To Wade in or Not To Wade in on Rowling, That Is the Question.

Long and Short: I disagree with Rowling on Dumbledore being gay; I agree with her on menstruation being constitutive of female gender.

I disagreed with Rowling on "Dumbledore" being gay. I put him in quotes because the question is what constitutes him. I say it is only what is on the page and how demonstrably it can tie out with real things. Taking a look at a clearer example for comparison: She put names of members of the the real-world Fabian Society into the Order of the Phoenix; that society is known (see their table at the fair at the opening of the college year at the beginning of Chariots of Fire) and its members on record; that society was about gradual change on social justice and politics; the Order is headed by DD, and while he fights the Death Eaters and Voldy immediately, as far as changing the behavior of Ministry rule, he believes in gradual advancement (he will give Dobby a job and pay but realizes other elves aren't anymore ready than are a lot of wizards, but they can get there eventually); all of that tracks strongly enough that you can say the theme of the real-world Fabian Society plays as an ingredient in the recipe of the fictional Order of the Phoenix.

But when it comes to DD being homosexual, I argue his orientation is never really on the page, homo or hetero. And there is even a gay-rights activist who agreed in an op-ed piece in Time the week after she came out with the statement at Radio City Music Hall in 2007: John Cloud wrote that, while he thanks her because they can use all the help they can get, it would have been better if she had actually written the character gay on the page ... which means he thinks she didn't. If anybody would be looking to say a character is actually gay on the page, it would be a gay-rights activist, but Cloud closes by saying, "one wonders whether she might not as well have left the old girl in the closet" (paraphrase). Further, I think reading a clear attraction to Grindlewald as the source of blindness robs force from other themes that she does have in there more clearly (and I think Cloud's own further reading shows an example of this: he asks, would it have been so bad to have some openly gay characters, like say to have the obviously gay-styled Blaze Zabini ask the aptly named Justin Finch-fletchley to the Yule Ball; but this misses a characterization JKR sets in the first book that, while Slytherins hate Gryffindors as an enemy, they are at least more of an equal enemy, whereas Hufflepuff are despicable as underachievers with no ambition. as witnessed in Draco's comment in Madam Malkam's in book 1 before they know who each other are, when he says, "can you imagine being put in Hufflepuff? I think I would leave"; the gay reading robs the bigotry reading when it disregards those tensions by suggesting that it might fit in the WW for a Slytherin Blaze to ask a Hufflepuff Justin on a date).

Now, on to the current controversy (one that might make it impossible for them to complete the Fantastic Beasts franchise, but the third film was having troubles even before this and covid19 ... and then covid19 hit): I agree with her on menstruation in relation to female gender. I am sure that there are a lot of plain vanilla, "cisgender" women out there who support the transgender univocal equation of their own gender identification as female with the gender identification of transgender persons, but then Ben Carson and Herman Cain like Trump and that doesn't make Trump right on race or not a bigot, and the say so of a number of traditionally cisgender women who may have been predisposed to agree with anything coming from one side is not definitive on the matter (even less does the opinion of the actors in the Yates films matter for anything: I hear Dan Radcliff declaim and I want to tell him to go wipe after he finally got to take a dump after five films of obviously needing to take one in every scene). [Note: I don't mean to liken LGBTQ interpretations to Donald Trump's racism, but simply to say that the reaction of some in an impacted group is not necessarily decisive  on an issue].

While I think that gender dysphoria must me taken seriously (and not met with the "tough love" bullshit that drives conversion-therapy damage for people with a physiologically verifiable psychologically objective condition of homosexual orientation), I do not think that this changes that "gender" identity (1) is constructed (this does not cut gender off from correlation to a larger normative realm) and (2) is built out of psychological experience, or else (3) has no stable meaning. I think the conservative side shot itself in the foot with all the talk of gender being ontological rather than constructed, because here we have people saying that, yes, there is core ontological identity that goes beyond experience-construction, BECAUSE it goes beyond the  physiological formation of the body in which those experiences are encountered and used for constrtuction, and (as I have read in pieces) that a person has "known" accurately their whole life that they are the other gender, basically in terms very much like saying that gender ontologically transcends physical accidents. I think that such persons may very well interpret the dysphoria they experience as identifying them with the gender pole opposite that associated with their birth sex in a gender-binary understanding they have received of the world, that they may find an affinity with their opposite-sex parent, and that they might understand that affinity as one of gender identity, but I don't think that that conception on their part makes it necessarily so.

