Make that double for “Robert Galbraith,” too.
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I think you can still like Harry Potter. The main cast of the movies all seem to be good people. But Rowling is a garbage person.
But yeah, it is tainted. Not sure how I would react if George Lucas dies and they find out he was a Nazi or something 
What Graham Norton said was great. I am not sure why they were asking him on the issue. Maybe because he is gay? But he is right that the people you should be talking to are trans people, doctors, and parents of trans kids. Get it from the source.
To take what he said as a personal attack on anyone specific is the height of vanity.
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Nope- if something’s already purchased, then keeping it, and even enjoying it does no harm. If you don’t want to keep it, donate it to a charity shop, then someone else can buy it and read it without giving her any money (Doctrine of first sale FTW).
Ritually getting rid of hew works (especially books) is a little too “contamination theory” for my tastes.
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I’d say British civilian TERs are at stage 7, stage 5 is illegal under current British law. The British Government is about stage 4 and has the power to enact stage 5 if they think they can get away with it.
For comparison, the Republican Party is about a stage 8.
Because the British press are asking everybody except trans people. This is a warning as to what happens if someone gives an answer that isn’t deemed to be correct by the TERs.
Billy Bragg is used to being a political outsider and knows how to survive the abuse, but it isn’t surprising that Graham Norton isn’t and doesn’t because he shouldn’t have to. About the most political thing he does is be the British presenter for the Eurovision Song Contest.
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What a bunch of bigoted assholes.
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Me, neither. I’m definitely aware there are good reasons to perhaps not make it so obvious that you’re not male when publishing, especially in certain genres. Heck, if it’s good enough for George Eliot, it’s good enough for me!
The weirdness for me is that good ol’ JK doesn’t seem to draw the parallel between what she’s doing — adopting a outward persona that doesn’t match her gender, in order to feel more comfortable in the publishing world — and what trans folks want to be free to do without persecution. You’d think that she of all people would understand!
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Glances at Northern Ireland
Doesn’t fucking stop them, though.
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Well, of course she doesn’t. She firmly believes that all trans people are just men trying to hurt women (completely ignoring trans men in the process). She keeps saying that over and over again, in a million different ways…
But she doesn’t, because she believes in the bigoted nonsense she’s promoting.
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A big part of why fantasy resonated for me as a youngster was that it suggested that there was a possibility of a brighter magic world beyond what I saw as the sad harsh world I was in. I might be different then how I saw myself then, and I might find fellowship with others. It’s a common origin story among kids who were into books, and not into sports. In retrospect, I can see I didn’t have it that hard, especially in comparison to trans kids of that day. I desperately wanted to jump through the looking glass, a trans friend told me mirrors always made them sad, as their reflection never matched how they saw themselves. It just seems unbelievable that someone who has fantasy as her day job can be so horrifically lacking in empathy and imagination.
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Well, not all genre fiction is progressive in political orientation. In some ways, it can be deeply conservative, as it’s often based around the glorification of monarchies and the rigid class structure that supported it. Some fantasy can be a critique of older orders, but some are very much not.
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Shaun has some great commentary on this and other topics.
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We are so screwed if they win.
Fucked up times.
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Agreed, and people can have very different takes on the same books. Tolkien represented to me that those who look foul might actually be pretty fair, and vice versa, everyone has something to contribute, and that, at the end there might be a lot of similarity at the end between Smeagol and Frodo, so don’t be quick to judge others.
While others might feel the point was how all the bad guys had darker skin and were less quasi-European.
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That’s the takeaway by Italy’s current fascist PM, who’s been a Tolkien fan since she was a teenager.
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Does JK Rowling believe she’s the hero here? To me she’s behaving a lot more like Voldemort or Lucius Malfoy (“Filthy mudbloods!”) than Harry Potter or Hermione Granger.
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I just recently heard that he wrote letters later in his life that questioned his representations in LotR.
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There is a reason why I keep calling her Petunia Dursley, and it isn’t just because she named the character after someone she hated.
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That’s how it has always seemed to me.
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