Lee.org

This is an essay on me coming to terms with JK Rowling’s vile stance on transgender issues. When you want to broach the subject with a friend that the author of Harry Potter might have some disturbing views on gender health, maybe you’ll point them here and let them follow my journey on the subject.

————————————————–

JK Rowling has written controversially about gender issues, especially the acceptability of transgender people in society.

First, let me be forthright about my opinion about transgender issues:

I fully and without reservation support anyone trying to become whoever they think they might be. Whatever a person believes for themselves is real. It is difficult but worthwhile to work toward becoming that person! There are many aspects to understanding gender including but not limited to social, psychological, and biological. I have travelled a long, occasionally bumpy road in understanding my own and other’s gender and sexuality. It has been composed of a nonstop process of exploration, consideration, observation, and re-consideration.

—————————————-

When I first read JK Rowling’s Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues, I did so out of context of the discussion that was happening. I simply read it. On my first reading, what I saw seemed to make good sense. I even naively blogged a summary, “To cut through all the flak, what I read is this “Be cautious about encouraging people to change their gender too quickly.” I fully support that position.” I was completely wrong about her intent and about her position. I now see how vile her position is.

Making time to understand the full context of an author’s words can be difficult and time consuming with all the stressors and demands on my time. That said, understanding the context in which words are said is essential! Most of what is below are things I learned in the past few days.

(TL;DR, you are welcome to just read the parts in bold)

To skip to the heart of the matter, I completely disagree with JK Rowling’s impression of gender and gender rights. I believe it is a view that is detrimental to the wellbeing of individuals and society. Her core belief is, despite quite a bit of lip service to the contrary, that gender plays no important role in gender identity; a person’s observed sex at birth is the only important aspect of gender identity in society.

Rowling strongly supports Maya Forstater’s ideas in her failed transgender lawsuit. Rowling and Forstater  state with nearly identical verbiage ,”I am concerned that the acceptance of “gender identity” in place of sex in laws and policies has a negative impact on women and girls, as it means that female only spaces including toilets, changing rooms, women’s refuges, prisons, hospital wards, and women’s sport can not be maintained as female only.” and “I am not anti-trans. Like JK Rowling I think people should be free to wear what they like and live as they please.”

A summary of the lawsuit: Forstater doesn’t believe a person who has changed genders has actually changed genders. Forstater includes even people that have gone through the legal process in the UK to obtain a UK Gender Recognition Certificate a “GRC”. She said as much and was let go from her job because of it. The judge in the case decided that Forstater is incorrect and the GRC does actually confer its namesake. “…the sticking point was [Forstater’s] insistence that a trans woman is still a man even if she holds a GRC confirming her legal status as a woman”

On my first reading, I had missed so many details in Rowling’s article. I incorrectly assumed that Rowling and Forstater had an understanding of the difference and nuance between sex and gender and were making an academic, pedantic point. This misinterpretation colored my understanding of the reading greatly. Forstater wrote things like ““Sex” is a material reality which should not be conflated with “gender” or “gender identity”. Being female (or male) is an immutable biological fact, not a feeling or an identity… I believe that everyone should be free to live as they choose without harassment or discrimination because of adopting or not adopting gender norms and stereotypes.” My initial response is “Ok… that’s interesting, I’m listening… where are you going with this?” Unfortunately, where she is going is that Forstater strongly believes that both gender AND sex are immutable in her eyes and likewise should be immutable in the eyes of the law.

In Rowling’s article she talks about people’s impression that she may be a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) but she doesn’t say if she embraces the label or not.  Forstater calls herself “gender critical” which is recognized as being synonymous. I didn’t understand what the term meant before reading about Rowling’s position and I mistakenly let the words roll over me. I even googled the term but got the wrong impression. I had latched onto a discussion about how it wasn’t really a derogatory term and moved on. Well, I’ve got egg on my face because “TERF” is not derogatory in exactly the same way that “white supremacist” is not derogatory per se.

A person that is a trans exclusionary radical feminist “denies that trans people’s self-affirmed genders and sexes are equally valid as cis people’s self-affirmed genders and sexes”

In the UK, actively promoting the core belief of a TERF is against the law as evidenced by Forstater’s failed lawsuit.

In Rowling’s Sex and Gender article, she expressed concern about “…Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where [Lisa Littman, the person who coined the phrase] believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.” I’m sorry to say that I latched onto that idea too quickly and strongly without looking into it carefully. I had been reminded of an absolutely essential book I read a few years ago “Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche“. I cannot recommend it highly enough. (thank you Professor Jennifer Dawgert-Carlin at CCSF for the recommendation!) Please read the book, or my summary, it will blow you away! In brief, the book traces several mental illnesses that have been spread socially: literal “memes”. Recalling this book got me concerned that Rowling understood a problem that others might not understand. The rub is that the idea of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is very new, not well studied yet, and simply not ready to be discussed outside academic psychology! Maybe it’s actually a thing, maybe not. I found exactly 1 research study about ROGD on Google Scholar, all the other articles are heated discussions about Littman’s paper. Here’s a good article in Psychology Today about some of the complexity of trying to mainstream the idea too quickly. My friend S. reminded me “[Rowling] is not a Psychologist. She is an author. Look to experts to learn more about the issues. Wikipedia is good for starters.” That is spectacular advice. I had made the mistake of thinking that Rowling was speaking as an academic with a lot of evidence. She is not and does not.

