I admit I stopped reading the series pretty early on and I stopped following information about it after that. I did hear about the “Oh, of course we had a gay character, Dumbledore was gay, I just didn’t mention it” apology, but I didn’t pay attention to other problems in the books.
It’s sad, because the first book is one that helped my daughter learn to love reading. She followed the entire series as a kid. Rowling could have just kept quiet and a lot of the controversy would probably not have happened. She didn’t include a gay character? Well no one’s perfect and it is a black mark on an otherwise good series. Instead she had to defend every decision as being right and critics as being wrong. It is tarnishing the legacy and it looks like she is just going to keep on tarnishing away.
My experience of “being a man”, as the TERFs would put it, is one of being abused into acting as someone who I felt I wasn’t. I was beaten by bullies, I was told I would go to hell by church leaders, I had psychatrists try to convince me that I was a gay man. I never voluntarily lived as a man, it was forced on me at an early age and I rejected it as soon as no-one had the power to stop me anymore.
The TERFs are complicit in that abuse. They talk about their lived experiences while denying mine.
I am sorry about what you’ve been through, and I support your fight for equality.
It takes actual work to restructure the way we’ve been socialized to think about gender, sexuality and the non-binary;
I see people like JRK as selfish over-privileged assholes who are too fucking lazy to do the mental and emotional labor required to evolve into a better human being.
So unfuck her; let her be left behind with the other dinosaurs, she just needs to STFU and get the hell out of the way.
That really did feel tacked on with dumbledore. I did enjoy the series but I always felt it was messy and borrowed heavily from better writers like Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams and that vague attempt at writing a bit PJ Wodehouse.
I tried to read her post potter book she wrote under another name ( The Casual Vacancy) and it was just plain horrific. Just so much of that lame “Look at me! I’m writing for adults” with horrible people and just plain dickish writing. I gave up after a couple of chapters and got a refund as it really didn’t seem worth the slog.
Much of her talent was being in the right place and getting very lucky with a well “researched” and mostly ok book series.
I’m going to be honest here. I forget how long ago it was but maybe 10-12 years ago i briefly dated a woman that had gender dysphoria, and she had asked me about my thoughts on it and all these years later i’m ashamed that i told her i couldn’t see how a woman could transition and really be a man. To me it was just something i had never really confronted despite my own struggles with gender.
The least i can do going forward is listen and be honest with myself when i don’t know enough. I’m happy to boost the voices of others that have something to say, those that have lived their lives and learned through their struggles.
Fair enough. Everyone gets to decide whether what an artist’s work contributes to their life is worth coming to terms with the artist as a person. It’s just unfortunate that it’s pretty much a question of “when”, rather than a question of “who”.
As for JK Rowling, I guess it kind of bothers me there’s so much focus in the online discourse on the Harry Potter books (“well, they were never actually good in the first place”, etc.), rather than on her being such an awful person.
I think she was a known TERF even before all of this happened, but maybe it wasn’t clear what exactly she actually believed. In any case, I have no intention of supporting her either (although I am, admittedly, not really a Harry Potter fan).
I can see how hard this shit is going to be for a majority of “Normal” society and the kind of hill that has to be climbed here.
It took a bit for me and I’ve been in the furry community for decades and I have ton’s of body dysphoria (As many furs probably do) so it was never a big leap to grok gender dysphoria but it took a bit.
One furry friend I know who did a lot of cross dressing had transitioned and it was a big surprise to me and it took a lot of mental work to break the ruts in my head with pronouns with her but she was very cool about it. I tried to give her a bunch of space to not ask questions as I figured she was always getting that shit all the time. She probably helped me grapple with the mental shifts I needed to get it. Probably helpful that I’m in a community that is playing with identity at a level where switching species and gender is just part of reality.
My household has had furry parties every month for the better part of 15 years and I came to realize a large percentage of people I was around had or were transitioning over the past decade from the makeup of furs showing up. There was a point when we had a wedding in our back yard at a party I thought: “OMG! Did we just have a trans wedding in our back yard?” we did and it was kinda cool.
Turns out the furry community has a higher percentage of trans to CIS that other places I’m told from some research statistics.
See, people can just find the best or most comfortable space for themselves, and sometimes there’s crossover and I think that’s really sweet and positive.
People have used their fursonas to help with their transition by changing it first. I know this documentary that comes out in July is covering some of that (That also is being done by a trans filmmaker):
Not sure whether Rowling was trying to troll homophobes or just grabbing for progressive ally cookies, but she could have put that controversy to rest for a lot of people by having Dumbledore be openly gay in the Fantastic Beasts series, which she didn’t despite having no qualms about showing I’ve lost count how many heterosexual relationships in the Potterverse.
It’s not really a question for society at all. The only thing society should have to say is that everyone should be allowed to be who they are, and that people that need help should get help.
The ‘just a question’ you’re actually asking is a nitty-gritty practical one about the operations of a particular domestic violence shelter in the particular circumstance of a transphobe and a trans-woman show up at the same time needing help.
And to the extent you’re gesturing at a real problem on that level at all, it’s not an especially complicated or new one. It’s basically just a specific form of “this person can’t get along with this other person”. Whether the reason for that is transphobia, or racism, or just interpersonal thorniness, I doubt that’s a completely novel problem for shelter administrators. And I expect that – at least given adequate resources – it’s generally a pretty solvable one. Just keep them apart, help one or the other person move to a sister facility, etc.
It’s worth noting that most domestic violence organizations aren’t even just for women in the first place. They might not house men at the same site as women, but certainly most will nevertheless do their best to help, perhaps putting a male victim up in a hotel temporarily, finding another organization with better facilities, etc.
It’s beyond completely unacceptable to say that trans-women are the only people you somehow can’t figure out how to help, because a “real” woman might be transphobic.
