In response to JK Rowling’s recent bout of transmisogyny some are saying that she should have “read the room” and realized that this moment of global uprising against anti-Black racism is not the time. Actually — she did. This is her response: white backlash. Policing and fortifying gender/sex boundaries has always been a tactic of white supremacy.
Racist eugenicists in the West long believed that Black people, Indigenous people and people of color were “less developed” than white people. They used evidence of queer and gender non-conforming expression to characterize racialized people as “backwards,” and needing “uplift.”
To differentiate themselves from BIPOC, they argued that only white people could achieve a binary distinction of sexes. Racialized people — especially Black people — were seen as inherently “hermaphroditic” and gender nonconforming, stuck in a primitive past.
The sex binary was seen as a civilizational achievement of white people, one that no other race could reach. This is why when BIPOC trans people sought support in early medical clinics for gender transition they were turned away. Their gender dysphoria was seen as a marker of their “degeneracy” that couldn’t be “fixed.”
In this way, the category of woman has always been racialized. In order to maintain the guise that white people were more human than BIPOC, white men tasked white women with maintaining the boundaries of sex difference (having to look as different from them as possible to create the illusion of the binary). Genitals became conflated with sexed identity. The vagina was politicized as a link between the individual body and the white race. The purpose of sexuality became less about pleasure and more about population. Womanhood became defined by the vagina because it was white women’s job to reproduce the race.
With her remarks, Rowling is continuing a centuries long project of white supremacy. Her notions of sex/gender descend from patriarchal, racist eugenics. Ironically, she accuses us of masquerading as something we are not, but what she and so many like her, are actually doing is masquerading racism as feminism.
For further reading to learn more about these histories read:
White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States by Dr. Louise Michele Newman (Oxford University Press 1998)
The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century by Dr. Kyla Schuller (Duke University Press, 2018)
Histories of the Transgender Child by Dr. Julian Gill-Peterson (University of Minnesota Press, 2018)
art by @liberaljane