Imagine being the most famous and wealthiest writer in the world.
Imagine being so immensely talented and so immensely rewarded for your talent.
Imagine having created characters that live in the imaginations of millions of children and adults all over the world.
And then, instead of being able to enjoy your success, or use your wealth and influence to enjoy a happy life for yourself and make life better for people in the world…
…instead you devote all your energy and your skills to making your fellow human beings suffer.
How dreadful would that be. How much unbearable anguish and suffering would that entail.
And that’s why I can’t bring myself to join the chorus of condemnation and vituperation of J.K. Rowling.
Instead I feel deeply sorry for her.
And I can’t help wondering why. Why does she so obsessively devote her time and her energies and her talents to to insult and disparage trans people like me?
Why waste a perfectly good weekday morning calling trans women activists ‘men’ in the hope of being arrested?
It’s a very strange thing to do. And absolutely no use to anybody.
She can call me “a man” as often and as vehemently as she likes and it will make no difference.
I am not a man. I never was and I never will be.
Because we are so much more than our biology.
I spent years and years trying to be the man I was biologically supposed to be, and hating myself for not being able to do so.
None of that helped.
Nor did my concluding that all the reasons I discovered in myself for needing to be a woman were all based on distress and delusion and so could be “cured” or overcome.
Nor all the arguments I found that so convincingly told me I could never become a woman and that it was a waste of time.
Nor did trying to suppress and forget it all and live a ‘normal’ life.
None of that helped.
The only thing that helped was understanding that the human being I am could not be hated away or despised away or argued away or reasoned away or ignored away and that the only thing to do was try to accept her.
And so I began to live as a woman. And at first when I did I discovered that every time I walked out my front door people felt free to laugh at me and jeer at me and insult me and threaten me with violence because I was, they said, “really a man”.
I had to try to understand them to keep myself sane and realised that in fact it wasn’t me they were hating but themselves.
I triggered something in them they were frightened of and had been taught to hate and despise and they were projecting this out onto me to try to diminish their suffering.
But expressing hatred of another human being does not diminish our suffering or our hatred of ourselves. It only increases them.
Which is why it saddens me to think of Rowling, that sensitive and accomplished artist, being so possessed by the traumas of her past that she obsessively needs to project them over and over again.
Because it is very likely that her hatred of trans people is because we represent something she hates in herself.
And so continually abusing us will not ease her suffering, but only deepen it.
And I suspect that is why her pronouncements are getting more and more extreme.
It is hard to imagine a good outcome for this. Which is why I wish her well…
Why I hope she finds a better way to ease her pain.
As Queen Jesus says:
“Bless you if they persecute you for being who you are, because it means you are bringing about change.
And bless this who persecute you, too.
For hatred is the only thing they have, and it doesn’t amount to much.
And they will lose it in the end.
For no matter what they say or what they do
They cannot stop the change that is coming,
And one day we will all be free.”
Amen to that. May the light gradually filter in through the cracks that are so clearly showing.
I tend to agree Jo. I saw Graham Lineham being interviewed recently and he was so consumed by his conviction that he was right he could not see where his obsession had brought him. He has paid a heavy price in terms of family and career as a result of his fostering of hate within himself and his attacks on our community. It was a sad spectacle to watch him bluster his way through the interview, losing his temper and being extremely rude and mysoginustic as well as transphobic. I really did feel sorry for him. However, the real harm, psychological and physical that he and Rowling have visited upon our community means that feeling sorry for them outweighs my horror at what they are visiting upon us.