Feminist icon Alice Walker has been blasted on social media for defending J.K. Rowling’s rejection of men posing as women.
Alice Walker, the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Color Purple, has been dubbed a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” (TERF) for siding with J.K. Rowling’s “trans exclusionary views,” online magazine MadameNoire asserted Tuesday.
Walker, whose feminist creds include a stint as editor of Ms. Magazine, recently declared that J.K. Rowling’s critics are “trying to burn the wrong witch.”
“I consider J.K. Rowling perfectly within her rights as a human being of obvious caring for humanity to express her views about whatever is of concern to her. As she has done,” Walker wrote.
The ability of children to easily feel confident in which gender they are has been “eroded,” Walker declared, and from that confusion “has come much cutting off of parts and restructuring of essential physical equipment.”
“If such restructuring is freely chosen at eighteen or twenty, at least there is a sense the person involved may have lived long enough to know, definitely, what is desired,” she continued. “Younger than that, I feel there may in fact be reason, later on, to mourn and weep.”
“After all, the human body is a miracle, of whatever sex, tampering with a miracle is unlikely to serve us,” she added.
Rowling was famously pilloried by the LGBT lobby in 2020, after she made fun of an op-ed piece calling women “people who menstruate.”
“‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” Rowling tweeted at the time. “Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
Like many feminists, Rowling found the notion that a biological male could become a woman just by identifying as one both demeaning and offensive to women.
Similar feminist backlash followed Glamour magazine’s naming of Bruce Jenner as “Woman of the Year” in 2015, with most criticisms sounding like: “So, you looked around the globe and the best woman you could find was a man?”
In one such commentary, Nicole Russell wrote that by choosing Jenner as woman of the year, “Glamour endorses the idea that men are better at being women than we are.”
Australian-born feminist Germaine Greer accused Glamour of “misogyny” in its decision to award Jenner its woman of the year award, noting that transgender women are “not women” and do not “look like, sound like or behave like women.”
“I think misogyny plays a really big part in all of this,” Greer said, “that a man who goes to these lengths to become a woman will be a better woman than someone who is just born a woman.”
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