Here are the last nails in the coffin.  Rowling took the pen name “Robert Galbraith”. The most prominent real individual with that name is Robert Galbraith Heath, a psychiatrist who was famous for coming up with electroshock gay conversion therapy in the 1950’s. That says it all. Yes, it’s as unethical and as you suspect it might be, maybe moreso! Rowling denies this origin of her pen name, but her reputation as an author who meticulously crafts her character’s names is well understood. Rowling’s new book is about a male serial killer who dressed up as a woman to hunt women. Oh come on! That’s just piling on! That demonstrates clearly yet again her ridiculous “things that go bump in the night” fear.

So, what do I think of JK Rowling’s views on transgender persons? Destructive, abhorrent, and disgusting are a good start.

More reading:

• The Bad Wizard Lady Controversy, Explained
• Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”
• Studies: Suicide attempts high among transgender teens, increasing among black teens

The New England Journal of Medicine is the world’s leading medical journal and website. (Specifically “The journal usually has the highest impact factor of the journals of internal medicine”)

In my previous post, I quoted an NPR article about how The New England Journal of Medicine published a very strongly worded article to vote Trump out. Please read what they have to say:

(via)

Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.

The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering,¹ the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly.

We know that we could have done better. China, faced with the first outbreak, chose strict quarantine and isolation after an initial delay. These measures were severe but effective, essentially eliminating transmission at the point where the outbreak began and reducing the death rate to a reported 3 per million, as compared with more than 500 per million in the United States. Countries that had far more exchange with China, such as Singapore and South Korea, began intensive testing early, along with aggressive contact tracing and appropriate isolation, and have had relatively small outbreaks. And New Zealand has used these same measures, together with its geographic advantages, to come close to eliminating the disease, something that has allowed that country to limit the time of closure and to largely reopen society to a prepandemic level. In general, not only have many democracies done better than the United States, but they have also outperformed us by orders of magnitude.

Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly? We have failed at almost every step. We had ample warning, but when the disease first arrived, we were incapable of testing effectively and couldn’t provide even the most basic personal protective equipment to health care workers and the general public. And we continue to be way behind the curve in testing. While the absolute numbers of tests have increased substantially, the more useful metric is the number of tests performed per infected person, a rate that puts us far down the international list, below such places as Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia, countries that cannot boast the biomedical infrastructure or the manufacturing capacity that we have.²  Moreover, a lack of emphasis on developing capacity has meant that U.S. test results are often long delayed, rendering the results useless for disease control.

Although we tend to focus on technology, most of the interventions that have large effects are not complicated. The United States instituted quarantine and isolation measures late and inconsistently, often without any effort to enforce them, after the disease had spread substantially in many communities. Our rules on social distancing have in many places been lackadaisical at best, with loosening of restrictions long before adequate disease control had been achieved. And in much of the country, people simply don’t wear masks, largely because our leaders have stated outright that masks are political tools rather than effective infection control measures. The government has appropriately invested heavily in vaccine development, but its rhetoric has politicized the development process and led to growing public distrust.

The United States came into this crisis with enormous advantages. Along with tremendous manufacturing capacity, we have a biomedical research system that is the envy of the world. We have enormous expertise in public health, health policy, and basic biology and have consistently been able to turn that expertise into new therapies and preventive measures. And much of that national expertise resides in government institutions. Yet our leaders have largely chosen to ignore and even denigrate experts.

The response of our nation’s leaders has been consistently inadequate. The federal government has largely abandoned disease control to the states. Governors have varied in their responses, not so much by party as by competence. But whatever their competence, governors do not have the tools that Washington controls. Instead of using those tools, the federal government has undermined them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was the world’s leading disease response organization, has been eviscerated and has suffered dramatic testing and policy failures. The National Institutes of Health have played a key role in vaccine development but have been excluded from much crucial government decision making. And the Food and Drug Administration has been shamefully politicized,³  appearing to respond to pressure from the administration rather than scientific evidence. Our current leaders have undercut trust in science and in government,⁴  causing damage that will certainly outlast them. Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed “opinion leaders” and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.

Let’s be clear about the cost of not taking even simple measures. An outbreak that has disproportionately affected communities of color has exacerbated the tensions associated with inequality. Many of our children are missing school at critical times in their social and intellectual development. The hard work of health care professionals, who have put their lives on the line, has not been used wisely. Our current leadership takes pride in the economy, but while most of the world has opened up to some extent, the United States still suffers from disease rates that have prevented many businesses from reopening, with a resultant loss of hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of jobs. And more than 200,000 Americans have died. Some deaths from Covid-19 were unavoidable. But, although it is impossible to project the precise number of additional American lives lost because of weak and inappropriate government policies, it is at least in the tens of thousands in a pandemic that has already killed more Americans than any conflict since World War II.

