JK Rowling receives 'heartbreaking' letters expressing trans surgery regrets
Author J.K. Rowling says individuals who've undergone transgender surgeries have been sending her "heartbreaking letters" detailing their regrets.
In an interview with Good Housekeeping magazine, the Harry Potter series author said many people now fear for their safety and losing their jobs for daring to say that biological sex is an immutable trait.
Earlier this year, Rowling penned a lengthy essay articulating her concerns about the implications of transgender ideology, particularly how it undermines women's rights. She subsequently likened the experimental hormone drugs being dispensed at gender clinics to a "new form of gay conversion therapy."
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Rowling further warned that a medical scandal was at hand, and that organizations and individuals who embraced radical trans dogma while vilifying those urging caution would soon "have to answer for the harm they've enabled."
Over 90% of the letters she's received have been "supportive" of her public words, she told the magazine, including letters from "medical staff, social workers, prison workers, workers in women’s refuges, and members of the LGBT community, including trans people.”
“Some of the most heartbreaking letters I’ve received have been from young women who regret the irreversible surgeries they’ve undertaken,” Rowling said. “These stories need to be told.”
She also called for people to be allowed to discuss the issue openly and said greater attention should be given to women's concerns and how medicalized gender treatments are disproportionately harming young females.
“I believe everybody should be free to live a life that is authentic to them, and that they should be safe to do so,” she said. “I also believe that we need a more nuanced conversation around women’s rights and around the huge increase in numbers of girls and young women who are seeking to transition.”
Rowling's comments come amid what some say is a turning tide in the debate about transgenderism, particularly the experimental medical practices being performed on trans-identifying minors, in light of a recent court decision in the U.K.
Last week, the U.K. High Court of Justice ruled against the Tavistock clinic in London, after Keira Bell, a 23-year-old woman who detransitioned, alleged in a lawsuit that she was irreparably harmed by the puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones she took as a trans-identifying teenager and that she was not capable of understanding the long-term repercussions to her health and well-being.
Bell said outside the court following her win: "This judgment is not political, it's about protecting vulnerable children. I'm delighted to see that common sense has prevailed."
The court ruled that children age 16 and younger are not cognitively capable of giving informed consent to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The judges explained in their decision that both experimental treatments were "two stages of one clinical pathway and once on that pathway it is extremely rare for a child to get off it."
Bell also underwent an elective double mastectomy and previously said that the drugs prescribed to her likely sterilized her for life. She described the life-altering choices she made as a minor as "brash." The clinic rushed her into the experimental medical practices and treated her like a "guinea pig," she said, adding that it was “heartbreaking to realize I’d gone down the wrong path.”
After Rowling spoke out in June, she was widely panned in much of the media as bigoted and cast members of the film adaptation of Harry Potter, including Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Eddie Redmayne all distanced themselves from her remarks.
