"J.K. Rowling spent Thursday once again demonstrating a perplexing inability to pipe down and enjoy her millions."

"This time, the Harry Potter author wasn’t retconning diversity into the series she finished writing over 12 years ago or disclosing that before indoor plumbing, the wizards of her universe used to just poop themselves and magically vanish the evidence away. Instead, Rowling tweeted her support for Maya Forstater, a tax expert whose firing from a think tank over transphobic comments and subsequent court battle has generated a great deal of controversy in the U.K. In so doing, Rowling seemed to align herself with a virulently anti-trans group of otherwise liberal women, most often referred to as trans exclusionary radical feminists or TERFs."

From "After a Transphobic Tweet, J.K. Rowling Can No Longer Be Considered an LGBTQ Ally" Slate).

Here's the tweet that's provoking some people:

Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 19, 2019

Here's what's linked at that "poop" reference:

JK Rowling started 2019 with wizard poop and ended it by shitting the bed pic.twitter.com/W8cVK3oRI3

— Joe Berkowitz (@JoeBerkowitz) December 19, 2019

Here's a Vox article from last September that's linked at "TERFs": "The rise of anti-trans 'radical' feminists, explained/Known as TERFs, trans-exclusionary radical feminist groups are working with conservatives to push their anti-trans agenda." Excerpt:

In the early ’70s, groups of what would now be called “gender critical” feminists threatened violence against many trans women who dared exist in women’s and lesbian spaces.... TERF ideology has become the de facto face of feminism in the UK.... Any vague opposition to gender-critical thought in the UK brings along accusations of “silencing women” and a splashy feature or op-ed in a British national newspaper. Australian radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys went before the UK Parliament in March 2018 and declared that trans women are “parasites,” language that sounds an awful lot like Trump speaking about immigrants.

According to Heron Greenesmith, who studies the modern gender-critical movement as a senior research associate with the social justice think tank Political Research Associates, gender-critical feminism in the UK grew out of a toxic mix of historical imperialism and the influence of the broader UK skeptical movement in the early aughts — which was hyper-focused on debunking “junk science” and any idea that considered sociological and historical influence and not just biology. Those who rose to prominence in the movement did so through a lot of “non-tolerant calling-out and attacking people,” Greenesmith said, much like gender-critical feminism. “Anti-trans feminists think they have science on their side. It is bananas how ascientific their rhetoric is, and yet literally they say, ‘Biology isn’t bigotry.’ In fact, biology has been used as bigotry as long as biology has been a thing.” (See scientific racism, eugenics, and the justification for slavery that black people were intellectually inferior to white people.)

Though TERFism got its start in the US in the ’70s, the ideology has largely fallen out of favor as the country’s mainstream feminist movement has continuously battled against the religious right for abortion access and LGBTQ rights. In a country where political coalitions on the feminist left are crucial to the survival of basic women’s rights, it doesn’t make much sense to spend time oppressing a tiny population who are otherwise valuable allies in the culture war....

But probably where “gender critical” feminism has the potential to wield the most influence is in government. US-based “gender critical” feminist groups like WoLF and Hands Across the Aisle, which sent a letter to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in favor of barring trans women from women’s homeless shelters, are happy to work alongside conservatives to limit the rights of trans people — even if those same conservatives want to pass legislation limiting their reproductive rights....

TERFs treat trans women as predators and trans men as victims of the patriarchy
Gender-critical feminism, at its core, opposes the self-definition of trans people, arguing that anyone born with a vagina is in its own oppressed sex class, while anyone born with a penis is automatically an oppressor. In a TERF world, gender is a system that exists solely to oppress women, which it does through the imposition of femininity on those assigned female at birth.

“Legally redefining ‘female’ as anyone who claims to be female results in the erasure of female people as a class,” WoLF wrote in its SCOTUS brief. “If, as a matter of law, anyone can be a woman, then no one is a woman, and sex-based protections in the law have no meaning whatsoever.”...

Gender-critical feminists blame the patriarchy for deluding trans men into thinking they can identify out of female oppression, or blame structural homophobia for convincing trans men they can become straight men rather than lesbians....

With “stranger danger” drilled into the heads of women and girls from a young age, anti-trans feminists can easily paint “the other” as a constant sexual threat — despite the fact that studies have repeatedly shown that women are most likely to be sexually assaulted by someone they already know....

Lots more at that link.