I simply don't think that dysphoria from one gender is enough to identify one solidly with the other in a binary system, as if to say that dysphoria from one creates euphoria with the other, because that requires that there be stable gender concepts. If one is to say that one has really been a woman all of one's life, one has to be able to say what one means by being a "woman" beyond simply that it is dysphoric from male gender identity, because "male" gender identity will simply then be that which is dysphoric from female (euphoric at interacting with the female if heterosexual, but dysphoric as being female, whether one is born with male sex or female sex). I think there are core experiences that are the building blocks of "male" and "female" in the construction of stable gender identity: a woman will never know what it is like to worry about getting kicked in the balls the way a man does (a woman worries about other pains from violence, but not that particular pain in the family jewels that are exterior to the rest of the body), and I as a man will never know what it was like to have my body change in the core way a female body changes in the development of breasts or know what it is like for blood to be something that regularly flows from my body rather than only as the result of injury, or the knowledge of the possibility of having another human beings whole body grow inside me, or post-partum depression ... I will never really be able to understand the way she does when one guy's wife joked that she had looked forward to getting her body back, but then, nope, there's the demand for the boobs (her words, not mine, and as I say, she was joking around about it, not grousing about her child's needs). I think that, without those psychological, experiential factors defining gender, it winds up being amorphous and not a thing that can be spoken of constructively. All that is needed to say that one is definitely a woman is to say that one feels like a "woman," and that begs the question, with such a highly subjective criterion and no stable common ground to unite one person's conception of "woman" with another person's, of whether we can solidly call anybody a woman or man.

There are people whose physio-psychic development has come to a place of dysphoria from the gender identified with their birth sex, and as as a result of no personal failing on their part or their parents (hell, look at the story of increases in cancer from Dupont selling teflon and birth defects in the areas where they were dumping chemicals from its production [see the film Dark Waters with Mark Ruffalo] and tell me it's not possible for serious problems to occur in prenatal male/female brain development because of what some capitalist asshole dumped in the water). And my heart breaks for them because I don't know what the answer is (and I try to avoid using pronouns with family of those people to avoid using the birth-sex gender pronoun, as I know some whose kids have suffered from the dysphoria to the point of hospitalization and medication for suicidal thoughts). But I don't think that simply assigning them to being "actually" the other pole is a solution.

In a lot of ways, the transgender question in relation to feminism is like the gay question in relation to the other themes more demonstrable in Harry Potter. The two things wind up in competition, just as there was a debate on the Democratic side in 2008 as to whether it was more important to have an African American (a win on the race front) or a woman (a win on the sexism front). On the objective side of the questions going on with Rowling presently, I find the concerns of the feminist question to have more of a stable basis in its assessment of a core material world and a prejudice and injustice within it (these gender differences exist on a biological level and one set of people at one clear end of a spectrum, one ole of a binary, have used them to oppress those at the other end ... at least as far back as the Babylonian Enuma Elish telling a story of the gods to justify the idea of using the procreation role of mothering to subjugate women in a patriarchal society), whereas I think that the transgender univocal flattening of euphoric female-sexed and dysphoric male-sexed into one "gender" called "woman"  does not have a solid base in the material reality of what we know of psychology as it works with physical experience, even though the dysphoria to which that move tries to respond is real and quite possibly physiologically based in developmental years. A transgender "woman" who does not menstruate is not a woman who needs to worry about pregnancy from rape (many other things from the violence of rape, but not pregnancy), and therefore not about having the role of mothering forced on her under those circumstances. A woman may say that this can't be used as evidence because she can love her child and being a mother, and therefore love what was forced on her, in spite of that origin, but that acceptance and love of the child in spite of how she got pregnant is still something unique to women that men can't do because they can't undergo that violence in order to be accepting of it. And if the concern of pregnancy by rape is not particularly a woman's issue ... but the only people for whom it is an existential reality are women ... where does that leave it? It doesn't seem like it can be part of the issue of justice between the sexes.

