Dear Cisters: I’ve never seen JK Rowling hurt anyone, so why won’t you shut up about it?
Professor Facts doesn’t care about your feelings
Welcome to Dear Cisters, the column that’s more like Dear Abby than the Savage Lovecast. I’m your host Stephenie Magister, transgender writer/nerd/editor for award-winning and best-selling books.
HELLO READERS AND LISTENERS!!
Are you ready for some fan mail??? I get letters from people who seem to think that winning an argument with me would somehow erase the harmful, abusive impact of JK Rowling’s actions.
(or their own)
Names, dates, and other random stuff has been changed to provide some degree of anonymity for the person writing to us. They shouldn’t be hounded and harassed just because they publicly shared their bigoted positions with millions (billions?!) of people.
NOTE: JK Rowling fan mail is primarily written in response to Why People Are Losing Their Minds About JK Rowling AGAIN
LETTER
Dear Cisters,
Transgender experiences should not disqualify a woman from deserving safety, security, and equality. Please stop using them as a justification to deprive us of those things.
Neither should not being trans. I’ve never read or seen Rowling attack or abuse anyone. I see people write that they wish she was dead and they want to rape her everyday though, and they have the audacity to claim the moral high ground.
Sincerely, Disciple of Divine Destruction
ANSWER
Dear God’s Double D,
Honestly, how dare you?
The world is not an extension of you. I am my own person with my own thoughts and feelings. Do not tell me that my experience of abuse is not real just because you have no empathy for it.
Please do not tell any other woman that their experience of harm didn’t happen just because you didn’t see it or experience it yourself.
Please do not come to a space where a woman (me) tells you she is experiencing a harmful and/or abusive impact from someone’s actions and then tell her/me that just because you’ve never personally witnessed or experienced what you consider to be abuse, what I and countless other women have experienced as abuse didn’t happen.
If you have come here merely to contribute to the experience of me and any other woman who has had what might be considered transgender experiences, I need for you to leave this conversation.
None of us deserve to be harmed and abused in the name of whatever you’re trying to achieve by doing so.
Sincerely, Stephenie
COMMENTARY
I’m very, very, very happy to report that for the most part, the people I encounter don’t have any trouble with this sort of thing. As for the person who wrote to us…
I’ve never read or seen Rowling attack or abuse anyone
As though those two have anything to do with each other lol. Even if I was stupid (foolish? naive?) enough to engage in that kind of argument with them, me winning or losing it would say NOTHING about whether a person’s actions hurt someone else.
Not JK Rowling’s.
Not yours.
Not even mine.
I don’t get to determine for anyone — even myself — what impact my actions have. I just do the best I can and show up for what’s outside of my control. In science, we tend to push for objectivity IN PRINCIPLE, despite knowing we’ll never get there.
When it comes to the human experience, though? Come on. I don’t even pursue perfection in principle.
The philosophy that you can override and control your thoughts, emotions, and experiences (and that of other people wtf?!) requires a degree of outright narcissism that scares me.
The claim that you can override and control your thoughts, feelings, and experiences is the kind of neurolinguistic programming stuff that got Keith Raniere sent to prison for running the sex cult NXIVM.
Believing you have that degree of control over yourself and others, however, might qualify you for the Jordan Peterson succession plan. He will one day require someone to carry the torch of toxic masculinity. Until then, you can just kinda hold it for him. He needs light while bathing his word salad in abusive ranch dressing.
And if you find yourself rejected because you are AMAZING at bad faith arguments but just aren’t quite rough enough around the edges (yet), the eternally youthful Ben Shapiro will eventually need a successor, too.
THIS IS JUST LIKE MY OPINION AND STUFF…
I’m not the kind of person who’s going to tell you my education means I know everything about everything.
But I do have a formal education! Like, as much as you can learn from YouTube and mastering Google (I’m serious!), I also have actual degrees in this stuff. I have a bachelor’s in Communications, a Master’s in Journalism and Mass Communication, and one year in the PhD program before I got offered enough money for me to just go full-time in publishing.
I don’t KNOW much of anything. I don’t think like that.
I just have the conclusions I’ve reached up to this point as I continue to learn and reflect. The most my education affords me is being able to humbly shrug my shoulders and say I on occasion know enough to have an opinion about something.
So when it comes to the human experience?
OUR EXPERIENCES ARE LESS LIKE A REMOTE CONTROL AND MORE LIKE A THERMOSTAT
Our feelings don’t turn on and off like a switch based on whether we can explain or justify them.
Our experiences aren’t malleable like a digital photo that just needs to be manipulated until we like them.
We can’t experience abuse and then convince ourselves it was actually healthy. Regardless of how our understanding of what happened evolves, we can’t escape that in that moment, we experienced harm.
For the most part, we feel and experience things first. Only then do we — only then can we — try to make sense of our experiences. Only then can we find a way to describe and share those experiences with others, and then make a decision for how to move forward on the terms available to us.
That’s the influence we can have. We assess the terms available to us and move forward as best we can. Most of what we assess won’t be within our control. Even some of the stuff that IS within our control wouldn’t be healthy for us to wrestle to the ground. Well, in my opinion anyway.
To me, serenity and surrender are a vital part of healthy living.
THE VALUE OF HEALTHY DEBATE
So what does that mean for anyone who wants to debate my experiences, emotions, and limits? What does that mean if you say rude stuff to provoke me into debating the rights, safety, and limits of anyone else?
Just refer to these articles first. The people who talk to me like I described above are going to encounter these boundaries.
Winning an argument against a trans person will never invalidate, silence, or erase the harmful impact trans people experience across the world. Please listen to them. The time you waste arguing over the safety of trans people is literally killing them.
Whatever argument you have for why trans people or anyone else shouldn’t have felt hurt by something you did or said — why you did everything you could, in fact, to PREVENT that harm — guess what? It still happened. Your actions still had a harmful impact.
There would be more dignity in you being honest about the impact of your actions beyond your intentions. I promise you’re still a good person! We all make mistakes. We all hurt people when we didn’t mean to do so. We’re all just humans doing our best.
So if you, like this listener, want to write to us with the phrases that you use to provoke trans people into talking to you like this listener did, please stop. Please go somewhere else. That’s not going to work with me.
There are lots of people who are ready to fight you. I’m not one of them.
It’s not that I can’t defend myself.
I just don’t engage in that lifestyle.
THE END (DAMN GIRL, THAT’S DARK)
Hi, it’s Stephenie!
Believe it or not, I do this for a living.
If any of my content brings you a moment of comfort, hope, and confidence, consider all these different ways to practice Good Patronage.
FREE PATRONAGE: Hold that CLAP button until you’ve given as many claps as you can (the max is 50 per person). Subscribe to me and your other favorite authors. Click that Newsletter icon so you get notified every time I publish something new (I hope you like a lot of content muahahahahahahahaha).
PAID PATRONAGE: If you sign up for a subscription at Medium and/or Audible, you help support me providing more content like this.
