An Open Letter to J.K. Rowling

Ms. Rowling,

You say you are defending women’s sex-based rights, that you are not anti-trans, and that you reject the label. I am going to take you at your word and engage the argument rather than the caricature, because you are owed that and because the question deserves better than a slogan from either side.

Here is where I think your case fails. You frame women’s rights and mine as a fixed quantity to be divided, as if every inch of safety I gain must be subtracted from someone else. But I am not the threat the framing needs me to be. Trans women are not the ones harming women in the numbers your most fervent followers imagine — far more often, we are among the women being harmed. A movement for women’s safety that writes us out of the category has not made women safer. It has only drawn a smaller circle and called the people left outside it a danger.

You have more reach than any politician I could write to. That is exactly why I wish you would look hard at who cheers your every post, and ask whether they share your stated concern for anyone’s rights but their own. I do not think they do. I think the best-known pen in the world has been lent to a cause that will not stop where you mean it to — and that the people it hurts most are women, including the trans ones you have decided do not count.