Labour Loves JK Rowling's Money, Not Justice
When Reasonable Isn't.
Labour, trapped between the Scylla of bigotry and the Charybdis of lonely idiocy has decided that the wisest course to steer for a party seeking to lead a modern, semi-democratic nation is to chase the approval of billionaires. I mean, good night Irene, there’s no way a billionaire could lead someone smack into deadly bigotry or spinning, unproductive idiocy, is there?
BREAKING NEWS: I’ve just talked to Elon Musk and he says, “Definitely not.” He’s also offering all Pervert Justice readers a free sound system upgrade on any new cyber truck purchased to include a turntable for scratching your own beats while the Tesla Autopilot takes all your driving worries away.
Of course, Musk isn’t the billionaire that Labour is courting today. That billionaire is J. K. Rowling, international woman of “Oh, Lordy, why couldn’t she be a mystery?”
Before we check the details on this, I want to be clear that I think it’s a good thing that Labour is consulting with a celebrated author of children’s literature on how to encourage reading, distribute books, and support first time authors so that everyone has a chance to show what they have to offer the UK’s precocious tykes.
So when I heard that Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer were going to meet with Rowling on issues important to bibliophiles, despite my strong disagreements with Rowling in a number of areas I actually supported the idea.
—Wait, what? I’m sorry, BREAKING NEWS: The Guardian says the meeting isn’t about encouraging authors and readers, but about hearing Rowling’s opinions on how trans people should be allowed to live their lives.
Things started out rocky when Rowling deferred Labour’s overtures until the party met with a list of grievance groups that include two previously identified as hate groups — and some, I’m sure, are good people. The Labour-Rowling Row has been ongoing for some time, recently heating up again last week after an op-ed the author penned for The Times, which The Guardian describes below:
Writing in the Times, Rowling, a former Labour member and donor, said she would struggle to vote for the party “as long as Labour remains dismissive and often offensive towards women fighting to retain the rights”. She said she had a “poor opinion” of Starmer’s character and claimed he was “dismissive and often offensive” of women’s concerns about sex-based rights.
It’s not entirely clear from The Guardian’s reporting whether Rachel Reeves was agreeing to meet with groups including The LGB Alliance, whom Labour’s own Shadow Deputy Prime Minister has named a hate group, or whether other assurances were enough to bring Rowling to the table.
Those other assurances have to do with the limits that the party is willing to put on the process and consequences of legal gender changes in the UK. Deep into a short election season in which Labour is trying to unseat the Tories for the first time in 14 years or so, how Rowling feels about trans rights has become a vital issue for a party that has had a hard time figuring out just how much to hate everything contaminated with trans cooties without looking like they hate the poor victims of transness themselves.
The compromise on which Starmer’s leadership team have settled hinges upon a new focus on medicalization:
Labour has reiterated its pledge to “modernise” the process by which people can change gender, removing what it termed outdated elements of the process, such as requiring consent from a spouse. The requirement to present evidence showing that a person has lived as their new gender for two years would be replaced with a “reflection period” lasting the same amount of time.
[…] The national policy forum set out the proposal for changes, including replacing a panel of doctors and lawyers who give approval for a gender recognition certificate (GRC), the legal basis for gender to be changed. Under Labour plans, this would be done by one doctor with a specialism1 in gender issues.
I’ve written extensively elsewhere about medicalization. Unlike many trans people, I do not fight against medicalization per se. My position is more nuanced in that I recognize that some people experience clinically significant distress respecting a relationship within themselves, including (but not limited to) a relationship between one’s psyche and one’s body. Medicalizing this distress and providing care and treatment to relieve this distress is not a bad thing.
Likewise there are people who do not experience such clinically significant distress, or experience distress not within themselves, but in their relationships with others and with institutions or society as a whole. There’s nothing wrong with describing this experience as non-medical.
The problems come when people describe transness as only a disease or only a way of relating to others. Both of these overgeneralizations erase the experiences of wide swathes of trans folks and are used to argue for curtailing the freedom to live a trans life. One appeal of medicalization is that it allows someone to describe trans people as innocent victims, making no choices. While this infantilizes trans people as helpless and pitiful, with reduced or zero agency, some trans people have been accepting or even supportive of this because it can, in some contexts, be the only argument with a hope of gaining a person access to care vital for their mental health, sometimes for their survival. The other side of this distorted coin undermines the entire idea of medically supportive care by portraying transness as only a relationship to others or society. If stereotypes didn’t exist, the thinking goes, no one would ever want hormones or surgery. Even so, some people who are trans and don’t personally feel the need for medical intervention will support such arguments to avoid the nearly-inherent implication that they are of necessity “sick” or “damaged” by virtue of being trans. Transness isn’t leprosy, they argue. It’s a blessing.
In reality trans lives are far more messy than this, but the social traps cis folks have laid for trans people inevitably snared different folks in different ways, resulting in a wide variety of trans advocacy from different perspectives, allowing politically minded cis folks to absurdly reduce trans lives to one of those two descriptions. Labour has chosen an exclusive reliance on medicalization which has the advantage of allowing Keir Starmer to look sympathetic (he hopes) as he pats the heads carefully chosen trans proxies. But those who don’t experience clinically significant internal distress will be left out by this policy.
As with abortion, trans rights are being collapsed into a binary. For trans advocates this means one side is portrayed as promoting whimsical, post-truth declarations of ephemeral gender while the other is portrayed as hostile to the very idea that medical treatment could ever be justified. And as with abortion, while both sides have used inaccurate, sometimes even demonizing rhetoric, there is no genuine equivalence. Decisions about abortion and transition are both too complicated and too personal to be taken from individuals.
The Tories seek to take all freedom away from individuals because deep down they hate gender freedom, hate it with burning passion. For ideological reasons, they would vest complete authority of one’s personal life with the government itself.
Labour seeks to take all freedom away from individuals, too, vesting power in a government proxy: the gender specialist. Their motivation is quite different, however. They’re trying to navigate through a narrow channel between PR disaster for a party with a large queer contingent and a yawning hole through which all the billions of their richest donors disappear.
It’s hard to determine which party deserves the larger share of one’s contempt.
“Specialism” is my new favourite Britishism. I know that they have the word “speciality” across the pond, so I’m not sure why specialism caught on for a doctor’s area of practice, but it certainly appeals to my ironicalist sense of vocabulisms.
I hate that our voting choices are basically between the same parties in different colours. However, there's a Reform candidate standing in my area and since I cannot abide any of their positions, the safest option is to vote for one of the Big Two and then start writing letters.
On a side note, I bought Hogwarts Legacy (second hand, so no money to JKR) and laughed like a maniac when I met the innkeeper, an openly trans character. I wish she had a bigger story.
And a side side note, we on this side of the Pond use "speciality" with that extra i. But specialism is such a good word, why would you not use it?
All Jo had to do was say “Thank you all so much for educating me on this matter” or “I apologize for my ignorance” but no. She just chose ignorance.