J.K. Rowling is embroiled in a fresh row with another Harry Potter actor over transgender rights.
Following exchanges of fire with Daniel Radcliffe and others, Rowling has blasted David Tennant after the Goblet of Fire star voiced strident views on those who speak out against trans rights.
During an appearance at the British LGBT Awards over the weekend, he called on British equalities minister Kemi Badenoch to “shut up” after she advocated for banning trans women from entering women’s toilets and sports teams.
In an interview at the same event, Tennant called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon.”
Earlier in the week, Rowling branded people like Tennant the “gender Taliban.” In posts on X (once Twitter) on Friday, she expanded her comments to address Tennant’s “wrong side of history” quote.
Rowling wrote: “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders.”
She added: “For a man who’s supposedly a model of compassion and tolerance, he sure does want a lot of people to cease to exist.”
Yeah, everyone is the hero in their own story, so from their perspective, they surely feel like they know things until they meet an actual biologist challenging them.
TERFs invoke half-remembered high-school level biology as if it was mathematical fact. In actual biological reality, nothing is binary or absolute. I don’t need a PhD in computational biology to know that, but if surely helps.
I’m curious (perhaps against my better judgement) what you think a biologist could tell Rowling that would challenge her?
We could maybe give people like her a glimpse into the sheer defiance that nature has against all attempts to fit into tiny categorical boxes.
It’s not just the topics that she doesn’t understand (especially the intersection of gender with endocrinology and neurology), but everything.
If you are a biologist and think you have found a rule that applies to some part of biology, you will feel deeply uncomfortable until the inevitable exceptions start cropping up that tell you that while the theory is still statistically sound, it’s not unnaturally strict and therefore plausible.
Obviously trans people exist and are valid. Thinking otherwise would be ignoring mountains of biological patterns and data that tell us that every binary in biology isn’t actually clean-cut.
To be clear I’m asking what you think a biologist could tell Rowling that would challenge her. You seem to be saying that a biologist could tell Rowling that biology is fuzzy at the edges. What makes you think this would challenge Rowling?