The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling Continue

Natalie Wynn may not be a household name among most Quillette readers. But the American transwoman’s YouTube channel, ContraPoints—which combines progressive social commentary with campy props and decor—has become a sensation among young progressives. Attacking right-wing and centrist views on issues connected with identity, gender in particular, is Wynn’s specialty. And her April 18th video, criticizing the recently released Free Press podcast The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, has already garnered about 2.5 million views.

The backstory here, for the benefit of those who are entirely new to the issue, is that Rowling has been under fire from transgender activists since 2019, due to her stated view that biological sex (as distinct from self-professed gender identity) should be considered when assigning legal protections to girls and women. The scathing, often febrile, campaign against Rowling and her (supposed) transphobia is the subject of the Witch Trials podcast, which is hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper (who, being a former member of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, knows a thing or two about hate cults). While the podcast convincingly presents Rowling as a mob victim, Wynn suggests Rowling is actually an intolerant author of her own misfortune.

It’s notable that Wynn chose to participate in Witch Trials (Chapter 6: Natalie and Noah, specifically), notwithstanding the podcast’s pro-Rowling theme. And so it could be that the new ContraPoints video (which, confusingly, is also called, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling) may have been aimed at re-building bridges with the orthodox gender ideologues who comprise much of Wynn’s fan base. Wynn also expressed disillusionment with transition in a recent AMA (“ask me anything”) segment—a moment of candor that was likely seen as running off-message from the uninterrupted pro-transition narrative that activists expect. Even by the standards of militant political movements, trans-activist media enforcers tend to be unusually ruthless in calling out apostates. And so the newly released ContraPoints video may have been Wynn’s effort at damage control.

But since we have no proof that Wynn was acting on such motives, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the motives at play here were sincere, and that the contents of the video truly do reflect Wynn’s actual views—including the YouTuber’s apparent belief that Rowling’s gender-critical feminism channels a “crypto-reactionary backlash disguising itself as feminism” (a description in keeping with Wynn’s previous denunciation of gender-critical feminists as constituting a “hate movement hiding behind a bunch of pseudo-feminist platitudes”). Given the size of Wynn’s platform, it’s worth assessing the presented arguments on their merits.

In the seventh and final chapter of the Witch Trials podcast, “What If You’re Wrong?,” Phelps-Roper puts a set of questions to Rowling. These comprise a kind of epistemic virtue test—designed to help people assess whether they’ve been as responsible as possible in arriving at their beliefs.

The most important of these, to me, is the third question: “Can you articulate your opponent’s perspective in a way that they recognize? Or are you strawmanning?”

To strawman is to argue against a position that is not actually your opponent’s position, without acknowledging the manoeuvre. For example, I might say, “I think transgender status and sex should be protected separately under anti-discrimination law,” and my opponent might respond, “Holly thinks transgender people don’t deserve anti-discrimination protections, and she’s wrong because…” When you strawman a person’s argument, you’re creating a caricatured version of it that you can more easily refute. This is an intellectually dishonest tactic that prevents any real conversation from taking place.

The opposite of strawmanning is “steelmanning”: creating a version of your opponent’s argument that is as strong as possible, and arguing against that version. In my academic field, philosophy, where we care very much about good arguments, strawmanning is considered a central vice, and steelmanning is considered a central virtue. Wynn studied philosophy, and has a master’s degree in the subject, so presumably has had fairly robust exposure to such intellectual norms.

I say all this because the question I want to address is whether Wynn passes the Phelps-Roper test. Does Wynn articulate the gender-critical position in a way that Rowling would recognize, or is Wynn strawmanning?

My verdict is that Wynn fails quite spectacularly, and that the April 18th ContraPoints video would be better categorized as political propaganda on behalf of trans activism, dressed up as good-faith intellectual commentary. I’m not saying that’s how Wynn intended it; I can’t know that. But I am saying that’s how it functions.

It is my personal view that the ideology behind trans activism—by which I mean the idea that self-described gender identity must be treated, in all areas of law and policy, as a definitive marker of identity that supersedes biological sex—is in its death throes; and so we’re seeing desperate rearguard actions by its proponents to keep it propped up. Wynn’s video represents one such attempt, in that it reinforces the conceit that the debate over gender orthodoxy represents a Manichean battle of good trans activists pitted against evil transphobes; a dualism that, in turn, is mapped politically upon the divide between good US Democrats and evil Republicans (never mind that the subject of the Witch Trials was a British author, or that the political issues it touches on have been playing out in many countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands, the nations of Scandinavia, Brazil, and countless others).

