‘Radicalized’ Rowling Calls for Bathroom Vigilantism
Leading Off: A reckless exhortation. A former friend dismayed. And an activist newspaper aligned with a right-wing group. The week’s top story lines.
by Billie Jean Sweeney
JK Rowling, the UK transphobe, urged her 14.3 million followers on X this weekend to photograph and disseminate images online of people they believe to be transgender who are in public restrooms.
The behavior Rowling encouraged appears to violate a UK harassment law that prohibits the watching, following or spying on individuals, and the publishing of material that purports to be about them. Violations are a criminal offense, subject to a up to year in prison.
Rowling expressed certainty that all of her millions followers would always be able to discern trans from cis, invoking the wearing of “wigs” as a surefire method. She derided one critic who questioned her certainty, calling him “crazier than a box of meth-addled frogs.”
But cis women, many of them lesbians, are frequent victims of the bathroom vigilantism that Rowling called for. A lesbian was viciously attacked by a man and a boy waiting outside a woman’s restroom in Illinois in May. The woman suffered a fractured nose and eye hemorrhaging, “just because I walked into the woman's bathroom, and I looked the way I look.”
In Boston, a male hotel security guard entered a women’s restroom in May, banged on a stall, demanded IDs and eventually ordered a cis lesbian couple out of the bathroom because they did not look right in his eyes.
In January two loudly transphobic members of Congress, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert, followed a cis woman into a public restroom at the Capitol and confronted her based on their erroneous belief she was a trans lawmaker.
The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found no evidence that safety or privacy had been compromised by trans people using the bathrooms that align with their gender. Conversely, its February report found growing levels of harassment of trans people in restrooms — in both the restrooms that align with their gender and the ones that align with their gender assigned at birth.
Stephen Fry, the British actor and comedian who had narrated Harry Potter audiobooks, said in an interview last week that Rowling had become “radicalized” online. Though he once considered her a friend who he had stood by, Fry denounced her current online commentary as “cruel.”
“She says things that are inflammatory, contemptuous and mocking,” Fry said.
The New York Times has closely aligned itself with Rowling’s harsh anti-trans views for years, notably publishing a lengthy “defense” of her by an opinion columnist in 2023.
The Times rolled out an assembly line of stories advancing its anti-trans agenda in the aftermath of last week’s Supreme Court ruling in US v Skrmetti, but the harshest criticism of its coverage centered on its 11,000-word magazine story.
Among its many flaws, my own review found, the piece appeared to mimic the legal arguments and talking points of the right-wing anti-trans group Alliance Defending Freedom. One passage, asserting that “the gender of a gender-fluid person might shift from hour to hour” hews closely to the claims in an ADF piece last year complaining of “new words like genderqueer and non-binary.”
More insidious, though, was the medical science disinformation it slipped into the piece, falsely asserting that trans health care raised “novel issues” because it could “require lifelong treatment.” The ADF has used this same loaded framing in its court filings.
Gender affirming care is not “novel;” it’s been accepted practice for decades. Numerous conditions — from high blood pressure to asthma, thyroid disorders to glaucoma — require lifelong medication.
Despite the Times’s insistence that trans rights are “lost,” elected officials and courts across the country still very much have a say in the matter.
In Delaware, Gov. Matt Meyer signed an executive order on Friday guarding the personal information of providers and trans patients, and protecting providers from retaliatory actions.
State Rep. DeShanna Neal, whose daughter is trans, praised the order as “fulfilling a promise I made to my daughter and to all trans people who deserve dignity, respect, and care.”
Billie Jean Sweeney is a news editor, press freedom advocate and trans woman.