The tweet was critical, not supportive. It was a back handed compliment.
People can find a way to 'problematise' just about anything, so it's basically saying public people cannot have opinion on political issues or they will be misrepresented, most often by bad-faith actors doing so for their own personal benefit.
That's the nature of social media, so I suppose you lie in the bed you make, but I'd put far more blame on those milking the situation to enhance their status.
She was critical of the way he talked about other women, but she still supported his portrayal of "gender identity theory." I don't think she was misrepresented much when it comes to this particular tweet, because it was pretty clear compared to some of her other opinions that leave more room for reasonable discussion.
Public figures can have all of the opinions they want; I'm just saying that they have more responsibility when expressing themselves by sheer virtue of their relatively strong influence and reach. This goes for popular critics of Rowling too, partially because many celebrities and YouTubers have avid fans who could threaten and harass someone else just because their idol criticized them harshly. There have been numerous examples of such incidents over the years (whether targeting trans people or J. K. Rowling herself).
What degree of support did she offer?
All I've seen is she said people shouldn't be fired for saying sex is real, although she may have done more that I'm not aware of.
Do you think people should be able to hold the position sex is real without social sanction?
(Note: MF won her employment tribunal, so JKR was supporting someone who was legally judged to have been the victim of discrimination)
From what I've read, Rowling's support for Maya Forstater wasn't merely in terms of her employment but also in terms of ideology. Bear in mind that I intentionally avoid following J. K. Rowling to any considerable extent, so I don't know how her position on the whole case has developed since, if at all.
I'm not sure what you're specifically referring to by "social sanction," but in general, it seems to me that this varies on a case-by-case basis so much so that no general rule can apply to everyone who holds socially unacceptable views. White supremacism is socially unacceptable, and publicly supporting it is illegal in some countries (and rightfully so, in my opinion, because it's inherently inciting). On the other hand, atheism or, say, Hinduism is socially unacceptable in a lot of countries too, but of course I don't believe it should be illegal. Context matters.
But obviously, sex is real, and most trans people know this. Many of them wouldn't go to great pains in order to have hormone therapy and surgery otherwise; they don't need to be told that "sex is real" when they have gender dysphoria, for example. It's just that when some of the anti-trans ideologues say "sex is real," it's meant as a dismissal of the medical consensus that gender and sex are not synonymous and that gender isn't just a binary category, which is the position I gathered from Rowling's continual criticism of "gender identity theory."
What would you expect a disproportionate number of rapists to 'transition' rather than spend time in a men's prison where bored psychopaths spend their hours thinking of ingenious ways to maim sex offenders?
Scottish ministers say they did not know trans rapist was put in women’s jail
I wouldn't know what a disproportionate number would be without knowing the overall numbers of prisoners in general and trans prisoners in particular. This isn't something that intuition can answer.
Either way, though, I see this as a much more complex issue than a blanket allowance or blanket ban would imply. The position that
all trans women who haven't medically transitioned should be banned from women's prisons is unnuanced and fails to take into account the vast majority who don't transition specifically to exploit the system. Similarly, I don't believe the law should allow for a rapist to just "identify" as a woman in order to avoid going to a men's prison either.
In order to prevent such ad hoc "transitions," perhaps the law could require a minimum amount of time of legally identifying as a specific gender before a person could be sent to the corresponding prison, which would render on-the-spot "transitions" useless as a means of avoiding men's prisons. I haven't thought long enough about this to know whether it could also have loopholes or other issues of its own, though.
Do you think that there are differences between ciswomen and transwomen that, in some cases, may justify different treatment?
Yes. Sports are a prime example. However, most of the examples I have seen are far blurrier than that of sports, and even different treatment in sports varies based on the nature of the sport itself (e.g., contact sports versus, say, swimming or running). Some people also present specific situations as warranting different treatment when they don't, such as those who argue that trans people should be identified by pronouns matching their sex rather than their gender.
If so, where would you draw the line, and what is an acceptable range of latitude around this 'line' that people may disagree on without being "transphobes" or bigots?
That almost entirely depends on context and on the specific situation in question. I also realize that some people may cross a line typically crossed by bigots without necessarily being bigots themselves. Many people are genuinely uninformed but not prejudiced—or at least not consciously and intentionally prejudiced—and this applies to all sorts of issues, not just trans-related ones.
Treating transwomen pre-op or post-op as secret sexual predators when there's no evidence they're more likely to be assaulted by transwomen over other ciswomen (neverminding the breakdown of crime by other demographics commonly used to discriminate such as race and poverty)
