Like frozen eddies caught in the swirl of a moral panic, the words of a national journalist linger days after J.K. Rowling released her essay addressing the dangers she sees in the trans rights movement. Shona Craven’s piece “This Is Why JK Rowling’s Non-Fiction Foray Caused a Twitter Storm,” which links trans identity to online echo chambers and the hurled abuse, crystallizes what the EU’s Council of Europe has described as “vitriolic media campaigns” in the UK that portray trans women in a vilified and misrepresented light. Other warnings, extending beyond Britain, also surface: anticipating what lies ahead, the US affiliate of the ostensibly progressive Guardian signs a public letter protesting what they perceive as transphobia woven into its UK editorial stance.
In its 2021 Annual Review, ILGA-Europe captures the trajectory of these events, noting that “anti-trans rhetoric continued to cause serious damage in the UK again this year,” and pointing to the defining trans-related saga of 2020 as “a prime example” of repeated transphobic attacks by Rowling on Twitter and in her writing. All of these warnings corroborate a body of recent scholarly work indicating that the UK’s legacy media has become a refuge for transphobic voices. Concerning how the Rowling story was reported in Scotland, two pieces stand out as illustrations of this new moral panic: Craven’s column in her capacity as The National’s columnist and Community Editor, and Gina Davidson, The Scotsman’s Deputy Political Editor.
Compared with their reach, I play a quiet part in this drama—a newly out trans woman and a PhD researcher with only a handful of publications—yet I am stirred to speak against the hostility I observe. A few days after Craven and Davidson publish pieces that delegitimise trans identity, I draft rebuttals that are rejected by their respective outlets. Neither paper publishes trans-inclusive commentary during that period, and it appears no article can contest the framing of trans people as delusional and oppressive. Feeling voiceless, I gain insight into how power shapes voice.
This is a personal account of the Rowling furor and the media’s transphobia, but it is also about voices. I draw on Andrew Anastasia’s nuanced notion of the trans voice as a triad—“speech-sound,” as an expression of agency, and as a song of collective politicized liberation. The second and third elements are the focus here: I want to recount a rare act of agency I undertook amid a surge of anti-trans sentiment in Britain’s legacy media, specifically surrounding Rowling’s case that reached its peak in June 2020.
We are rendered hostile abstractions in a contradictory narrative: Trans people are not real, only our violence is real.
My trans voice evolves during this period. I observe Rowling’s Twitter activity from 2017 to 2020, growing more uncertain about Rowling’s liking of transphobic tweets. I witness those “likes” evolve into progressively vicious cycles of statements and responses between Rowling and contributors to the online backlash. Reflecting on that era, I recognize that I could be seen as Rowling’s kind of trans person—quiet, reserved, and careful about ethical concerns. In her June 10, 2020 essay, Rowling differentiates between politically voiceless trans people who “simply want to live their lives,” whom she claims to love, and the more empowered yet broadly defined “trans rights activism” (TRA) movement, which she characterises as giving “cover to predators.” The follow-up coverage of the online backlash—her essay and the Craven and Davidson pieces—shapes my response, while their editors seem to mute my trans-inclusive voice.
I have never met Craven, but Davidson is better known to me. She interviewed me a year before the Rowling affair at a trans-focused conference I was organizing. My trans voice then was awkward and underdeveloped—barely a speech-sound, not yet an expression of agency or part of a larger chorus. In that interview, Davidson drew on examples of TRAs silencing women whose details I did not know. Had I previously studied gender-crit Twitter, Mumsnet, and related blogs, and known of Davidson’s alignment with those anti-trans sites, I might have anticipated the sources she would rely on and the frame she would adopt.
Nevertheless, we sat there, two women of similar ages, one cis, one trans; there was no toxicity, even if I was taken aback by her restrained reaction when I used the term “cisgender.” It was conversation, it was “discourse”—didn’t democracy arise from such imperfect exchanges? Perhaps by meeting me, Davidson could glimpse the gap between real trans women and whatever image she imagined was typing tweets that urged Rowling to condemn trans people. True to the liberal-democratic myth of a single, brief café dialogue capable of overcoming the daily torrent of messages from trans-exclusionists, I hoped this exchange might bridge the divide; Davidson’s later coverage of the Rowling affair demonstrates how little impact I had.
Thus, a year after our café meeting, Rowling publishes her June 10 essay, merging coded smears about trans women with a whitewashed portrayal of transphobia. She writes, “I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like
