Except in both the Contrapoints video and in the Jessie Gender video, they condemn people who attacked Rowlings. They do not condone it remotely. They are not excusing people who attacked Rowlings on twitter, even while they gave a reason why that happened (because an extremely powerful culture figure is using her platform to punch down). they also note that Rowlings is NOT the victim of oppression because of that.
None of which they or anyone here has argued.
Do you think that the people here, especially the transfolk here are just out to get zingers against you, rather than insisting on their humanity being respected? if you think that’s the case then you really have no paid much attention to the community here, which regularly push back against unwarrented attacks that are racial, gendered, etc, etc.
This isn’t a game to lots of us here. At all. It’s real fucking life. There are people here who have had to real life consequences of anti-trans speech.
That it took “18 hours” to write a lengthy screed which basically amounts to a massive wall of self-absorbed text that still ignores the real existential threat someone like JRK poses to the Trans community speaks volumes.
Indeed, indeed, indeed. It is not that there are things about trans women she does not understand and does not get, or that she sometimes uses the wrong pronoun, or does not understand the biology… but that she sets out to attack and hurt a discriminated group on purpose with premeditated malice.
That is the real bigotry. We all in our life will meet people whose race/class/social group/gender identity/medical or mental condition/sexuality/fashion/mode of expression etc… etc… we don’t totally get and you now… just be kind.
That sounds like a small thing but it isn’t and that is where Rowling failed: Where she should be kind and do a Hermione she is hurtful and does a Dolores. She should know better.
She is Petunia Dursley, who in the books was jealous of the attention and support her sister got when she got her letter to Hogwarts, then when she had to look after Harry she denied that magic existed and punished him whenever he accidentally did magic, while focusing all her attention and support on her non-magical son.
Harry Potter’s situation is familiar to a lot of young trans people.
Why didn’t we trans people think of being civil towards the TERs, let’s say, about 50 years ago.
My way of dividing the Santa Cruz women’s community was that the very few separatists—trans-exclusionary separatists, because not all separatists were trans-exclusionary—but the few who were, called a meeting of the women’s community in Santa Cruz. Which, at the time, was possible, because we all knew each other; it was like the days of ancient Greece when the polis consisted of everybody you could see from atop the Agora. You could get all the women in the women’s community in Santa Cruz in one room. You could see who they were. So we did that, and this was not a meeting caused specifically for this purpose, we were there for several agenda items; one of them was, “Will Sandy Stone be accepted as a woman in Santa Cruz?” This was put forward by the transphobic separatists. It being Santa Cruz, there was reasonable discussion from the accepting side. The transphobes said what they always say: Men divide community and so-forth. Then we took a vote on it and it was all of the rest of the community in favor, and the two radical separatists against. So, the two transphobes against.
Sandy: That was the way the Collective was responding to the public debate. Then we had a very foul debate in which, when we looked around, the people affiliated with the Collective, who lived in Oakland, immediately said that “Wait, these women are not from here. There’s a group here from Chicago that is known to be head breakers!” I think she meant that they were there to stir up trouble.
We brought four or five women from the Collective, and me, and our idea was – very naively – that we would have a rational discussion about trans people and the women’s community. It started off with a woman, I’d never met her and I have no idea who she was, standing up and delivering a long statement which consisted of bizarre misinformation about the psychological origin of being trans, that is was a twisted pathological state and that trans people posed a danger, because of our pathology, and how we were perverting the women’s community and bringing pathological energy into it. While she was saying all of this, several women from the Collective were looking at me with their eyebrows up in shock and I was sitting there with my jaw dropping, and when she finished, the Collective women on either side of me said that I should respond to it. I was, just without words. I said the totally wrong thing. I think anything that I said would probably have been seen as being wrong, but I think I picked the most wrong thing to say. All I could think of to say was – in a normal speaking tone – “But… But, this is bullshit.”
