J. K. Rowling made a much longer than usual tweet on Monday in which she responded to a seemingly serious claim that “Gender identity is real, layered, and deserves a more thoughtful approach” than the un-nuanced assertion that “transgender women” are mentally ill men.
Here is the original claim with Rowling’s three paragraph response immediately after:
The first response to this was a question about Rowling being tested for chromosomes, the twixter assuming that Rowling had been asserting that the question “What is a woman?” can only be answered in terms of XX or XY chromosomes. Rowling replied with her answer to the question “What is a woman?” (specifically, “How can I know I am a woman without a chromosome test?”) and a chart outlining the various genetic possibilities for men and women.
I repost this here for three reasons.
(1) It’s an important statement of Rowling’s position on ‘Gender Identity’ and I want to share it with those teachers and students of Rowling Studies who may not follow her twixter account closely.
(2) It serves as a rejoinder to the smug feminists, academics, and Gender Theory mavens who consistently assert that “it’s a shame Rowling hasn’t done her homework on this issue… If only she would just pick up a biology book and learn the scientific facts of sex and gender!”
(3) Rowling uses the language of Enlightenment sophists and scientists who dismiss religious faith as “subjective” and that their work is “objective” and “fact based.” She speaks disdainfully of the Gender Theory Extremists by describing them as “quasi-religious” and practicing a “form of faith-based fundamentalism.”
Even though the last five years Covid hysterics have revealed the “objectivity” of “fact-based” medicine as a sham, after which we now know more than half of “scientific studies” are fraudulent and that millions have been injured or killed by the pontiffs of mRNA “science” and counter-productive lockdowns, Rowling has no more insulting phrases for the deluded than to say they are like religious believers.
Again, for those resisting the idea that Rowling is “spiritual not religious,” don’t forget to include this in your arguments. If Rowling were a woman of any kind of faith beyond rationality and emotion, which is to say a traditional faith with a track record of human transformation and deification, she wouldn’t sound so much like a 19th century Darwinist or an adolescent logical positivist when she argues.
Whatever Rowling’s faith looks like, her use of the term “faith-based fundamentalism,” refers to a blindly dogmatic one, based on tenets that are above question, whether from ancient texts or new age ideology, as opposed to one which is open to discussion, debate, experience or evidence.
Humanity can be susceptible to such dogmatism, but when done right the scientific process should challenge and expel the orthodoxy, not entrench it.
Sadly, though, the “scientific process” today is rarely “done right” and the scientific establishment has become the primary vehicle of the true “fundamentalism” in the sense that you use this word has become a dogmatic orthodoxy “based on tenets that are above question,” most notably the Myth of Progress and of chiliastic materialism per Zahardi.
See Midwestern Doctor on exactly this point or Stanovich..
Your point, in alignment with Rowling’s, is the consensus view of post-Enlightenment adoration of ‘rationality’ and ‘science’ as the light of objective knowledge that dispels the superstition of religion and subjective opinion in all spheres. How one holds to this logical positivist cant in the wake of the 20th Century’s horrors and even post Covid just leaves me shaking my head.
But thank you for restating the core premise of Rowling’s religion as succinctly and clearly as you have. It is the signature belief and blind spot of the age before postmodernity dismissed it though our historical period’s metanarrative springs inevitably from modernist postulates and presuppositions (as ‘transgenderism’ from the gender and sex elision of ‘feminism’). Seeing it for what it is, a mistaken belief and historical departure from a right understanding, requires clear statements like the one you have made.
Would that Rowling, who has taken a heroic stand contra mundum with respect to “transgenderism,” had the “religious belief” that transcended classical liberalism. Two cheers, at least, for the honesty involved in her statement on the census form, though!