J. K. Rowling
JK Rowling recently drew fire on social media for tweeting the statements to the effect that "biological sex is real." The tweets began when she mocked an opinion piece that used the term "
people who menstruate" in place of "women" to account for the fact that transgender men also menstruate, and prefer not to be described as women.
The backlash on Twitter has been swift and cacophonous, and headlines have followed. GLAAD, an LGBT advocacy group, issued a response on Twitter, calling Rowling's tweets "
inaccurate and cruel." One
commenter wrote "I know you know this because you have been told over and over and over again, but transgender men can menstruate. Non-binary people menstruate. I, a 37-year old woman with a uterus, have not menstruated in a decade. Women are not defined by their periods."
Till now, even the most thematically ambitious feminist theorists have acknowledged that sex itself is a real biological phenomenon, and that sexual dimorphism is an important component of human existence as well as human rights.
Yet increasingly, such common-sense propositions as JK Rowling's are now cast as hate speech.As more and more people refer to themselves as trans, nonbinary, two-spirited, and gender-non-conforming, there's been a push to realign the objective reality of biological sex to match one's subjectively experienced gender identity. In the emerging view, the very notion of males and females existing as real biological entities is now seen as obsolete. Instead, some argue, we have only
varying degrees of "male-ness" and "female-ness." And so the very idea of segregating sports (or anything, for that matter) using binary sex categories is seen as illegitimate, since, if no definitive line can be drawn, who's to say a purported "male" athlete isn't
really female?
Comment: Hardly surprising. Given the amount of violence we've seen being perpetrated during these riots, it would be a miracle if people weren't getting shot and murdered.
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