In the nearly two-hour video, Wynn attempts to draw a parallel between Rowling and Anita Bryant, a Christian American who campaigned against 1970s-era policies that would protect homosexuals from discrimination. It’s a difficult case to make because, as many of Rowling’s defenders have noted, the Harry Potter author has never actually said anything (even remotely) hateful about trans people.

But this fact doesn’t deter Wynn. “True, [Rowling] never says the phrase ‘I hate trans people,’ because she’s not a complete idiot,” Wynn concedes. “But Anita Bryant never said ‘I hate gay people.’ She said, ‘Save our children’ … For that matter, David Duke doesn’t say ‘I hate black people,’ but he will share a lot of statistics about anti-white crime. So this is not really a very good criterion for deciding who’s a bigot, is it?”

Wynn’s likening of Rowling to Bryant may initially seem persuasive. Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign expressed concern about the impact of a Florida county ordinance on children; and the gender-critical feminist campaign against laws that make sex a matter of unfettered self-identification, or that prohibit anything but an “affirmation-based” approach to trans-identified children, also channels concerns about the impacts of such policies on children. Bryant said gay people already have (to her mind) equal rights; gender-critical feminists similarly ask what rights trans people don’t have.

Wynn tells us that right-wing women in feminism’s second-wave era had an irrational fear of lesbians; and presents Andrea Dworkin’s argument that this represented a displacement of their fear of the men they knew, who actually hurt them, onto a convenient “other.” Wynn tries to draw a parallel here by arguing that today’s gender-critical women exhibit an irrational fear of transwomen; and that this, too, supposedly reflects a conveniently displaced fear of the real enemy, men.

I’m guessing this must come off as persuasive to a good portion of Wynn’s young audience, for whom the 1970s qualify as scarcely more recent than the suffragette era. In truth, however, while Bryant objected to an anti-discrimination ordinance aimed at protecting homosexuals, gender-critical feminists are not objecting to anti-discrimination protections for trans people. Gender-critical feminists want anti-discrimination protections for trans people. They just want them drafted as such, rather than being conflated with anti-discrimination protections for females. Which is to say, they seek recognition of the fact that sex and transgender status should be treated as distinct protected attributes, because to be a female person is not the same thing as to be a male who identifies as a woman.

At one point, Wynn spends a substantial amount of time describing, and then attributing to Rowling, so-called “motte-and-bailey” rhetorical tactics. These are arguments by which a person puts forward a difficult-to-defend claim (analogized to a lightly defended low-walled medieval courtyard known as a bailey), and then retreats to a more defensible claim (the metaphorical motte, or castle) when challenged, without conceding that the latter differs from the former.

But then Wynn uses this same strategy to impugn Rowling, first arguing that saying “transwomen are men” is transphobic (the bailey), and then retreating to a far more defensible position, expressed implicitly by means of the following rhetorical question: “Is it really hysteria to react with strong emotions when your basic inclusion in society is up for debate?” The sleight of hand here is aimed at convincing the audience that the widely accepted proposition—that everyone in society should be “included”—simply restates the far more dubious original statement.

Unfortunately, this sort of motte-and-bailey trick has become a common feature of the gender debate. And so one must constantly remind oneself that the motte and bailey are very different things: trans people’s basic inclusion in society isn’t up for debate (or, at least, not among gender-critical feminists). Whatever universal human rights there are, gender-critical feminists support trans people having them. What is up for debate is whether transwomen, by virtue of self-identification as such, should have access to rights specifically reserved for women.

Bryant was worried about children coming out (to use a modern term) as gay, because her observant Christian beliefs cast homosexuality as a sin. Gender-critical feminists are worried about politicized “gender-affirmative” medicine putting children on a medical pathway with irreversible impacts on their long-term health, sexual function, and fertility. The idea that these two sets of concerns are analogous is absurd. One need only review the scandalous details concerning the Tavistock youth gender clinic in England to understand this distinction. The Tavistock is being shuttered not because of some modern-day army of Anita Bryants, but because of the cautionary tales supplied by patients (transitioned and detransitioned alike) and clinicians.

Gender-critical feminists also are worried about girls responding to societal sexism by choosing an individual response (transition) rather than a collective response (feminism). And we see a conflict of interests between minority groups (for “minority” here, read disadvantaged groups, regardless of size), whereby some of the demands of one group—trans activists speaking on behalf of trans people, in this example—run at cross purposes to the interests of other minority groups—lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, women, and children.

