Today in news of the terrible, J.K. Rowling still exists and continues to post on social media. In a recent post, Rowling shared a quote tweet (the original post’s author removed), repeating her nonsensical claim that “safety and fairness” are somehow threatened by the existence of trans people, here reduced to the phrase “a medical scandal,” then the false claim, “despite mounting evidence of harm.” There is none. She is wrong. But, she is wealthy and white, so beyond the reach of most forms of accountability.
Rowling of course, is the author of a series of very popular children’s books, which have made her a billionaire. She is also what is known as a TERF, for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. I do object to the use of “radical” in this acronym but refuse the term “gender critical” feminist because these are not people who are serious about critique.
Make no mistake, we are living in authoritarian times. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has said that “gender ideology” threatens the “traditional values” of the country the security of the nation. In 2013, Russia passed a federal ban on the distribution of “propaganda about nontraditional sexual relationships” to minors, known colloquially as the “gay propaganda” law. Ten years later, in July 2023, Putin signed another law, this one banning gender reassignment surgery or any action to change one’s gender in public documents. This anti-gender ideology also fuels Putin’s war against Ukraine.
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has banned gender and women’s studies at universities, and declared LGBTQ rights antithetical to his country's “Christian roots.” Orbán, who spoke at CPAC in 2023, has been courted and praised by the far right in the U.S. who sees Hungary as a template for what they want to bring here.
Alongside strong men like Putin and Orbán are the nice white ladies who co-create these fascist regimes even as they lead lives that are less than conventional. In Italy in 2022, for example, Prime Minister Georgi Meloni declared, “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian and you can’t take that away from me!” No one wants to take anything away from Meloni, but it’s the kind of rhetorical flourish that works as a polemic in a campaign speech because it plays on some of peoples’ deepest fears. But despite her proclamations, she is not in any way “traditional” when it comes to gender. She lived with a man without being married, had a child outside of marriage, and now relies on a constellation of friends and relatives for childcare, like many do in blended families or complex kinship arrangements, but she continues to advocate for far-right policies in Italy and to align herself with authoritarians around the world.
J.K. Rowling, famously a single mother who relied on state benefits to write her first novel, is engaging in a similar rhetorical strategy. She is using a well-worn strategy of invoking a fear about safety then misdirects it at trans people as a “stranger danger.” Any feminist worth her salt will tell you that we are in the most danger from violence inside our relationships not in public restrooms. And, ever the businesswoman, Rowling is trying to turn a profit from her trans bigotry by selling anti-trans pins, shirts, and coffee mugs through an online store. Most of the tired slogans she’s hawking are ones that reinforce the idea of a gender binary but one item (that she eventually pulled) said, "this witch doesn't burn," which is meant to be a kind of self-referential humor, but it’s one that relies on a white feminist view of history. In such a narrative, white women are only, ever victims of patriarchy and never the perpetrators of violence. It’s a history that leaves out a more complicated, nuanced telling in which gender exists on a continuum, sexuality is fluid and both intersect with structures of race and class.
The anti-gender ideology of TERFs like J.K. Rowling use the language of “safety and fairness” to suggest that we are somehow collectively “unsafe” and that the presence of trans people amounts to “unfairness.” When Rowling says things like this, she is — like Georgi Meloni — invoking a particular view of the world that rests on everyone following a proscribed set of rules, about who is and is not a woman, which mothers get counted as virtuous (and which dangerous), and ultimately, what kind of nation-state can be built on top of those assumptions.
White women like Meloni and Rowling grant themselves the agency of self-definition and self-determination but pull the ladder up behind them when it comes to offering those rights to trans folks.
Here, in the U.S., our homegrown authoritarians have Project 2025. I’ve spoken out about this blueprint for authoritarian rule before. The architects of Project 2025 are Christian nationalists who promise to restore an order that they claim has been lost. It is the Heritage Foundation that developed this plan to attack “gender ideology” because it is the cornerstone of their vision for a white, heterosexual, Christian nation. This is what they mean by “make America great again.” The fight “against gender” is always and inextricably tied to the campaign for “racial purity.” One of the most effective (and affective) strategies for exploiting peoples’ fears about society writ large is to start with something very personal, like sex assignment, gender and the family – all areas we tend to think of as “natural” or “God given.”
In many ways, what J.K. Rowling offers white women is a secular version of the Christian nationalist playbook. Rather than “God” she insists on a misunderstanding of “biology,” rather than “nature,” she relies on the phrase “sex is real,” to suggest sex assignment at birth is immutable. This convoluted logic is necessary for her to maintain the affective attachment she has to a set of ideas about gender: women as only, ever victims and men as only, ever perpetrators of violence. It is a simplistic, facile view of the world and one that upholds white supremacy.