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WOMEN | GENDER | POLITICS

Three Female Perspectives on the ‘Woman’ Question

Andrew Jazprose Hill
5 min readMar 26, 2023

Birth sex, gender identity, and the law as viewed by J.K. Rowling, Miley Cyrus, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Black-and-white photograph showing two women with heavily powdered faces.
Photo by David Todd McCarty on Unsplash

Here we are nearing the end of Women’s History Month 2023. And thanks to a new podcast about J.K. Rowling, which frames the author as the victim of a modern day witch trial, people are once again asking that perplexing question: “What is a woman?”

Recently, I wrote a lengthy piece on another platform about the controversy surrounding the Harry Potter author after she posted a series of tweets and wrote an essay regarding her concerns about transgender women versus biological women.

My interest in the author came from reading her ongoing C.B. Strike crime-fiction series. I didn’t get into the Harry Potter novels until years after the initial fever over them had died down.

But once I began to read her, I found Rowling to be a talented author with extraordinary insights into personal relationships. Although I rarely read crime novels, I’ve been captivated by the C.B. Strike stories.

After I wrote my article about Rowling, which was really an exploration of the several controversies surrounding transgender rights, I realized that it contained three specific takes on…

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Andrew Jazprose Hill
Andrew Jazprose Hill

Written by Andrew Jazprose Hill

I write about Art, Culture, and Race in The Jazprose Diaries on Substack. My short stories are there too in The Fiction Fix. Read me, Seymour, read me.

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