Here we are again, asking the people we pay to entertain us to consider, just occasionally, to just entertain us. And for once, we're not talking about freeing Palestine. Rowling has published another essay on sex and gender, returning to an argument she has been making for six years.
It brings to mind another novelist, Sally Rooney, whose activism over Palestine has become nearly as conspicuous as her fiction. The two novelists occupy very different political territory, yet both have become prominent campaigners whose public identities are increasingly inseparable from their causes. Their shared situation has the public asking whether having an enormous audience creates a responsibility to speak or merely an opportunity to be heard.
And whether a little literary restraint might occasionally be in order. On October 21, Rowling published an update to her controversial 2020 essay on sex and gender, explaining that her convictions remain intact while her involvement has expanded. "My views haven't changed," she wrote, adding that her activism had become "practical as well as theoretical." In practice, Rowling has established Beira's Place, a women-only sexual assault support service in Edinburgh, and a fund supporting legal challenges concerning women's rights.
Her latest essay argues that transgender activism has acquired excessive institutional influence, particularly at the expense of working-class women seeking single-sex spaces. "Twenty-first century trans activism is the very inverse of those movements. It is elitist to its core," she wrote, contrasting contemporary activism with earlier civil rights campaigns.
Rowling also explicitly rejects discrimination against transgender people in housing and employment, while maintaining that biological sex should determine access to certain spaces. Her position has a substantial constituency. Her opponents, meanwhile, regard her characterization of transgender women as exclusionary and harmful.
Yet the essay introduces another question. What does Rowling accomplish by explaining, once again, convictions she has articulated extensively for six years? Even the most devoted reader might reasonably wonder whether a sequel was necessary.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
