkably successful gay rights movement, a winning message was essentially, “We just want to live like you, and this requires you to change your life exactly 0.” This was good strategy and it worked.
Trans individuals deserve a similar message and good advocacy. However, the most vocal trans advocates, who it’s worth noting, don’t necessarily represent the median trans individual, overplayed their hand. Instead of seeking freedom from violence, equal treatment in marriage, employment and housing, and access to medical care following a rigorous assessment process - all reasonable requests - many advocates placed increasing burdens on the general public. This included asking women to accept biological men into sports, prisons, crisis centers and changing rooms, rolling out an increasingly complicated bevy of difficult-to-remember pronouns (in some countries their use being enforced legally, although much confusion remains to the degree it would be enforced), or told they must accept anti-science positions such as that biological sex is a spectrum. Instead of focusing on practical issues and looking for compromise (such as on women’s sports or gender-neutral bathrooms), advocacy took on an ideological and advocacy tone.
Through the 2010s into 2020, much of the progressive infrastructure cross-nationally largely capitulated to the ideological position of the most radical trans advocacy, presumably kneecapped by any accusation of “transphobia.” During this phase Rowling was among a few individuals willing to publicly face up against this wave, despite becoming the recipient of terrible abuse, including rape and death threats.
To be fair, Rowling could sometimes be sarcastic, particularly on social media (though which of us can claim to be without sin on that score?). This likely made it easier to criticize her as “transphobic” although I’m not sure how much of a difference it would have made if she’d stated her opinions without the slightest hint of snark. From there, it often became received wisdom that Rowling was transphobic, often from people who hadn’t read what she’d written on the topic.
Once, I was in a Facebook thread with some colleagues right around the time the Hogwarts’ Legacy game had come out in 2023. Someone on the thread made a comment that implied the game wasn’t doing well. I replied that, in fact, the game was the #1 selling game at the time. Someone else then accused Rowling of supporting the genocide of trans individuals (the “genocide” word is used a lot in these debates, despite little evidence to support such a thing even exists, let along Rowling bears any responsibility). Being an idiot, I offered the person making such a claim an opportunity to provide an example where Rowling had said any such thing. This went about as well as one might expect. I didn’t save the thread, but my recollection is that I was, essentially, criticized for asking people to supply evidence for their potentially slanderous accusations, not believing trans individuals’ stories without question (I don’t believe anyone’s social media claims without question for the record), being a sealion, etc. No one provided the sort of quote from Rowling I’d requested (because there isn’t one, I concluded). Overall, there was much rending of clothes and pulling of hair. The entire thing was quite unhinged.
I imagine many people have had such odd exchanges in recent years. Again, to be clear, I don’t believe these represent the median trans individual. But these kinds of exchanges do little to benefit trans rights and, if anything, reinforce the narrative (for which there is some correlational evidence) of an association between trans identification and mental illness.
As such, I think it’s little wonder that attitudes regarding transgenderism have become complex. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans support anti-discrimination efforts for trans individuals, but have become more skeptical that sex can be changed or worry that the pace of societal views on gender identity have moved too quickly. Support for transgender access to women’s sports has declined as have more general attitudes toward gay and trans rights. A push for the ideological over the practical, and a shrieking reliance on accusations of transphobia rather than a willingness to engage in calm and rational debate may be eroding the rights of all queer individuals, reversing decades of progress. It’s true that some opposition to trans rights is legitimately transphobic (usually requiring no tea-leaf reading to discern), but by losing the opportunity to be the adults in the room, the loudest trans advocates have ceded the high ground of sane discourse.
Meanwhile, Rowling’s favorability ratings appear to be improving. Her relationship with Warner Brothers may be thawing. The books, movies and theme parks are as popular as ever. And, perhaps more critically, the science appears to be suggesting that at least some of her concerns were on point.
Reading the future is a pernicious business. But I suspect Rowling will come out of this on top, with a better reputation than the child stars who abandoned her. I’m optimistic enough to believe we’ll also keep pushing for non-discrimination for trans individuals, develop a rigorous assessment process for medical interventions that neither assumes every child who identifies as trans is correct, nor withholds medical care from those would benefit from it, and is able to allow for social acceptance of trans individuals without depriving biological women of their place in sports and other protected spaces. But, as ever, only time will tell if my crystal ball is clear or cloudy.
What happened to her left hand? I do not know…