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IMO its always about scapegoating, you need to find a minority which is prevelant enough for people to have encountered, but not too many that they're in everyone's family or work or friend circle - and that won't have significant civic or voting power.

Post-ww2, ethnic divisions are more taboo, gay rights are too broadly popular to pursue, but trans people are the conservatives best punching down opportunity, while trying to appeal to people on the fence by being 'virtuous' and 'saving the kids'.

she seems to have been harboring these feeling since she before she wrote harry potter, there are many people attributing her books to transphobia and antisemitism in a subltle way.

I’d say just don’t engage with it at all.

If someone talks about it, pretend ignorance. Like total ignorance of any aspect of the stories.

Or, if someone mentions it, just say you don’t give bigots money.

Editing to expand: by pirating you are perpetuating the cultural impact. The majority of people pay for access to this media, and by engaging with it you make it more costly for other people to skip it.

They will cast Snape as black and the audience will wonder why Harry immediately hates him.

Unfortunately, they won't be hated. A lot of people don't actually care all that much about trans people :(

As a cis man who is only tangentially acquainted with transgender issues, and as a person who isn't particularly eloquent, I cannot do this topic justice myself. You'll have to trust me when I say that the image of "just any bloke can call himself a woman and go into the bathroom and assault women" is language that is deeply colored by propaganda, and has no basis in reality. When you indulge in language and ideas like that, you are doing harm. Similarly, the "men doing women's sports" idea is harmful to both cis and trans women, and has, again 0 basis in reality.

If you are truly interested, and not some right wing troll who's "just asking questions" (we get a lot of those on .world, it's like the instance attracts them), please, please give these YouTube videos a watch:

https://youtu.be/EmT0i0xG6zg https://youtu.be/qfUsuQ8rfu4

The shorter one is from a cis man, but it seems to me that he explains the idea very well, at least behind the sports thing. And I promise that the longer one is worth it. It will help you understand a deeply marginalized segment of the population much better, and you will be a better person for it. I think that's worth 2 hours.

My comment to her is that we need to enforce anti-harassment laws in all spaces. I don't care if you're a man harassing a man, a man harassing a woman, a woman harassing a man, or a woman harassing a woman, the cops should come take you away and ... educate you why we don't do that shit in a civilised society. And you don't need to make a person presenting as a woman use the men's washroom, or a person presenting as a man use a woman's washroom, to make that happen! In short, you don't need to be a dick to people.

Fun fact. I saw a recent news article where a trans-man (i.e., born female, presents as male) went into the woman's washroom because the only free stalls were urinals, which he couldn't use. So he went to the woman's washroom to use a stall there, and got harassed by the police because...well, he was a man in the women's room. Except he wasn't. He was born a she, and in North Carolina, you USED to be demanded to go to the washroom of your birth gender, and they're trying to force that back in again, after it was partially repealed and allowed to expire back in 2020.

It's not about protecting women. If it was, they'd just enforce the laws on the books about harassment, sexual or otherwise, and be blind to the genders of the perpetrator and victim. But we can obviously see that this is about legally harassing transgender people, and it just uses women's rights as cover for the hatred. Your only answer as a transgender person to peeing is hold it...or pee yourself. Or move to a state, city, or country that doesn't treat you like shit because you would prefer to be the other gender...or not be restricted to the binary structure in general!

As far as I know, if you're a dude, you can already just walk into womens bathrooms. There aren't police outside or anything checking peoples pants. There's not some epidemic of people legally transitioning just so they can be predators.

These laws end up hurting women, who were born women and were always women, who don't happen to look "feminine" enough (ETA: or the opposite, cis men who don't look manly enough), and people start harassing them for using the bathroom they were meant to use.

If you want to go after predators, go after predators. It's not that hard. You don't need to go after trans people to do that.

idk if reading a billionaire author's own statement (managed by a billionaire's pr-team) on the billionaire's own site is "the most complete picture you can get".

I've read the text as well, and that isn't too crazy. But it's honestly just dog-whistling, as you can see from her going utterly BATSHIT crazy on social media.

Edit not to mention highly illogical. She literally wants a law saying this guy must use the women's bathroom:

And you don't think he will get harassed when he goes into the ladies' because he was born with a vagina?

Or that this person won't get harassed when they have to go the men's:

You can prolly see why TERF views aren't actually feminist at all

I started looking further into this because a friend of mine, which is a total HP nerd, was trying to give me some context on where her anti-trans activism comes from.

You deliberately found someone with strong bias to get info from? Maybe you should think about that.

I also understand that sex and gender are separate, and Rowling seems to be on the train that conflates it, which might be the basis for her position.

I think you need to back up a little more on Rowling. If you start dissecting her works, you'll see she has born/birth/blood nature being a reoccurring theme. Hagrid is naturally angry. Voldemort is evil because he was a rape baby. House Elves are natural ~~slaves~~servants. The Weasley family will always be poor(even when Harry should be paying rent or at least buying them a new car). Hell, the Irish character keeps blowing things up. Things are the way they are at birth and anyone who pushes against the natural order is wrong. Hermione Granger, the other outside to magical society took issue with the House Elves being treated as slaves and everyone, including the House Elves and Harry Potter, the first outsider and someone who should have no bias for slavery, treated her as being annoying and wrong for caring.(Also remember when JK implied that Hermione could be Black? Yeah, this isn't a good look.)

If you want a deep dive into Rowling's writings that isn't centered on the trans issue, check out Shaun's review of her total body of work at the time.