Gender-critical feminists want a response to that conflict of interests that takes all minority groups’ interests seriously, rather than simply giving one group whatever it demands, on the specious grounds that doing otherwise would negate their “basic inclusion in society.” The demand for a debate that hears all voices is hardly comparable to religiously-motivated antipathy toward one particular minority group.

As for Wynn’s appeal to Dworkin’s claim that right-wing women irrationally feared lesbians as sexual predators, whether true or not, there is no useful analogy at play here—since gender-critical feminists do not fear transwomen in particular as sexual predators (or as threats in other ways). Rather, they fear biological men in general—not all men, but some men, and we don’t know which until they out themselves as predators. In subjecting all biological men to a sensible level of scrutiny, gender-critical feminists are simply refusing to make a blanket exception for that subset whose members happen to self-identify as being of no threat to women. This is because gender-critical feminists believe that the justification for sex-separation lies in maleness and/or the male socialization associated with living as a male for much of one’s life, and not in one’s self-declared gender identity as a man.

Whenever Wynn clips the expression of gender-critical beliefs, they’re almost invariably articulated either by Republican politicians, or by full-throated British women’s-rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen (whom I interviewed for last month’s Quillette column, and who appeared recently on the Quillette podcast).

Podcast #212: Kellie-Jay Keen on Protecting Women, and Facing Down Aggressive Gender-Rights Mobs

The British activist once known as Posie Parker talks to Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay about the assault she endured in New Zealand, why she doesn’t call herself a feminist, and the dangers of the “full-on cult” that has mobilized against her.

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Wynn conflates Keen with the GOP on the basis of every misdeed (real or imagined) ever attributed to her by trans-activist Twitterati (most of which were addressed and/or debunked by Australian MP Moira Deeming, in her recent response to the leader of the Victorian Liberal Party, who’d moved to expel her for appearing at a public event with Keen). By contrast, Wynn’s viewers never hear from any of the left-wing women who’ve been outspoken in defense of gender-critical feminist issues in many countries.

This isn’t a coincidence: one of the rhetorical tactics at play within trans activism more broadly is to pretend that any opposition to gender-identity ideology must somehow be rooted in socially conservative American political subcultures (“Evangelical Christian” is a descriptor that often gets thrown about). And so one almost never hears of Julie Bindel, a veteran left-wing lesbian women’s rights campaigner in the UK who wrote the book Feminism for Women, or Kathleen Stock, a left-wing lesbian philosopher, pushed out of the University of Sussex for her gender-critical beliefs, who wrote the book Material Girls (both of which came out in 2021). Or, for that matter, me: another left-wing lesbian philosopher, not yet pushed out of the University of Melbourne (though hardly for lack of trying), who wrote the book Gender-Critical Feminism, which came out last year.

There’s one brief moment late in Wynn’s video where Atlantic writer Helen Lewis is clipped noting that “there are two different arguments going on. One is the traditional conservative right argument, which is anti-LGBT. The other one is a criticism from the left, in which it says, sometimes male people and female people have different interests, no matter how the male people identify.” Wynn’s response is that, “as a trans person, I don’t care whether you justify your transphobia in the name of protecting women, or protecting children … It’s the same repulsive bigotry to me.” The YouTuber has every right not to care about the difference, of course. But that doesn’t make the difference go away.

And so, to the extent Wynn’s strategy for equating gender-critical feminism with transphobia (and therefore Rowling with transphobia) depends on throwing all forms of dissent from gender-identity ideology under the evil/right-wing/Republican banner, it’s a strategy for creating propaganda, not for making an actual argument.

In purporting to paraphrase Rowling’s allegedly transphobic postures, Wynn remarks caustically, “Yeah, I don’t hate marginalized people, I just hate it when they advocate for themselves.” While the suggestion that this statement accurately captures Rowling’s view is nonsense, it’s nonsense that goes to the heart of the disagreement between trans activists and gender-critical feminists. Specifically, it reflects the premise that there is a single true and authentic set of claims endorsed by trans people, and so anyone who expresses disagreement isn’t just pushing back against that set of claims, but rather against an entire community.

This premise utterly elides the reality of political life, whereby there are fierce disagreements among not just trans people, but all marginalized groups, over their needs and interests, with competing groups and individuals emerging as self-declared advocates and spokespersons.