The meeting immediately erupted in screaming. People were standing on tables, screaming about me and about the evils of me, and about how it was all true because here was the proof because I had not engaged in a “womanly” way. Nobody could stop it. Nobody could calm it down. The TERFs refused to stop disrupting the meeting unless I left the room. After a while, we did a little huddle and some of the Collective women said, “We can’t have Sandy leave. That’s just not acceptable.” I said, “Look, I think I’d better leave because this is not going to go anywhere with me here.” Eventually, we agreed on that and I left.
I went back to the Wilshire District in LA because all I wanted to do was to crawl into a hole, in a fetal position and try to shake it off. The rest of the group came back traumatized. They said that after I had left, that there was no rational discussion, that there was a lot of hate about me, and a lot of anger with the Collective for employing me – which I wasn’t; I was a member, not an employee – and they began to realize for the first time that there wasn’t going to be a rational debate. They really began to understand that something was going on that was quite loathsome and that we couldn’t respond to in any reasonable way.
As the harassment directed at Stone reached a violent tipping point, including one harrowing incident in which she was forced to hide under a table at a concert after the event was stormed by gun-toting militant lesbian group the Gorgons, Stone had had enough. For both her safety’s sake and the survival of Olivia (against which a boycott was being threatened), Stone removed herself from the music business altogether — a response Raymond found inadequate, commenting in Empire that Stone should have at least “assumed some responsibility for the divisiveness.”
This pattern escalated. We were organizing what was for us, a major tour. We wanted to tour the country and provide women’s music for women in major cities along our route. It was the first time anything like that had been attempted. We were very intent on it and it was extremely energy-absorbing. It took all our energy to get it going. We had an entire network of lesbian separatist producers, people who could organize local logistical support, people who could advertise tickets and handle the selling and we wanted it to be completely done by women.
Anyway, we had organized this tour and we had gotten a letter telling us that when we got to Seattle that there was a separatist paramilitary group called the Gorgons. The Gorgons was a group of women who wore camo gear, shaved their heads and carried live weapons. We were told that when we got to town, they were going to kill me.
Cristan: Wait, they said that they were going to KILL you if you came to Seattle?
Sandy: Yes, but we kind of laughed about it. We thought that was just talk, but then we heard it was actually true. So, we began checking this out and the women who had booked the hall for us said, “Yes! These people are real and you guys had better do something about this because they’re serious!”
We did, in fact, go to Seattle, but we went as probably the only women’s music tour that was ever done with serious muscle security. They were very alert for weapons and, in fact, Gorgons did come and they did have guns taken away from them.
I was pants-wetting scared at that event. I was terrified. During a break between a musical number someone shouted out “GORGONS!” and I made it from my seat at the console to under the table the console was on at something like superluminal speed. I stayed under there until it was clear that I wasn’t about to be shot… Not that it would have done me any good to be under there.
And as for the comment about Godwin’s Law.
On 6 May 1933, while Hirschfeld was in Ascona, Switzerland, the Deutsche Studentenschaft made an organised attack on the Institute of Sex Research. Dora “Dörchen” Richter, the first known person to undergo complete male-to-female gender reassignment surgery, may have been killed in this or subsequent attacks on the Institute. A few days later, the Institute’s library and archives were publicly hauled out and burned in the streets of the Opernplatz. Between 12,000 to 20,000 books and journals, and even larger number of images and sex subjects, were destroyed. Also seized were the Institute’s extensive lists of names and addresses. In the midst of the burning, Joseph Goebbels gave a political speech to a crowd of around 40,000 people. The leaders of the Deutsche Studentenschaft also proclaimed their own Feuersprüche (fire decrees). Also books by Jewish writers, and pacifists such as Erich Maria Remarque, were removed from local public libraries and the Humboldt University, and were burned.
This is a very real fear for us. TERS may not be burning books yet, but they are trying their hardest to get GICs closed and doctors struck off for helping trans people. Some people have been given an infinite waiting list time because of these attacks reducing the amount of help available. If they burn books it will be a low key event this time, done to “clear libraries of obsolete work”.