Anyone else who recklessly squandered lives and money in this way would be suffering legal consequences. Our leaders have largely claimed immunity for their actions. But this election gives us the power to render judgment. Reasonable people will certainly disagree about the many political positions taken by candidates. But truth is neither liberal nor conservative. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.

Disclosure forms  provided by the authors are available with the full text of this editorial at NEJM.org.

Supplementary Material
Disclosure Forms PDF 591KB
References  (4)

1.Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. COVID-19 dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html).

2.Total number of COVID-19 tests per confirmed case, September 14, 2020. Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-covid-19-tests-per-confirmed-case).

3.McGinley L, Abutaleb L, Johnson CY. Inside Trump’s pressure campaign on federal scientists over a Covid-19 treatment. Washington Post.  August  30,  2020  (https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/convalescent-plasma-treatment-covid19-fda/2020/08/29/e39a75ec-e935-11ea-bc79-834454439a44_story.html).

Google Scholar. opens in new tab

4.Haberman M. Trump admits downplaying the virus knowing it was ‘deadly stuff.’ New York Times.  September  9,  2020  (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/us/politics/woodward-trump-book-virus.html).

Close References

Citing Article  (1)

Janice Hopkins Tanne. (2020) Covid 19:  NEJM  and former CDC director launch stinging attacks on US response.  BMJ, m3925.

Crossref

The New England Journal of Medicine is the world’s leading medical journal and website.

(via)

FILE – This Dec. 29, 2011 file photo shows the entrance to the editorial offices of the New England Journal of Medicine in Boston. On Wednesday, June 13, 2018, the journal retracted and republished a landmark study on the Mediterranean diet, and issued an unprecedented five other corrections after an obscure report in 2017 scrutinized thousands of articles in eight journals over more than a decade and questioned some methods. The New England Journal’s review did not alter any conclusions and should raise public trust in science, not erode it, said its top editor, Dr. Jeffrey Drazen. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

The Trump administration has “taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy” in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic,  The New England Journal of Medicine  says in a scathing editorial that essentially calls on American voters to throw the president out of office.

It is the first time the prestigious medical journal has taken a stance on a U.S. presidential election since it was founded in 1812.

“When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent,”  reads the editorial  signed by nearly three dozen of the journal’s editors. “We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”

The editors accuse Trump’s government of a massive public health failure – and of worsening the pandemic’s effects by prioritizing politics over sound medical guidance.

The piece, titled “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum” and published Wednesday, does not mention President Trump or his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, by name. But it refers to the Trump administration repeatedly, and its footnotes cite news articles about Trump insisting that coronavirus risks are overblown, pressuring federal scientists, and politicizing the search for treatments.

“Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed ‘opinion leaders’ and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies,” the editorial states.

The New England Journal of Medicine  is at least the third widely respected medical or science journal to call for a change in U.S. leadership. Editor-in-Chief  Dr. Eric Rubin  says the editorial is rare for two main reasons: It’s one of the handful of times an editorial has been signed by all the editors, and it takes an unprecedented political stand.

“There have been many mistakes made that were not only foolish but reckless,”  Rubin tells CNN, “and I think we want people to realize that there are truths here, not just opinions.”

Even though the U.S. has distinct advantages in biomedical research, manufacturing capacity and public health expertise compared with many other countries, the U.S. has recorded  more than 212,000 deaths  from the coronavirus – the most in the world. Along the way, U.S. leaders have denigrated experts and ceded disease control to the states, the journal’s editors say.

“Anyone else who recklessly squandered lives and money in this way would be suffering legal consequences,” the editorial states. “Our leaders have largely claimed immunity for their actions. But this election gives us the power to render judgment.”

The editorial acknowledges the difficulties that all countries face in coping with the coronavirus. And it notes that some deaths are unavoidable in a pandemic. But in the U.S., the authors say, “we have failed at almost every step,” from having adequate protective gear to a problematic approach to testing and contact tracing to a failure to follow basic precautions such as wearing face masks.

“In much of the country, people simply don’t wear masks, largely because our leaders have stated outright that masks are political tools rather than effective infection control measures,” the editorial states.

Many of the sentiments echo concerns raised in other venerable journals this year.

Scientific American  broke with 175 years of tradition by endorsing Biden last month — a decision that was both unanimous and quick, Editor-in-Chief Laura Helmuth  told NPR. And  The Lancet  called on Americans to make Trump a one-term president back in May.

All three journals took stands against Trump without referring to political parties; Helmuth says the  Scientific American  editorial  purposefully avoided doing so in an attempt to be inclusive for its readers.

In a similar vein, the  New England Journal of Medicine  editorial states, “Truth is neither liberal nor conservative.”

The opinion piece notes that the U.S. has performed worse than many other developed nations, such as South Korea that had much higher rates of travel to and from China when the coronavirus initially emerged.

The journal’s editors write: “The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000.”

I sent 100 personal letters to people in Milwaukee in support of Biden.

Here’s 50 of them

I recently bought some MERV 13 furnace filters from filterbuy.com and was very happy. They mailed 3 filters for about $14 each delivered in about a week. They work well to keep the occasional wildfire smoke out of our house. An acquaintance on Nextdoor.com recommended them to me.