Consider feminism, for example: there’ve been women speaking up for women throughout history, many of them contradicting one another. American conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016) was a woman who saw herself as campaigning in women’s interests, yet opposed the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment at a time when the National Organization for Women was advocating for it. Feminists have both supported and decried sex work, abortion, surrogacy, affirmative action, and many other issues besides.

Even when one group, spokesperson, or message emerges as popular within a given community, it still must prevail in the larger marketplace of ideas. What distinguishes the trans movement from other social campaigns of its type is the curious insistence that this gradual process of evaluation and debate is morally illegitimate, and even traumatizing—and so we must skip it altogether.

You can disagree with a specific form of feminism without hating women. You can disagree with a specific form of racial-liberation ideology without hating people of colour. And you can disagree with a specific form of trans activism without hating trans people. Of course, it is useful for Wynn to cynically conflate a particular kind of gender orthodoxy with trans people as a whole—all the better to demonize opponents. But that’s a tactic we should call out, not one we should let pass.

“The question now,” Wynn says, “is whether transphobia is the sort of thing that progressives can denounce, the way we at least aspire to denounce racism, misogyny, and homophobia.” Put another way, is transphobia a “legitimate viewpoint,” or an “ugly prejudice”? If it’s the latter, it surely deserves “scorn and condemnation,” or, in other words, the kind of response that Rowling has in fact been subject to (and which Wynn apparently condones).

But needless to say, Wynn’s definition of transphobia is extremely broad, and includes saying “transwomen are men” or “transmen are women.” Wynn’s claim requires us to believe that “man” and “woman” are gender terms (not sex terms); that the right account of gender is gender identity (not gender norms); and that gender identity is settled by self-identification alone. Furthermore, it requires believing that it is not just a mistake to reject one or more of these claims, but that it is phobic.

But of course, everyone has a stake in what the words “woman” and “man” mean, and feminists in particular have a stake in what the right account of gender is—as gender was the central concept of concern to second-wave feminists. It allowed them to distinguish woman as she really is from woman as sexist societal forces have constructed her to be. Feminists have reasons relating to their own political interests to reject some or all of the claims whose rejection Wynn takes as proof of transphobia. Could there be a clearer example of the real conflict of interests between minority groups than one group (here trans activists) claiming that another group’s (here feminists’) basic politics constitute transphobia?

According to Wynn’s analysis, the idea that Rowling was victimized by any kind of “trial” is absurd, since Wynn sees the abuse the author has received as well-deserved—in much the same way as Anita Bryant deserved the literal pie to the face that she got on television (which Wynn clips multiple times). Rowling, we are told, is “truly, the Anita Bryant of transphobia.”

Gender-critical feminism is a movement that has attracted women from across the political spectrum, from leftists through centrists through (political or religious) conservatives. Some of those feminists don’t call themselves “feminists,” usually because they don’t agree with the tenets of mainstream feminism. There are also gender-critical people who well and truly are not feminists, either because they are men who instead consider themselves “allies,” or because they’re people who are neither feminists nor feminist allies but who simply agree with some of the issues that gender-critical feminists are speaking out about. Some Republicans in the United States agree with some of the law and policy matters that gender-critical feminists have been advocating on. That does not make Republicans gender-critical feminists; it does not make gender-critical feminists Republicans. Neither J.K. Rowling nor Kellie-Jay Keen are “the Anita Bryant of transphobia.”

Wynn says of gender-critical feminism, “It’s a movement that has no beliefs apart from a shared determination to reduce the number of trans people.” Did she get to this conclusion by steelmanning, presenting the arguments of those gender-critical women who have thought most carefully about the movement and its disagreements with trans activism (and mainstream feminist activism besides)? Or did she get there by strawmanning, ignoring all of that work and instead clipping tiny segments of YouTube videos or screenshotting out-of-context replies to social-media threads, all carefully curated to paint particular gender-critical women in the worst possible light?

There’s something ironic about the fact that Wynn says, of the Witch Trials, that its narrative represented a “slippery and dishonest way to argue.” Wynn’s entire video response is a slippery and dishonest strawman of the gender-critical feminist position that J.K. Rowling has been persecuted for defending. Wynn has failed to demonstrate any ability to articulate opponents’ perspectives in a way that they would recognize. And for that reason, Wynn’s video is not a rejoinder to gender-critical arguments; it’s a clever piece of political propaganda designed to prop up the ideology behind trans activism by characterizing anyone who disagrees with it as a Bryant-esque bigot. In short, Wynn fails the Phelps-Roper test.