Tucker Lieberman
3 min readJan 26, 2024

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This does not jibe with my perceptions or understandings.

If Rowling “support[s]” all trans people (as you say she does), why do you also say there’s a “backlash” such that trans people need to “make peace with Rowling”? How can trans people be receiving support and backlash from the same person?

The millions of trans people on the planet do not all have to be supplicants to a billionaire on your premise that she’ll continue to “war” with us (your word) until every last one of us kneels to her and gives her whatever it is she's asking for, while simultaneously you ask us to acknowledge that she has always “support[ed]” us. This is contradictory.

It's also impossible to achieve such a "peace" (consensus, silence, acquiescence, etc.) on a practical level, given that there might be roughly 50 million trans people on this planet, and I suspect, on your view, if even one trans person remains "vocal" about disagreement with Rowling, the rest of us will be seen as part of a "community" that deserves "backlash" by association.

Also, since you aren't Rowling (right?), you aren't in a position to promise anything that she will or won't do in response to whatever 50 million trans people go on to do or not do. You can't negotiate on her behalf. (Or are you her lawyer?)

If you did "support" trans people, you wouldn't imagine yourself as siding with (or representing) Rowling in a "war" against trans people.

Since your "support" comes with a full dose of "backlash," it's unappealing, and because your self-assessment is incomprehensible, I don't know what on earth I'd be negotiating for with you/her.

Similarly, you’ve contradicted yourself by saying you’re “not on board with the demand that…a gay marriage is a marriage” even as you describe yourself as having been “married” to a woman and then to a man. If you believe your gay marriage isn’t a marriage, it doesn’t make sense that you refer to it as one. Of course every marriage is unique, therefore “different” from every other, but if we call a partnership a "marriage" it's because we believe it is one. You might not believe your current partnership can ever be a marriage; happily, you’re free not to marry (legally or religiously) and to refer to your lover as a “roommate” or “partner” or whatever. Up to you. But I don’t know why you call yourself "married" if you also say gay marriage, well, isn't.

For my part, my gender is neither a “demand” nor a “let’s discuss”; it’s not primarily any kind of invitation to anyone who isn’t me; least of all is it an overture to some billionaire making noise on a social media platform I don’t use. My gender is a description of my body, life, feelings, identity, relationships, history. I’ve lived in this gender for decades. It's a fact about myself and how others relate to me. My transition was underway before the first Harry Potter book was released in 1997. My gender is not a reaction to Rowling’s existence, and I did not wage war on anyone.

I've written several hundred articles on related topics, all of which are available from my personal website, should you be interested in reading my analyses in more detail. But I doubt you are interested, as your comment here regrettably has nothing to do with my article to which you used the reply box. This article, with which you aren't interacting, is about a fellow named O'Neill, not Rowling. If you haven’t read this article, I doubt you’ll read others by me.

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Tucker Lieberman
Tucker Lieberman

Written by Tucker Lieberman

Cult classic. Author of the novel "Most Famous Short Film of All Time." Editor for Prism & Pen and Identity Current. tuckerlieberman.com

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