A male boxer punched a woman at the Olympics. LOL, JK, that never happened.
Trans hate is a threat to us all.
Snarky tweets are not often prophetic. Or not often enough, anyway. But occasionally one comes along that is prophetic (in the biblical sense of carrying moral force, rebuke and a message you should heed).
That’s a high bar. But, as JFK himself said in 1962: “We do not post these incredibly high-quality tweets because they are easy, but because they are objectively hilarious. And to annoy billionaires.” (Emphasis mine. Words also mine.)
Point is, this type of tweet is as rare as a competent rental agent or a utility company that got better after privatisation. So it’s important to draw attention to them when they occur in nature.
Take a look at this magnificent specimen:
That is, of course, satire. Nobody, least of all penniless newsletter writers with no access to lawyers, is suggesting that Jo Rowling actually believes this. (And they would similarly never suggest she’s litigious. That’s how you get sued.)
What the tweet is suggesting (and here I’m going to really enhance the comedy by explaining the joke, you’re welcome), is that anti-trans demagogues are unlikely to stop with trans people, when it comes to their ever-increasing field of targets.
To put it another way: trans exclusion doesn’t end with excluding trans women. That’s just the beginning. The mindset that seeks to rigidly define what a woman can be will naturally move on to attacking cis women too.
And behold.
Rowling (aided by legacy press like The Guardian, more right-wing publications and along with sensationalist pundits around the world) stoked the kind of outrage so often reserved for successful women of colour when they denounced Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, a cis woman, claiming she was a man.
Khelif is a woman. She was assigned female at birth. She has always competed as a woman. She has, like any boxer, regularly lost fights against other women. But when she won a bout against a Russian boxer last year, the Russia-dominated IBA accused her of not meeting ‘eligibility criteria’, making vague statements about supposed and gendered ‘advantages’. The ‘testing’ cited by the IBA (which has long been dogged by rumours of corruption), has been called ‘so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with it’ by the International Olympic Committee (which permanently banned the IBA from the Olympics last year).
But hey. People make mistakes. Transphobes more than most, admittedly, but still. Once all this information came to light, I’m sure the people denouncing Khelif probably backed off. After all, they are always banging on about defending women. Here’s a woman who’s being targeted for being successful. I’m sure that Rowling and the dementors that surround her simply apologised and offered statements of support and solidarity.
Like fuck they did.
If you’ve not followed Rowling’s reputational decline over the last few years, this will seem very odd indeed, but for those of us who have watched in horror as she doubled and tripled down on bad takes, this trivialisation of the important issue of gender based violence comes as no surprise. It’s the stick she and her ilk have used to attack trans and gender-nonconforming people for a while now.
What’s new is that she’s attacking cis women.
And that should be no surprise either.
The fact is that once you start down the path of defining and defending ‘real women’ from those who you don’t consider to be real enough for you, you’ve already embarked on a journey of exclusion, purity tests and paranoia.
As a Christian, I am all too familiar with this kind of toxic purity spiral. Ever-increasing numbers of shibboleths, faith statements and schisms are just the symptoms of a process which starts by removing those not pure enough to belong and ends with Inquisitions and burning heretics.
More than that, it always ends up spilling over, expanding the list of targets to include ever more people. Whether this is intentional (as the standard of purity becomes stricter) or an accident (as things get out of hand) hardly matters. You start off saying ‘Britain for British people’ and it feels pretty reasonable, but soon you’re hating illegal immigrants, and then all immigrants, and after a while you’re attacking people in the street for having a different level of melanin from your own.
Most bigotry is interconnected. Tans-hate is, I believe, profoundly entangled with misogyny.
Here’s how it might happen to you:
You start from a culturally conditioned fear-reaction to trans people simply because they do not fit the categories you were explicitly taught or have imbibed from culture. Then you seek to justify those feelings rather than confronting them, presuming, with zero evidence, that any trans woman in a women’s bathroom is not there because it’s where they feel comfortable, but because they want to attack cis women. And soon, your vigilance in policing the ladies’ toilet has you wondering whether the woman you just saw enter is a ‘real woman’.
Then you’re accosting women who aren’t feminine enough for your expectations, demanding proof of sex. You’re violently attacking women you think may be men. Or misgendering a female boxer in the name of ‘defending women’.
This is the necessary result of transphobia, because it is based in an idea of womanhood rooted in a narrow, patriarchal, culturally specific (and, many say, racist) ideals.
The question for women who agree with Rowling, is: if people feel emboldened to challenge women who they think are trans, are you sufficiently feminine-presenting to avoid such an embarrassing or dangerous accusation?
And for the transphobic lads: is your beard growth strong enough, are you tall enough, is your jaw square enough to avoid similar queries? Are you sure?
Because the number of people coming into trans comment sections intending to misgender the creator but failing is instructive, and men thinking drag artists are women is occasionally dealt with hilariously. Despite what bigots and stupid people say, nobody ‘can always tell’ if there is a difference between birth-assigned sex and gender presentation. And anyone who tries to is likely to make mistakes.
That’s why the world transphobes will leave us if they win is one where only hairless, delicate-featured, made-up trad-wife gals and cro-magnon body-builder bear boys can go about their lives without being questioned about their genitals. All in the name of keeping an already persecuted group from getting ‘too comfortable’.
