Like, I think re-contextualising internalised misogyny as simply being about the hatred of women has impacted how people understand the harmful rhetoric spread by TERFs like JK Rowling and how she upholds patriarchal systems, because whenever JK Rowling’s beliefs are mentioned, it’s usually under the impression that they come solely from her own internalised misogyny, and therefore, that she just hates women.
There is a disturbing amount of people who “joke” about JK Rowling being a closeted trans man because she seems to hate women so much, which is already incredibly transphobic towards trans men, but it also represents only half of the picture. JK Rowling’s hatred of maleness, manhood and masculinity also plays an extremely significant part in her ideology. She considers any association with men, any association with (perisexcis) male genitalia, or any association with masculinity as being inherently predatory, and any association with (white) women, (white) womanhood and (perisexcis) female genitalia as being inherently good and pure.
Hence why she campaigns so violently to keep trans women out of women’s spaces under the belief that it’s not possible to separate trans women from an imposed, societal boy or manhood (whether or not it was actually imposed in the way she thinks it was, or how that imposition can be incredibly harmful and dangerous for young trans girls), and also why so many of her targets are women of colour, because they do not fit into the white Western standards of womanhood and femininity that her beliefs are based on.
As for trans men, she advocates preventative measures to stop trans men from transitioning, under the belief that we’re confused girls trying to escape misogyny, and that it’s our internalised misogyny that leads us to transitioning at all. JK Rowling’s entire campaign is to separate “maleness” from “femaleness” because in her world, the two simply cannot mix. In her world, women are perpetual victims (misogyny) and men are inherent perpetrators (misandry) which— perhaps unbeknownst to her— is exactly what the patriarchy wants.
To negate the animosity towards masculinity and manhood that TERFs have is to negate a good portion of the pillars that patriarchy stands on. This idea that men and women have to be separated because they’re inherently opposed to each other, and that men simply cannot help themselves from being sexual predators because it’s wired into their male brains is… patriarchy 101. The cis men in power are laughing at how gullible TERFs are, quite frankly, and it’s disturbing how many so-called transfeminist leftists are also falling for it because they still want to find their own way of saying “women good and men bad.”
JK Rowling doesn’t hate women because she’s secretly a man, in fact, I don’t even think saying she “hates women” or “hates men” is accurate because that oversimplifies her actual mentality. She doesn’t think she hates women, because she advocates for the protection of women (even if her advocation is built on exclusion and transphobia) and she doesn’t think she hates men because she’s perfectly happy to cosy up to powerful cis men, and presumably she doesn’t hate her husband.
However, she is a deep deep believer of biology being a dictator of how a person acts, and this belief requires both misogynistic attitudes towards women and misandrist attitudes towards men, and if feminists in leftist spaces are only rejecting one of these beliefs, then you will still find yourself sitting at the same table as JK Rowling one day.