I don’t want to kill anyone, I want to be left alone and for other people to be left alone. I want TERs to not be TERs and just get on with their lives and not be concerned about mine. I have learned the hard way that I need to fight for that. I have had bricks through my window, death threats through my door, I used to sleep with a hammer under my pillow. I now have PTSD from my experiences, I haven’t visited my parents in over ten years because I go into instinctual fight or flight if I spend any time back where all that happened. I do not want sympathy for what happened, I want people to stop it from happening again, to anyone else.
During the American Civil Rights Movement there were a lot of people who were more concerned about the Black Panther Party than they were about the KKK and other groups who made self defence necessary. Don’t be like them. Don’t be on the wrong side of history for the sake of civility.
Some people think we should be like Gandhi, but Gandhi said this.
That sort of statement from Gandhi masquerades a a deep piece of wisdom that can’t be fully understood without being in Gandhi’s head. But it also affirms that the opportunity to explore Gandhi’s head is likely to be an utter waste of time.
That’s a depressing, yet familiar litany of violence against Trans people that shows the twisted ideology of which JKR is only the celebrity tip of this miserable iceberg.
More generally, in those stories, what do we see? We see radfems attacking Trans people for existing. We see radfems attacking lesbians for not agreeing with them on how to be lesbians, and more widely we see radfems attacking sex workers for daring to have agency,, we see them attacking the founder of the women’s refuge movement for daring to report on the cyclical nature of abuse- at what point do we admit that these things are not isolated incidents?
At what point do we question the ideology that drives this bullying, this intimidation, this violent hatred?
Transphobia is the current focus of their hatred- we have a violent radfem problem.
If I had to hazard a guess I’d say it’s a similar problem rampant in the Black community with regards to certain men; they don’t actually want to do away with the oppression exploitation and marginalization perpetuated by White males - they merely want to take the place of White men at the top of the hierarchy of a caste system.
And women who think or act the same are no better, no matter what they may call themselves.
Equality and equity for EVERYONE, and oppression for NONE.
If that’s not someone’s long term goal, then that person is NOT ‘on the same side’ as I am; no matter what color their skin is, no matter genitalia what they do or do not have between their legs.
If it isn’t fair for everyone, it isn’t fair for anyone.
We don’t all want the same things but everyone should have the same respect, autonomy and opportunities.
I really don’t understand why people think otherwise.
(Apart from we’re told not to think like that…)
And shortsightedness. A great many people think they are better off as masters than equals, and a great many more have internalized that belief that they would be better off as masters than equals.
If Joanna Cherry becomes leader of the SNP I will start calling them the Scottish Nazi Party. There are pro-independence parties who do not attack vulnerable people, and if the SNP don’t want to be among them then that will be taken into consideration.
I didn’t get to the place in Contrapoint’s video where she talks about Rowling’s PTSD, but your story makes me want to scroll through and find it.
The post trauma stress has a weird way of bubbling out unexpectedly. My first lover in high school was (later) murdered for being a gender outlaw… and by the time I connected with their mom and sister, there didn’t seem to be time for grieving.
Fact is, I’d shoved that memory completely out of my mind for decades. It came back when I asked myself, “why is this video relevant to me?”
It does seem naive - in retrospect- to expect useful support from adjacent communities. The Seattle bisexual women’s group wants nothing to do with men’s bisexual group, because they don’t want to get hit on. And they’re not wrong. But beside an annual picnic and the pride parade, there’s not much solidarity to show off for the straights.
In peer counseling they call it, getting restimulated. Someone’s trying to process their own grief, you’re supposed to sit there and listen, but what they’re saying knocks a bunch of your own stuff loose, and the only recourse it to pause the session, slow it down, and come back at it later.
Supposedly there is a distinction to be drawn between PTSD and PTS. Post traumatic stress has its own unpleasant effects, but not everyone goes on to develop the disorder.
So, yeah… about one post per day feels like a good limit for me right now. I don’t feel done with this topic, but this is as much as I can process today.
