It was no April Fool’s joke.
Harry Potter author-turned culture warrior J.K. Rowling kicked off the month with an 11-tweet social media thread in which she argued 10 transgender women were men — and dared Scottish police to arrest her.
Rowling’s intervention came as a controversial new Scottish government law, aimed at protecting minority groups from hate crimes, took effect. And it landed amid a fierce debate over both the legal status of transgender people in Scotland and over what actually constitutes a hate crime.
Already the law has generated far more international buzz than is normal for legislation passed by a small nation’s devolved parliament.
TERFs generally in fact do hate both, just in different ways. While I haven’t heard Rowling’s take, I’d be somewhat surprised if it wasn’t some version of the usual patriarchal agency denying thing where trans men are just confused by society telling them lies about escaping repression as women and how horrible it was that these poor girls were going to damage their bodies because they were just too dumb and weak-willed to know what they really wanted, which is a marriage to a good man and pumping out eight or nine kids. They want to take choice and self determination from all trans people, that version just plays better currently.
Incidentally, FtM and MtF are generally deprecated terms. Usually these days the terms, relative to my ordering in the prior sentence, are trans men and trans women, it’s less alienating than the older terms that tend to describe people as a segment of their life that isn’t them.