You've selected one of the most well crafted and reasonable criticisms of Rowling I imagine exist. Do you doubt if I chose to wade into the cesspool that is Twitter, or we'd access to Rowling's email, we wouldn't find 10 overheated, lunatic, threatening responses for each civil and well considered response?
Here's Rowling's essay:
https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j...gender-issues/
I read it and find almost nothing in it offensive. It's a thoughtful piece which is open to critique. It's not some flaming jeremiad or mission statement. Where one thinks it's right, it can be acknowledged, where one thinks it's wrong, it can be critiqued. There are many points made within it.
I think the problem we have when we discuss this stuff is the marginalized and their advocates feel a level of passion that others do not. Rowling discusses trans people clinically. If you're a trans person, there's no way to discuss yourself in an entirely clinical manner. It's deeply personal, and you've been historically disenfranchised. The critic you cite does an admirable job of attempting to assess Rowling's points in an exclusively rational and detached manner, but even she admits she cannot do it and winds up including personal experience.
But she's smart. She's the kind of critic who can and should engage with Rowling. I think if you told her, "We cannot discuss issues by including personal feelings as they degrade rational conversation," she'd grudgingly agree and have a discussion exclusively on the science and data.
But she's rare. The average person - and this is a HUGE problem in the US right now - is a fool who think his or her "personal truth" (meaning their feelings, or their passion) is the same thing as science, or fact.
It's not. You have no "personal truth." Your "personal story" is irredeemably subjective. It's a narrative, of limited if any value, and not at all a clinical truth.
The common middle minded people who throw flames on Twitter or in blog posts degrade debate and impede efforts to get to truth by emoting where they should be thinking. This overheats the conversations and turns them to rubbish. Instead of an assessment of where Rowling may be wrong, there's a howling demand that everyone acknowledge she is 100% wrong and deeply flawed to have even made the points she made.
This is idiocy.
But what's worse than this idiocy is the attempt to support these howlers by mangling science to argue a person like Rowling is entirely wrong and could not have offered her points in anything but bad faith. This is where the bullshitters who write the Twitter threads often cited here do their work - cherry picking studies that support them while ignoring those that do not, creating strawmen to knock down. (This is the sort of bullshit employed to argue something like cancel culture does not exist.)
In a perfect world, voices such as the one you cited would be - in fact should be - the only ones we listen to when we consider situations like Rowling's. Unfortunately, the internet has democratized things to a perverted end where the dumbest and most intolerant voices are those who own the floor.
I think we need to instill a new form of elitism of thought online, and as I said before, this begins with mocking and ignoring the rock throwers and paying attention exclusively to critiques of the quality you've cited.
The boycotters, the deplatformers, the shouters -- they should be left to rot in the intellectual sewage drain they occupy.
