Maybe an equally a good day to read what Rowling has actually said as well, instead of relying on what activists have caricatured her as having said.

I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men... So I want trans women to be safe.

I'm an American who's been living in Sweden for some years now, and it has been eye-opening in many ways. Swedes have led the way on gender issues in basically every way, from making up a new gender-neutral pronoun to use for children in pre-schools so as to avoid gendering children too soon to creating a pioneering gender clinic for youths at the Karolinska Institute (one of the world's top 10 research hospitals based in Stockholm) allowing them to get help before the US even let gay people have civil unions.

But what's been interesting is that after an SVT investigative documentary (like Sweden's PBS Frontline) a few years ago into the practices at said clinic, the country realized that all was not right with the course they'd been on since the 90s. It's hard for Americans to grasp because we're used to everything being so polarized, but in Sweden, the issue isn't right/left red/blue coded. Only one of the parties (a minor one) has any issue with trans stuff at all (though the horrible Nationalist party has recently started to take up the topic as well, thinking maybe they can make it an issue). But historically, here, gender stuff is not a contentious issue, and trans people have pretty uniform support across all segments of society. So optimizing treatment for trans youth is just a straight-up scientific/medical issue. That's why once a hard look was given to the data, and it turned out that the harmless interventions being provided to minors were, in fact, not harmless, it stirred such a big uproar.

After the documentary aired, the healthcare system spent a year investigating itself, and ultimately officially changed its recommendations around how care is provided to minors. I think this led Swedes to take a more critical look into matters around trans issues than they had previously. For decades activists had kind of taken the lead in the discussions, even within esteemed hospitals, but once it was revealed that there had been cases of care providers letting their emotional attachment to desired outcomes trump scientific rigor for patients, they were shown the door. From what I gather, similar things happened in other countries with progressive healthcare policies where the trans issue isn't a partisan issue for people to "take a side" on, but rather just a part of everyday healthcare where the goal is to have the best outcomes, like Finland, the Netherlands, the UK, etc.

As far as I can tell, JK Rowling, for her part, is just an old-school feminist and abuse survivor who is and always has been chiefly motivated by what's best to protect women and girls from male violence. In her oft-cited and more incendiary Tweets, she's typically been reacting to legal changes in her country, where there have been examples of male sex offenders, for example, simply mailing in a form to have their legal gender changed, then once being found guilty, being sent to female prisons, where they have raped women. This is more the sort of thing that is motivating her than hatred for people coping with gender dysphoria. Following these sorts of cases, there have been policy changes made to ensure biologically male sex offenders without physical gender reassignment don't end up in women's prisons, but only more recently.

Kudos to Daniel Dunham for putting into words what I feel this is all about and clarifying the issue. IMO people are way too forward in expressing opinions about things they do not fully understand or comprehend.
OTOH being famous will put you under a smudgy microscope when you are vocal about something… More stuff to think about, I guess.

Personally, I think all of the trans people & organizations I've listened to over the years who feel that Rowling holds broad and harmful anti-trans views based on what she has said in public in the past decade are fully qualified in understanding and comprehending the situation enough to express opinions about it, certainly more than us old white cis guys.

As for Radcliffe's letter, he takes great care not to overreach, defers to the experts, and speaks directly to the people who are Potter fans about the meaning of material he is intimately familiar with.

I dunno, Rowling is a writer. You'd think she'd be able to articulate what it is she actually believes without confusion. Or maybe she already has.

" ... Rowling holds broad and harmful anti-trans views based on what she has said in public in the past decade ..."

Decade? Did she make any public comments on this before 2020? This issue was just barely crossing over from Tumblr into real life a decade ago.

I've closed this thread because I don't think kottke.org is a good place for discussions like these. Per the comment guidelines:

The internet is full of places for people to go to express their opinions or argue about others' opinions, so I'd like to steer away from that here. If we can prioritize talking about facts, sharing stories, experiences, and expertise over opinions, it'll make for better, more informative threads.