Another contradictory expectation you're placing on me:
Because I considered O’Neill’s views (with which I disagree) and wrote about 15,000 words (across two articles) analyzing those views, I was (in your estimation) “letting people who disagree with who you are control you.” Simultaneously—contradicting yourself!—you’re asking me to go through the exercise of analyzing Rowling’s views (with which I also disagree), simply because you (with whom I also disagree) have asked me to. Why would writing extensively about Rowling not also amount to letting people who disagree with my identity (that is, she and/or you) “control” me?
As it happens, I have already written extensively about JK Rowling. Yes, I listened to her “Witch Trials” podcast in detail, and I wrote a long article with my thoughts about it (16-min read). Again, the unpaywalled links are on my website:
https://tuckerlieberman.wordpress.com/democracy/anti-lgbt/professional-transphobes/
So, yes, I’ve already done the thing you’ve asked me to do: I've analyzed what Rowling has actually said.
To answer the rest of your question, What should Rowling do? ("What would make you believe that JK Rowling supports you?"). I believe it's implied: She might at least please stop saying and doing the specific things I and many, many other trans people have repeatedly identified as transphobic. That wouldn't count as active support, but it would be a giant step in that direction. Realistically, JK Rowling is not going to support trans people. If you're asking what can any person do to support trans people and communicate their sincerity to trans people, that's a different version of the question.
To recap, not being transphobic is one step toward supporting trans people. What’s transphobia? If that is the question—if you do not believe that any behavior can be transphobic, because, perhaps, as you also said, it’s trans people’s responsibility to slink off to another neighborhood if they don't like someone's beliefs about them—you are not in a position to ask trans people for yet another list of ways to be less transphobic. Hundreds of articles I’ve written are already on my website. I don’t have the time to rewrite them for you today. Trans advocacy organizations exist and can explain things better than I can because they do this professionally.
I think you know all this, but in case you do not:
Telling gay people to move to a gayborhood assumes a lot of things. First of all, it places the burden on the gay person to reorganize their life so they exist primarily in places that are explicitly gay-inclusive. A gay person might not be able to reorganize their life this way, for various reasons. They might be a single parent who needs to live near their child’s school or near their child’s other parent. They might have a medical condition and need to stay where their healthcare is set up. They might be in the US on a high-skilled visa which means they're tied to the employer who is sponsoring them in the US. They might have gotten in trouble with the law and be on probation which usually limits where they can move. They might not be able to afford the gayborhood. They might not even like the gayborhood (because it’s too urban and they’re a farmer, for example, or because the population is much older or speaks a different language). Also, “community” is not just where someone sleeps at night; as you well know, as a business owner, people go to work, so the possibility of them spending most of their time in gay community is premised on them being hired by an explicitly gay-friendly employer with a significantly LGBTQ workforce (like you) or else being self-employed (with gay clients or gay subject matter) or retired so they don't have to worry about this. Also, people sometimes go elsewhere in their free time. Sometimes they take a little trip down the street, and they are not suddenly less gay, and shouldn’t have to be; they and their partner want to go into a random bar, enjoy a beer, use the bathroom, feel they are every bit as human as everyone else at that bar, and not be harassed. Being obliged to remain in the gayborhood just to have basic rights is a gay-lite version of being stuck in a Ghetto in the 16th-century Venetian sense of that word. There is no reason to want segregation on any level of severity or intensity.
As another specific example: My city has a gayborhood. Several years ago, my fiancé assumed that he and I could get legally married at a public notary in that neighborhood. The public notary in the gay neighborhood said they would not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples as a matter of personal principle. They just didn't feel like it. Thus, we had to find another notary—because the one in the gayborhood was anti-gay. So, yes, you can put all your effort into making a gayborhood, and still your city hall might hire a person like Kim Davis who will refuse to hand out gay marriage licenses in the gayborhood. What then? Maybe you want Kim Davis to leave the gayborhood and work for a city hall anywhere else? But on what legal principle can you tell her to go somewhere else? You don’t want her in your neighborhood? That’s not a legally valid argument. Her anti-gay “religious conscience” travels with her; if it’s valid for her to exercise it anywhere, it’s valid everywhere. You might have your own conscience that she shouldn’t be hired, but you’re not the hiring manager at city hall. Once there’s a hiring manager who’s apathetic about gay inclusion, anti-gay people will be hired. If it's legal for anti-gay Christians (wherever they choose to go) to discriminate against gay people, they absolutely will flock to the gayborhood to buy out all the gay businesses and turn them anti-gay. They have the cash to do this. They will wreck your gayborhood with glee if they have a mind to do it. Part of what keeps them from doing this are antidiscrimination laws that prevent them from discriminating anywhere. It's a waste of their time to infiltrate the gayborhood until it's legal for them to discriminate. So they pick battles about antidiscrimination laws more broadly, not just on Gay Street. Pro-gay activism to end discrimination is indeed useful activism, and I’m grateful that some people do it.
You are making a pro-segregation argument, saying that segregation really isn’t all that bad because segregated minorities can magically auto-grant rights and dignity, create a self-sustaining economy, and put up a “Haters, keep out!” sign in the driveway with full confidence that the haters will respect this request and turn tail and walk away. I’m not here for that argument. Segregation is harmful, and it isn't my responsibility to segregate myself.
It is untrue that trans people need only focus on two things: “creating community where they are safe and can be themselves” and “making sure they have legal protections in those communities.” The first of those is an obligation and a burden; you’re telling trans people to leave wherever we are, go somewhere else, and spend all our time creating community (a job for which few of us are ever paid) and staying safe (i.e., not get killed in the process). The second item doesn’t really make sense. Main Street doesn’t have different laws from Elm Street. Even if all the trans people from all over the jurisdiction congregate in a series of cabins on the side of the lake, there is no way for them to get “legal protections” that apply to them as long as they stay in their cabins on the lakeside. Nondiscrimination law, the right to healthcare, etc. is valid throughout a jurisdiction. Transgender Lakeside Retreat is not a legal jurisdiction. And as an aside, even if there were legally recognized transgender communities, it’s odd that you put the burden on trans people ourselves to “mak[e] sure they have legal protections.” I mean, if trans people are only about 1% of the population and are disqualified when we try to run for political office (see: Ohio), how do you believe trans people can possibly make the political system give us legal protections? We can't do it by waving our magic wand, nor by asking nicely, so what is the effort you belief is involved here?
