TWIBS: Rowling Shares Deranged Website
Twitter gremlin JK Rowling tried to mic drop by posting a link to one of the most detached-from-reality websites you’ve ever seen in your life.
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Okay, okay, okay… listen… I don’t want to write about her any more than you want to read about her, but sometimes she says or does something so reprehensible that I’m sort of left with no choice.
Our least favorite part-time writer, full-time bigot has tweeted out a URL leading to a website so deeply unhinged I simply could not stop myself from talking about it. Perhaps you’ve heard about or seen this website before, but this was my first time encountering it and… well, to say I’m shocked wouldn’t be quite right. I’m not particularly surprised that this website exists, nor am I surprised that Rowling is a fan. Still, it’s certainly a good stand in for the abyss into which you must not stare.
Some background: While engaging in her daily nonstop transphobic rants on Twitter, Rowling engaged with somebody defending the trans community from her nonsense. When that person pointed out that the thing she claimed to fear (somebody falsely claiming to be trans so they could invade public women’s bathrooms to harm them) simply does not happen, Rowling dropped a link to a blog called Trans Crime UK. The WordPress-powered blog appears to document the crimes of transgender people in the United Kingdom, but it has some categories that are… let’s say, less than conclusive.
You can find the website yourself with a quick Google, but frankly, I don’t recommend it. There’s no telling what sort of private information they’re publishing about people who may or may not be transgender, and many of whom haven’t even been convicted of a crime. That’s right, they have a category/tag for people who have only been charged with a crime, and frankly, many of the photographs included in their posts look AI-generated. They often provide limited, unsourced information about people who may not even publicly identify as part of our community, sort of just inventing a trans person breaking the law if they can’t find any actually doing it.
It’s important to remember, too, that hard data on the rate at which transgender people commit crimes separate from cisgender society is essentially nonexistent, for a lot of obvious reasons. Not everybody will report their identity accurately or out themselves when being arrested or incarcerated, particularly if they don’t have to. Most transphobes like to cite a 2018-2019 Ministry of Justice report on trans women in prison to misrepresent trans women as somehow more likely to commit sexual crimes, but consider that there are currently 97,800 people imprisoned in the UK, and that report lists just 163 transgender prisoners. If you try to search for statistics about trans people breaking the law in the UK, you’re far more likely to find dozens of articles about hate crimes against trans folks being more commonplace in recent years.
There are other groups in history that have also gone to great lengths to publicly portray their hated enemies as loathsome, habitual criminals. It feels a touch hypocritical, since I seem to remember a lot of accusations from transphobes of malicious intent when we launched the Trans Data Library, but Trans Crime UK’s lists go all the way back to 2014, and a quick Whois suggests the site’s been registered since 2017.
Incidentally, the blog contends that in 2018 Automattic, the company that owns WordPress, started removing “feminist” blogs for “the malicious publication of private details,” i.e., doxxing strangers to accuse them of unsubstantiated crimes. I can’t find any reference to that sort of rule in Automattic’s user behavior guidelines, but if you want to give it a shot, feel free to check out their explainer on how to report a blog.
If you suspect that might be a fruitless endeavor, I recommend you go about your day and forget about whatever sad loser has obsessively turned their entire life into documenting trans women on an internet blog.
Forget about them, just like their friends and family have.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
