Wait, what? Are you considered a bigot for not wanting to date someone who doesn't have the genitals you prefer? Can someone shed some light on this please?
The range of different beliefs among humans is so vast that almost any question of the form 'Do some people believe X?' has the answer 'Yes', even for quite extreme values of X. But that doesn't tell us much about the beliefs of typical people. This is especially true when there are folks going around emphasising the most extreme beliefs in groups they disagree with in order to produce a counterreaction.
But that's part of the problem here, and why this is a damaging article. It uses this view from a handful of extremists – "you are a bigot unless you date women with penises" – a view that almost nobody sensible would reasonably agree with, and then holds it up as an example of why another, unrelated set of things need to be fought against. This is a pretty common approach for people to use when trying to discredit or attack something they dislike.
I will add that Magadalen Berns, for what it's worth, was an explicit, out-and-out anti-trans activist. To quote her directly writing to a trans woman:
"You are fucking blackface actors. You aren't women. You're men who get sexual kicks from being treated like women. fuck you and your dirty perversions. our oppression isn't a fetish you pathetic, sick, fuck"
It is dishonest of Rowling to phrase this interaction in a way that doesn't at least acknowledge why her actions would be controversial under the circumstances. And this is a pattern that's repeated throughout the article. Let's call it an "appeal to reasonableness" – what seems like a reasonable and constructive argument on the surface only appears so because a lot of the context has been ignored or misrepresented.
American Identity Politics is a rot that has really damaged our western civilizations.
She seems invested in protecting women due to a shared experience and becoming convinced through genuine social work that this "movement" and all the toxic wrong-think and undeserved discourse has just served to confuse us and help paralyze rational management of her patients. It makes it much more difficult to look after vulnerable people and has invented terms that are offensive to women.
I support her and I hope whatever societies we end up with we institute protections that defend rational people from having wrong-think weaponised against them much better than we do today. Our decision makers shouldnt feel that they must act a certain way because a pressure group has shouted loudly, and does not hold the consent of the demos at large, which erodes respect and damages the legitimacy of our democracy.
I am a Brit and unfortunately Identity Politics is extremely dangerous on my Isles.
No thinking Anglo-Saxon-Celt-Indian-Sikh-Hindu-Breton-Briton-Norman-Hiberian-Welsh-Scot-Norman-Irish-Kenyan-Ghanan-Ugandan-Nigerian-Jew or other should support it. Each of us can magic up a real ancestral grievance. Some of it's horrific!
I'm excited to see how my government handle the next few weeks. The majority position now is unless it stops tolerating unlawlessness, destruction and boat people that the current system has been thoroughly comprimised and is not fit for purpose.
If my government wakes up in time, the Antifa element of this illegitimate paid up BLM "movement" & the institutional elements that enable them are in for a lovely shock. All educated black people I know in the UK now are already against them.
They and those that have validated mob rule will truly deserve what their weaponisation of race will bring to them, our western civilization (flawed, but still the best) is on fire because of them!
You can decide if you agree with that or not, but that is the kind of thing she said which upset people.
Many people will not like this, but so-called autogynephilia seems to be a real causal factor behind some varieties of gender-dysphoric identity among people assigned-male-at-birth. (To be clear about this, other varieties do exist that involve very different causal paths.) Her language was obviously unkind, but she was pointing at something quite real.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00918369.2010.4...
"You are fucking blackface actors. You aren't women. You're men who get sexual kicks from being treated like women. Fuck you and your dirty fucking perversions. Our oppression isn't a fetish you pathetic, sick, fuck".
Also, I keep hearing about "detransitioning", but can't find any evidence it is actually significantly growing -- numers who regret getting surgery seem to sit around, or below, 1%.
The article also gets into stuff like the underlying dynamics of gender dysphoric identity, which seems to be hignly socially influenced especially in younger folks. People will obviously disagree as to how this dysphoric identity should be treated; some will advocate a more relaxed, wait-and-see approach even as others (including many in the medical establishment) argue for a rapid transition. These are not trivial issues and there are arguments for both sides.
Can light be shed? Hardly. In the environment described by Rowling, any amount of disagreement within that sphere of thinking can raise pitchforks. It's a sort of corner case for human compassion and understanding in the subtleties and complexities involved, and people are afraid to touch it.
First, most reasonable people do not shame anyone for their body preferences- period. It is often more about how than what. You may prefer someone who is taller, shorter, larger, thinner, etc. But if you talk in absolutes, like "Tall people are ugly" then certainly you'll receive criticism.
And this of course leaves people feeling hurt. When I was active in dating, I wanted to date women who were attracted to thinner or average men, while I'm overweight. It hurt, but I accepted it.
That said, there are some, very tiny minority of trans people who are upset that in not being eligible for dating someone based on body preference speaks to their being perceived as their gender. "If I'm a ___, why would you not date me as such?"- and their answer is "Because you do not percieve me as my gender presentation".
Sometimes these people are loud and aggressive in their objections.
At the same time, it's also a fact that this is a tiny minority of people, a very tiny minority, and it's used largely as a way of amplifying a problem that largely does not exist- it's a strawman argument which does exist to some extent, but is much smaller than it's being portrayed.
Like I said at the start, it's complicated, but it's largely a justification to be hateful on JK Rowling's part.