And this isn't the only place you will find this tension particularly between LGBTQ and feminist concerns and thinking. Somewhere along the way, The Babadook got categorized as LGBTQ and activists pushed that identification from there, but that identification seriously cuts against the woman-film reading stated by the film-maker (tension between being a lover and being a mother). The woman-movie reading can be shown from the details of the film (e.g., the kid interrupts even her method of coping with the loss of the husband, in the scene of thwarted masturbation), while the LGBTQ reading defies logic: if the woman is the protagonist and she is the one keeping the Babadook in the basement as part of the resolution of the film, does this mean the answer is to keep the queer in the closet? If not, then the only logic is that either (1) the woman is actually the antagonist or (2) we call it LGBTQ on the basis of "contains any element anybody thinks weird" and eventually it is not distinctly LGBTQ because all are potentially LGBTQ, just waiting on somebody to assert it for it to become "objectively" so.

I'm aware that Rowling might find as much issue with my take on and defense of her comments on menstruation and female gender (and maybe even simply of a male presuming to declare anything about it ... and on that score she would be at least partially right), but there is my two cents for what it is worth ... or really even for whatever I can actually figure out that it is.

[Post Note: I'm also aware that, when speaking of bodies and bodily experience as normative and constitutive,  there are those who fault even Judith Butler (whom many on the traditionalist side of assuming binary- and hetero-norativity consider to be about as far out there as you can get in deconstructing gender, especially in her book Gender Trouble) for not going far enough because, when she speaks of the ground that actually can be there as simply "bodies" rather than gendered bodies, she still means human bodies, whereas the "posthumanist" movement is trying to find meaning and order in the nonhuman that can be the basis of the human without the human being normative, but all I can do here is note that it's a real question and that, in part, my answer would revolve around part of it being, for me, what some call a "retroductive warrant," or at least as best as I can understand that term, as a bedrock element that one realizes as one that they simply accept. First among these for me is that human bodies are the only bodies of which we know that can communicate a concept like "body" in any way to another body [or embodied mind, if you like, but the minds communicate through the body, so the receptor of the communication is first the body]. The second would be that, so far, the binary gendered system is the only one that we know of that has the capability of expressing ideas of gender: there are mixes and hermaphroditic bodies, but our understanding of them always seems to me to happens in terms of admixtures of the two poles of the binary or falling somewhere between the two on a spectrum. Granted, I think that there must not be hegemonic attempts to force those whose bodily experience does not conform as easily to strictly one or the other, such as hermaphroditic bodies or, even given a heteronormativity in sexual compatability (i.e., I am saying the next part even if one accepts that acting on homosexual erotic inclinations is out of bounds in and of itself, not just contextually, in a way acting on heterosexual inclination is not out of bounds), attempts must not be made by things such as "conversion therapy" to violently force heterosexual psychological shape onto a mind that has developed homosexual orientation, but I can't avoid binary gender language as at least the basic outline of the majority of cases (heteronormativity in sexual orientation is trickier ... I am pretty conservative on it, but it is a more intricate issue and one that should be approached with utmost care and respect, because there has been a great deal of injustice done at times against people who have a physiologically verifiable homosexual orientation that has developed organically and cannot be changed by force methods like conversion therapy). All of this takes place in language developed by people in gendered bodies whose understanding and language is informed through categories of bodily experience that can be expressed only in human language employed by human bodies and minds that develop gender identities that, even when neither euphorically male nor euphorically female, are constructed within the binary framework of understanding set by bodily experience of the development and activity of specific body parts, or at least can be recognized and discussed only by them (the question is sometimes as whether machines will develop a completely machine language, one not readable by humans, and my question is ... how would we know if there was, since to be truly unreadable to humans it would be unrecognizable to humans as language at all; and there is some pushback in the contemporary realm of literature studies against the "posthumanist turn")].