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What does this even mean? Like, how can someone not be "legitimate"? Does it mean "illegal" as in illegal alien? Is anyone claiming that trans citizens should be deported? Or does it mean "imaginary"? Trans people obviously exist.
JKRowling is simply pointing out that the word "woman", which used to have the clear and simple meaning of "female human" (or sometimes "adult female human"), was now not only redefined & politicized to basically mean "opinion" (or "a woman is someone who thinks they're a woman" which is a clearly nonsensical recursive definition) and is used for Orwellian speech control.
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Rowling's statement is true if your experience leads you to prioritize the orthodox. It's patently false if your experience deviates from the experiences that created it. The struggle in the conservation of orthodox values (e.g. sisterhood of women) and the visibility of heterodox experience (e.g transgender issues & the lived experience of women who's bodies don't conform to the stereotypes being used) has a lot of truth on both sides.
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I've read (one of) JK Rowlings' latest blog entries, and while I don't personally agree with her statements they seemed far, far more reasonable and debatable than what the internet made of it.
The internet made it seem like she was going to war against transgenders...
edit: for anyone looking to read it as well, I read this one: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-...
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You can't accurately construct a message about someone elses mental state without talking to them at length. When you assume people imply things, you're actually sharing YOUR mental state. When you take a message to mean significantly more than what the words themselves mean, you're not filling in the gaps with reality but your perception of reality.
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It's absolutely fine that you disagree with JK Rowling. It's also fine that she disagrees with you. Talk about it! Don't throw slurs at each other. Don't make personal attacks.
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The word "women" has always referred to female assigned sex, there is nothing wrong with that inherently but it wasn't entertaining some deeper truth about the world.
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Based on Pew polling, most Americans agree with Rowling[0].
>Overall, roughly half of Americans (54%) say that whether someone is a man or a woman is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth, while 44% say someone can be a man or a woman even if that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth.
Any ideology that considers truth to be unacceptable is a menace. Feelings cannot matter more than facts. Anyone who tries to tell you different should be immediately and permanently suspect.
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/08/transgender...
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There used to be a word for this as well; we called it "putting words in other people's mouth".
One can criticize aspects of a movement without being against the whole movement, or the people in the movement.
>one which is rightly considered offensive to most of modern society
What hubris.
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For example, JK Rowling's statement that "there used to be a word for people who menstruate" was essentially true (menopause aside), but had a hefty implied message about the legitimacy of transgender women, one which is rightly considered offensive to most of modern society.
Edit: Since people are nitpicking, here's an even starker example: Can you imagine contexts where it would be rightly offensive for an African-American to be told the true statement "My ancestors used to enslave people like you"?