Just one day after hundreds of New York Times contributors beseeched the paper in an open letter to examine the editorial bias in its often fearmongering coverage of transgender people, the Times Opinion Desk printed a column “in defense of J.K. Rowling.” It’s by—who else?—Pamela Paul.
Since 1988, Pamela Paul has recorded the title and author of every book she reads in a battered notebook she calls her Book of Books — the eponymous “Bob” of her engaging memoir, “My Life With Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues” (Henry Holt, $27). It moves from a shy, bookish childhood in Port Washington through a failed first marriage that (in an ironic twist worthy of fiction) was the launchpad for a successful career as a freelance journalist and author. Remarried with three children, Paul has been editor of The New York Times Book Review since 2013. She considered the challenges of juggling writing, reading, editing and parenting in a recent conversation from her office. It has been edited for length and clarity.
The piece argues that the Harry Potter author, who has in recent years publicly advocated against trans-inclusive policies, is not the transphobe her critics make her out to be, and that it “is as dangerous as it is absurd” to call her one.
To be clear, Rowling has not made these statements in the context of advocating on behalf of transgender rights and protections. They were perfunctory caveats, sprinkled in a sea of tweets and manifestoes that have consistently questioned the validity of trans identity, endorsed the view that trans women are predatory men in disguise, and promoted the exclusion of trans people from public spaces and services that match their respective genders.
In the established pattern of today’s anti-transgender movement, Rowling rarely mentions adult trans men, because to do that would radically destabilize her arguments. (Would cis women who have survived sexual abuse feel safer with trans men—men!—in their changing rooms and rape crisis centers?) The kind of trans person Rowling supports—and the only type of person she is referring to when she says “trans person,” as opposed to “intact male” or a “man who says they identify as a woman”—is one who undergoes “a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation,” with plenty of “medical gatekeeping” along the way.
The issue, here, is the definition of transphobia, which Paul is whittling and contorting to her own ideological ends. If transphobia does not apply to someone who would exile trans women in need from shelters and crisis centers that could support them; who believes that there are simply too many transgender children these days, and who would consign trans youth to distress and dysphoria rather than offering treatment that will allow them to pursue safer, happier lives; who believes a handful of vocal detransitioners to be more trustworthy than actual transgender people, such that public policy and social structures should be built according to the notion that every trans person is a detransitioner-in-waiting; who considers trans women inherently deceptive, conniving, and dangerous; and who has built her entire public political persona around casting suspicion on transgender people and the argument that their needs are mutually exclusive to those of cis women and girls—to whom, exactly, should it apply?
Paul wants it to apply only to those who would commit anti-trans violence and to the extreme right-wing legislators who are trying to outlaw transgender health care. (Banning trans health care for adults is transphobic; banning it for teens and making it extremely difficult, mentally taxing, and time-consuming to obtain for adults is reasonable—see the distinction?)
But whether transphobia is nakedly hateful or cloaked in concern and caveats, if it is levied in support of efforts to keep transgender people pathologized, mistrusted, and marginalized, it is a loathsome pursuit that does not deserve our sympathetic consideration.
That this column came the day after the open letter that implored the paper to improve its coverage shows how deeply the leaders at the institution want to appear to eschew progressive bias and hear “both sides” on the issue of trans lives, even as its coverage is already bent heavily toward the side of Rowling and Paul. So committed were they to this mission that they didn’t think it right to postpone the column for a single day after the letter, lest they appear cowed to what Paul calls the “gender orthodoxies” of the moment.
Paul writes for the Opinion section, which is supposedly walled off from the newsroom. Still, her long, passionate invective on the rights of J.K. Rowling to not get called names that J.K. Rowling doesn’t want to be called—timed to a J.K. Rowling podcast being produced by the media company started by Bari Weiss, another former Times opinion columnist—is of a piece with a through-line in the paper’s reported coverage. So much of that reporting focuses on the stresses and terrors of aggrieved members of society who perceive LGBTQ indoctrination around every corner, but especially in schools and the medical community. It is not that the paper refuses to report on the breakneck political assault on trans people fueled by the likes of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and other Republican leaders, but that it ends up promoting the same exact “we’re just concerned about children” framing that those politicians use to dress their agenda in a veneer of respectability.
Paul would like us to think Rowling brave, and a victim, for enduring the doxing and death threats that have come her way in response to her campaign for trans skepticism. Doxing and death threats are obviously wrong. But a person’s crusade does not automatically grow in righteousness in direct proportion to the number of threats she receives. Sometimes, when a group of people use a word with negative connotations to describe a prominent person, prompting others to distance themselves from her work or her views, it’s not bullying, or a witch hunt. It could just be a rational, sensible response.
Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd,” Paul wrote. “The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.”
