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.”
It’s an incredibly complicated issue, even if you look at individual cases (like Caster Semenya) and there’s almost no easy way to define what you mean by a woman. Ultimately it’s down to the individual sporting organisations to decide how to call it based on expert advice and any decision is going to disadvantage some athletes. If they think the decision is wrong, then there should be a way to appeal decisions because it can come down to difficult analysis based on each individual’s life history.
A compelling argument I’ve heard is that the greatest performance enhancing drug is being exposed to testosterone during puberty and that seems to be the base line a lot of the sporting organisations use. However, even then it is difficult to call for individuals and would need expert testimony on each individual case.
It might be compelling, but that doesn’t make it true (the testosterone in puberty part, not the sports organisations using transphobic rhetoric part, though as you can see bellow, even the International Olympic Committee, arguably the biggest global sports organisation, doesn’t advocate this thinking)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lindseyedarvin/2024/04/25/transgender-athletes-could-be-at-a-physical-disadvantage-new-research-shows/
Well, either expert testimony or a transphobic bore screeching about it on Xitter.