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Gatekeeping womanhood: JK Rowling’s great trans hunt
Two pressing questions have emerged globally over the last 18 months about trans rights: who gets to gatekeep trans healthcare and who gets to gatekeep womanhood more broadly. These questions have intersected in vicious fashion as women such as JK Rowling have used their platforms to erase trans identities completely, declaring that to be a woman one must be born a woman with XX chromosomes. They are very clear that anyone habituated as a girl who later discovers their chromosomes are not XX is automatically shifted to the male category, as evidenced by the attacks on Caster Semenya and Imane Khalif. This gatekeeping has bled out of the pink and blue panic over trans paediatric healthcare, which itself was rooted in the 2016 bathroom panics. Here I break down the historic roots of this and ask why in 2025 are we once more reducing women down to reproduction and unobservable chromosomes.
Gatekeeping womanhood was explicitly fought against by first and second wave feminists, with trans womanhood accepted as a form of womanhood as far back as the 1920s. Historically only a handful of trans women were able to medicalise because there was both little public awareness and few trans healthcare providers. Those that there were bought into Harry Benjamin’s model, which in turn was derived from the protocols developed by Magnus Hirschfeld in the 1920s. To become a…
