If you didn’t see this, I don’t blame you. After all, Minneapolis lawmakers did just vow to get rid of the city’s police force, so a lot’s been going on. But amid all the inane chaos, something else absurd happened: J.K. Rowling was cancelled.
The famed author of the “Harry Potter” book series drew the ire of the internet’s social justice warriors when she dared to bring up facts: the immutable nature of sex as male and female, exclusively.
Rowling made a logical case, pointing out the glaringly obvious. “If sex isn’t real,” she wrote in part, “the lived reality of women globally is erased.”
And like clockwork, the pile-on commenced. Vicious dissenters quickly pounced on the 54-year-old author, calling her “a transphobic bigot” using her platform “to attack a vulnerable minority.”
Never mind the fact that even some transgender people — members of the very crowd Rowling is presumably offending — agreed with the award-winning novelist. Dr. Debbie Hayton, a transgender-identified female, said many in her community “appreciate” Rowling’s “courage in speaking out against an authoritarian ideology that oppresses women, gay people and trans people.”
“We need to return to reality,” added Hayton. “Sex is real and it is immutable.”
You would think the progressives who bemoan and begrudge the idea of “cultural appropriation” would see the very tangible ways in which suggesting there is no such thing as the unchangeable male and female sexes would be a clear example of exactly that. Alas, that fact is quickly and conveniently glossed over, tossed into the heap of realities too troublesome to acknowledge.
The Oxford Dictionary defines “cultural appropriation” as “the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.”
And the EverydayFeminism website states “appropriation” refers to a “particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.”
Approximately one-in-five women in the U.S. — 21.3% or 25.5 million — report having endured completed or attempted rape at some point in their lifetimes. About 2.6% of men report experiencing the same. If that is not abundantly clear evidence of widespread oppression, I’m not sure what is.
But we live in a society that relishes in the erasure of the sexual binary, the elimination of the distinct female and male experiences. Not only does that cultural decision abolish the scientifically infallible binary and the God-ordained distinctions between the two, it cruelly forgets the heartbreaking realities that all too often accompany the female experience.
In a #MeToo movement culture that feigns to care about the wellbeing of women, we tell biological men they are, of course, permitted to transition and live as if they know what it means to be female. We take prizes intended for females — Women of the Year and Female Athlete of the Year — and hand them to men. Remind me again about the patriarchy we’re supposed to be smashing?
According to Scripture, there is no distinction between those who believe in Jesus. The apostle Paul said, “There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Yet there still remains distinct values to the male and female experiences. Paul’s words eliminated all societal hierarchies: a Gentile didn’t cease to be a Gentile; rather, once a believer, she became an equal heir to Christ as Paul, a Jewish man. The same is true of sex — whether male or female, we who are in Christ are all given unencumbered access to the Gospel. Our divine differences, though, remain.
None of this is to ignore the very real pain and struggle experienced by those who live with gender dysphoria, feeling as if they are trapped in the wrong body. But the truth is, if someone is born with XX chromosomes, she can never be “he.” And someone born with XY chromosomes can never truly be “she.”
Rowling is taking heat because she pointed out that simple fact.
We would all do well to acknowledge that handing the keys to the proverbial female kingdom over to men does nothing but erase the lived experiences — the good, the bad, and the ugly — of women across history and around the globe.
God, through science, intended there to be two sexes in His image (Genesis 1:27). And because we’re not God, we can’t change that — no matter how hard we try or how many facts we ignore.