Why does this matter?
Well, I personally really care about boxing.
LOL JK (*just kidding, not her).
It matters to me (and perhaps you) partly because of the role Christians have played in adding to the misery of trans people and adding to the already heavy burden patriarchy puts on women.
Far too often the Church is used as a dumping ground for the worst narratives of culture war, our people the stupid soldiers firing hate at those who Jesus would defend, because we are so easily manipulated.
More than that, I personally would love to live in a world where women didn’t have to prove they were women, and could be free of masses of douchebags trying to humiliate them. I actually think we could all do with the freedom to express our gender (or indifference to it) however the hell we want.
As a man who has never fully identified with the gender they were assigned at birth (but who will not claim to have experienced the oppression every woman and trans person has), I have had my life credibly threatened for wearing nail polish. I’ve had bricks thrown at me from moving cars for wearing ‘women’s’ clothing. I would LOVE it if that shit stopped, y’know? Particularly for people who constantly deal with more harassment than I will ever face.
But it won’t stop if we keep letting influential people with a weird axe to grind define our thinking.
It is not enough not to fall for the exclusionary and hateful arguments of those who want to make the world rigid with their odd personal definitions of who we all are and should be. We must challenge them, loudly, and stop their spread, be it in conversation, sermon or sport-spectating.
And hey, we could always do with more golden tweets.
Imane Khelif won gold at the Olympics, by the way. Cool.
New to Beer Christianity?
Here’s what it is.
Beer Christianity is also an occasionally amusing, boozy, sweary Leftist Christian podcast. Find us at beerchristianty.co.uk
You can contact Beer Christianity on Twitter/X: @beerxianity and on Instagram. Listen to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube etc. Audio comments or questions to be included on the show are welcome — just send us a voicenote on Insta.
Beer Christianity is created for free, but many readers and listeners have asked for a way to support it. We use Buy Me a Coffee[Beer].
Support Beer Christianity with money
Share Beer Christianity (the newsletter)
Thanks to everyone who has donated a coffee recently, especially you, Maggie! Very kind, very encouraging.
Oh hey. I’m writing a lot right now, hey? You’re forgiven if you were wondering if this was just a manic episode. I wondered the same. But I’m actually just trying to be more disciplined. More and more I am realising that there’s not a lot of representation of Leftist, progressive voices in media, never mind Christian leftist progressive stuff. We need a magazine. A newspaper. Just one radio station. Not just for me to spout off, but so that people see a Christianity that isn’t limited to that con-evo narrowness. So the least I can do is put my lil letter out there.
Thanks so much to everyone who engages and encourages. It makes a huge difference. I hope you’re having an okay time. xoxo J
Let's agree that gender is inherently non-binary: whether biological, physical or visual, there are no simple lines to be drawn. Existing gender binaries tend, I think, to be largely social: clothes, toilets, aggressive behaviours, and so on; basically artificial constructs. But there are areas where, in my view, things get more complicated, where we *seem* to need a line, even though reality is nearer to a spectrum.
Sport is one of those: why do they separate out women's events? Because physical gender differences are thought to make direct competition unfair, maybe even dangerous. You could just make it one category, open to all, but I think you would lose diversity and variety that way. So you end up having to draw a line somewhere. Khelif's situation is unknown; but what the controversy has done is to raise the question, again, about what the criteria are for such events. The IOC is currently going with what the passport says, but the bad old days of Eastern European doping demonstrated that national authorities are far from trustworthy.
But the one I think is more important is the question of single-sex safe areas - JKR's original bugbear. Like it or otherwise, male violence against women is a major problem in our society; the other way around is real but much less common. Safe spaces for abused women don't feel safe if there is someone there who looks and sounds like their abusers. Unfair, maybe, but that is the nature of fear and of surviving abuse. Similarly, the statistics for abuse of those who are trans women are horrendous. If a trans rape survivor can't go to a women's safe space, where can she go? It would be nice to think such issues could be dealt with by simple human goodwill and common sense, but these are qualities which seem to get lost in the ideological battlefield.
Which is why I get depressed by dehumanising talk of TERFs, or of "male" boxers punching women, or openly misogynistic tweets about gin-drinking women and their opinions. Somehow Jesus seems to have combined a justice-facing ideology with compassion for people in their situations; it doesn't feel so easy today.
If you see someone chucking overly-simplistic brickbats, it's always best to throw similarly simplistic brickbats back. Of course.
Rowling thinks that (reportedly) XY chromosomes and high testosterone are relevant to safety issues in women's sport; you respond with a blanket statement that "Khelif is a woman," backed up by "She was assigned female at birth," because skin-deep is what it's all about? Followed by a long attack on a paper tiger of your own invention about a "culturally conditioned fear-reaction". There probably are people and situations where that applies, but you do seem to be using it as a way of dismissing the concerns of Rowling, a woman.
Until our society learns to deal with non-binary issues in a non-binary way, these sorts of arguments are always going to be more heat than light. It seems to me that if we are going to separate sports events into 'male' and 'female' categories then some serious thought ought to be given to why. If it's just about doubling the number of Olympic events that is one thing, but if it's to do with fairness and safety then that is a lot more complicated. Once the 'why' is clear there is at least some chance of addressing the 'who'.