Written in Response to Article “J.K. Rowling Goes Full TERF in New Series of Transphobic Tweets”

The impulse to make this about JK Rowling’s exceptional transphobia is misdirected. Her words are representative of the everyday, mundane transmisogyny of cis feminism.

Let’s be honest: JK is articulating what many cis women truly believe: that while destabilizing gender is acceptable, complicating the consecrated category of sex is going “too far.” That cis womanhood is ultimately more real, more natural, more organic than trans life. JK speaks what so many cis women think of us: “I accept you…BUT.” There’s always a caveat. A condition. Cis womanhood gets to dictate the terms of our correct and appropriate embodiment and identification.

Imagine the double standard. What would cis women say if cis men extended this kind of paternalism to them? Said: your womanhood is illegitimate because it doesn’t fit our idea of what you should be. In fact, historically this was the case. Men told women they would become “unsexed” and “mannish,” if they got the right to vote. Men would argue that “biologically” and “anatomically” women were just meant for motherhood, not political life. Women called this what it was: sexism.

Well, this is sexism.

After centuries of cis women protesting cis men’s restrictive definitions of womanhood and women’s capacities, cis women turn around and do the same intellectual work on us. In the same way that cis men claim to know cis women better than they know themselves, cis women claim they know us better than we do. We are “biological males,” not because we are, but because they say that’s what we are. There’s a difference.

In this moment where we’re critiquing non-experts posturing themselves as epidemiologists in response to COVID-19, can we extend that energy to critiquing how every day cis people posture themselves as biologists? There is no biological basis in the sex binary. There is no biological basis in defining gender and sex by genitalia.

This is nothing new: white supremacy has long manipulated the rhetoric of biology (which let’s be clear, is not actual biology) as a means to justify discrimination and inequality. In this eugenic era: when you claim difference as “biological,” it’s a speech act. You’re able to naturalize it, gloss over how difference becomes produced as an effect of specific, cultural, political, and historical choices. It is much easier to declare that something just “is,” without interrogating how something actually came to be.

This is not actually about us. This is about what we as trans people elicit in JK Rowling. Our existence requires cis people to reflect on their own self-understanding and identity. We call into question the rigidity of gender-sex norms and are a testament to the possibility of self-declaration in a world that ritualizes its opposite.

 Yes -- that is difficult and confrontational. But that is precisely what’s required for trans justice.
The stakes of trans justice aren’t simply about “granting us our rights.” This is about recalibrating society’s ideas of gender as well as “biological sex,” a framework that was specifically created by white male scientists in the 19th century to naturalize sexism. This is inevitably going to require a deep reconsideration of the grammar through which all of us have come to know ourselves.

Cisness is not about biology, it’s about politics. Cisness is a political structure that deploys the rhetoric of biology in order to collapse the profound complexity and sexual diversity of humans. The very substance, the marrow, of cis gender is transmisogyny. In order for cisness to work, trans and non-binary people have to be delegitimized and disappeared. Cis people are inaugurated as modern and *real* precisely through their disavowal of us. They know themselves by saying, “I am not that!”

That’s what JK Rowling is doing. Performing cisness. Or rather: coming out as cis. Over and over again.