First, the caveat: This is neither a critique nor a defense of J.K. Rowling’s recent commentary on Twitter (link, link) or the subsequent essay where she expanded on her initial statements.
Rather, this is an exercise in exploring applying the principle of charity to see if we can extract any value from a argument which, on its surface, seems to provide no value or anything to think about.
I’m going to mostly focus on the second twitter thread. The first tweet tried to communicate a subtle point through sarcasm and was, in my opinion, a complete failure. The essay expands on the second Twitter thread but wasn’t published when I started thinking about this. 😀
So let’s start with Rowling’s words: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
I, of course, have no more insight into what Rowling “really” meant than anyone else. But if I interpret her words through the lens of trying to find the nugget of truth, I see her as making a two part argument.
1. Being biologically female entails a lived experience that is distinct from the experience of gender.
2. The effect of sex and gender can only be understood through the lens of intersectionality. Thus, cis women experience forms of discrimination which are not reducible to sex or gender alone (so do the other intersections, of course).
Let’s tackle the first part first. Does biological sex affect a person’s lived experience? From my perspective as someone with a uterus, the answer is most assuredly yes. There’s the lived experience of menstruation and the whole constellations of concerns around pregnancy (preventing it, achieving it, experiencing it). Those with female bodies who do not experience these things in what is considered a medically normal way still have their bodies judged by these standards.
Then there are the social implications of these lived physical experiences. Debates about birth control and abortion and fertility treatments, the way society judges pregnancy, these all illustrate that having a biologically female body does have significant impact on a person’s lived experience. Enough for biological sex to be worth considering an identity that is separable from gender.
What about the second part? Can we understand biological sex in a non-intersectional way? Can we say that the impact of biological sex can be analyzed independently of the impact of gender? I think this is a harder question to answer, in part because there is no single intersectional experience (kind of the point).
But overall, I am inclined to say that we must understand the interaction of gender and biological sex in an intersectional way. The stories shared by transfolk show that their experience of biological sex is often highly influenced by how it does not match their gender. And in my personal experience, sex and gender are highly tangled, even as I see how they are separate factors in my life.
Bringing all this back to Rowling’s comment, I think I land on saying that erasing the concept of sex does erase something important from the lived experience of individuals. However, I don’t think that transfolks and their allies are trying to do that. Rather, I think they acknowledge that sex has meaning but also want society to more broadly acknowledge that sex and gender are separable concepts. Understanding exactly how that separation works is a complex and subtle space where, I think, our understanding is still evolving.