Itâs not that Rowling made transphobia exist in the UK - there was already tons of transphobia (and transmisogyny more specifically) in UK media and news outlets.
The big change was that this transphobia was limited to right-wing news outlets, like The Daily Mail; the only transphobic writers in the public eye were people like Piers Morgan or Richard Littlejohn, your typical cishet upper-middle class white men who were generally A Bit (Sometimes Very) Bigoted in a lot of different areas. Easy enough to ignore if you didnât read those papers, or know anyone who did.
Rowling becoming a TERF was what made left-wing and centrist news outlets become outwardly transphobic. The Left-wing press werenât necessarily trans-positive, but trans issues were largely seen as being included under LGBTQIA+ reporting, and the left-wing papers largely fancied themselves as being progressive in that area. With Rowling, however, we suddenly had a very powerful woman, who was known for being a Labour voter and campaigner, saying that being transphobic was a core part of her beliefs as a feminist left-winger, and it made all the other transphobic left-wingers either adopt her views, or come out of the woodwork. Suddenly The Guardian is getting a reputation for writing transphobic articles in the name of âfeminismâ and becoming a hostile place for transgender journalists to work; suddenly, the BBC, which is supposed to be a centrist news outlet, starts publishing a lot of articles about detransitioners and linking people âwho want to learn more about the trans issueâ to transphobic organisations; suddenly, other left-wing feminist writers come out of the woodwork as being TERFs (Germaine Greer wasnât a surprised, but, for some, Caitlin Moran was).
Suddenly, TERFs become the face of British Feminism (and especially British Lesbian Feminism), with some big-names as figureheads, and with the full force of the British News Media following suit.
Rowling becoming a TERF is what changed the conversation about trans people from âtheyâre a marginalised queer group that only bigots hateâ into this shitty, fake âconflictâ between âwomenâs rights and trans rightsâ, and this was what makes the UK so toxic and transphobic. Proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act were stopped explicitly because TERFs were able to spread the idea throughout the news media - both left-wing and right-wing presses - that allowing trans people to self-identify would make the world more dangerous for Real Women and would thus be anti-feminist, and this is what sunk those changes. The actual polls put out by Stonewall reflected that most people are not transphobic (even though TERFs tried to manipulate the polls), but the news media were able to maintain a unified transphobic front that told a different story to the government, similarly to how Brexit came to be (because yeah, before anyone forgets: splitting from the EU was something that journalists, like Boris Johnson, put forward and repeated enough in the news that it suddenly became this big issue that the Tories felt they needed to act on in order to remain popular).
The assumption was that the polls must have been manipulated by pro-trans bots, created by The Trans Rights Activists, because the news media had all universally decided to tell the public that trans women were evil, misogynistic predators, and the government decided to believe that over the actual results of the survey. Let that sink in.
Rowling becoming a TERF wasnât the only thing to make the UK transphobic, it just encouraged the left-wing to follow in her footsteps.
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