I just saw that, you saved me linking it. 
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âAs for Rowling, itâs likely sheâs simply a product of her countryâs culture.â
Arenât we all?
Remember, kids, bigotry is a lifestyle choice.
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âSo, J.K. Rowling: Write whatever you please. Call yourself âgender critical,â if you like. Support any transphobic adult whoâll discriminate with you. Live your best life with your piles of Muggle money. But force cis, trans or intersex women to live with hostile work environments because of the fairytales that transphobes tell themselves? Noâ. #TransRightsAreHumanRights #WhatDrillAreYouTalkingAbout
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Unfortunately, yes. Oxford has become a hostile place to trans people over the last few years, and I originally moved there to escape transphobia. It crosses the town and gown divide.
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Damn, that might be a more deeply entrenched problem than here. Universities tend to be more accepting in the US (based on my own limited experience and excepting pseudo-universities like Bob Jones and Liberty.)
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I am so fucking disappointed in her.
Iâm not saying Iâm now gonna burn the HP books I already own, or anything outlandish like that, but the respect I had for her as any kind of ally (and as a decent human being in general) is burnt.
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Sheâs been on a slow slide but yup, Iâm totally done with her and her crap. All that following and position and she blatantly uses it to punch down, thereâs no mistaking it any more. Success doesnât always do nice things to people.
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Agreed; IMO, she started showing her slippage back when she declared Dumbledore was gay retroactively after the series was already completed.
Like, if youâre gonna make a character gay, thatâs groovy⌠but how about actively showing that in your novelsâ content?
Long story short, IMO, she was just faking the funk trying to seem more âwokeâ than she actually is⌠and now her own bias and bigotry is starting to overshadow her talent.
Also, regarding the dickhole for whom sheâs white knighting:
her defense of using transgender peopleâs prior names in public settings
Thatâs not fucking cool, even if you take sex, gender and politics out of the equation completely; itâs like the people who continued to call Muhammad Ali âCasius Clay,â even long after his conversion to Islam.
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I agree, it is nothing but lip service all the way in her work.
I hadnât noticed the Ali analogy but I see it now. Vaguely acknowledging the change but constantly undermining it by referring to the past.
JKâs latest Tweet was all surface crap too, no acknowledging anything personal, just airy âGo play dress-up, I donât care!â which could slip under the radar as positive - until you see the hashtag.
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What she doesnât seem to get is that itâs not âplayingâ OR âdress upâ; itâs other peopleâs identities.
It doesnât seem harmless to me, even out of context; itâs just condescending and dismissive as fuck.
Personally, Iâm constantly working to reorder my thinking formed from growing up in a cisgender hetero-normative binary dominant society, because thatâs what evolved human adults do; we adapt our thinking and behavior to our ever-changing environment, both physical and mental.
I donât have much patience for anyone who isnât willing to do the mental and emotional labor of actively trying to be a better person.
I fail in that endeavor far more often than Iâd like; nevertheless, Iâm still making the continuous effort.
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Thatâs the bit that really does the damage, even though itâs a weak-ass move that looks light. It normalises, or attempts to normalize, trans experiences as easy lifestyle choices instead of an integral part of an identity. If youâre not physically who you feel you are then your appearance is all you have to show the world âNo, this is me!â Belittling that is unfair at best, and dangerously life-threatening at worst.
I agree, we all should learn. Just because society is mainly built on a straight cis baseline doesnât mean we canât grow, adapt and accept other ways of living. I think the world is a better place when we do and fortunately Iâm not alone in that.
I fail too, but less than I did. Iâm all for moving forward, mistakes and all, and apologies where they are needed, rather than excuses.
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I stumble, stutter and fail way more often than I should, and i am absolutely a work in progress. IMHO, getting every tense, word and pronoun correct is far less important than accepting the individual for who and what they are. And dealing with the fact that they are not my story to tell, I am just along for the ride. Nope, that is not easy, especially when dealing with your own child where there are a lot of memories involved, but âit is not easyâ does not excuse not trying.
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I stopped giving her another chance about a year or so ago. I donât like doing that but forgiveness will have to be earned, and it will be a lot of work before I believe she is sincere.
There isnât as much of a problem at the lower levels of the university heirarchies, but it gets worse the higher up you go. With an institution as old as Oxford University, where there has been centuries of selection of who gets to run it, things are very conservative.
They are probably still bitter that they donât have their own MP (and a second vote) anymore
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Yep, pretty much. I used to cut JKR a fair amount of slack because, as someone who is not a Harry Potter fan but has many friends who are, I was watching anything she did from the sides so to speak, and she came across to me as having genuinely good intentions but also being genuinely clueless.
Like with Dumbledore being gay - she clearly thought this was important and that she was doing a good thing wrt inclusivity when she announced it. And it was a big deal at the time that such a beloved character that many kids grew up with was actually gay. OK so it wasnât mentioned in the books (personally I think itâs because this wasnât, in fact, something she had had in mind while setting up the character and writing his story), but eh, the '90s were a different time and so on and so forth, basically I wasnât particularly mad about that, because it seemed that at least her intentions were good. But the still, the criticism was legit, and it soon became obvious that she either wasnât listening, or when she did, she did it so thoughtlessly that as a result she kept putting her foot in her mouth in whole new ways and being unapologetic about it - doing away with all of the goodwill I had for her. Good intentions are fine but the road to hell is paved with them.
And I think that her involvement with TERFs likely started out the same way? She was kind of an icon and role model, a woman who struggled against all odds and became unbelievably successful using her talents, influencing an entire generation, leaving her seemingly indelible mark on YA/kidsâ lit, etc. She seemed to be keenly aware of this and seemed to want to promote feminist ideas. And at the first controversies I was like, okay, she clearly has good intentions but is obviously not familiar with the discourse on these issues (which, frankly, can be fairly impenetrable) and it can be easy for people to accept some TERF-adjacent ideas without thinking, because they can sound reasonable at first. Except⌠she then kept doing it. Despite all the backlash, and sure, backlash can make people dig in their heels, but even so youâd at least think about why youâre getting a backlash in the first place, no? Well, JKR clearly didnât. And thereâs no amount of good intentions (that I still donât doubt she has, misguided though they may be) that make up for not listening and not trying to understand the criticism you receive. Even less so when youâre so influential and have such a huge platform, which youâre unapologetically using to spread harmful ideas.
I mean, when youâre being defended and supported by The Daily Wire and similar cesspools then maybe itâs time to sit down and think about whether this is something youâre OK with, and if not then you might want to figure out how you ended up in this situation and what to do about it⌠not JKR, though. So yeah.
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Thatâs not an excuse. Feminism should not be transphobic. TERFs make as much sense as racist feminism and classist feminism (Which unfortunately exist as well).
(in context it is clear that Emma Goldman was writing about transgender people over 80 years before the transgender umbrella term became known by the wider world.)
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But I never said it was an excuse? That was the point I was making: that this was probably where she was coming from, but a) she never bothered to actually think about the wider implications of these ideas, and b) when criticized, she didnât listen to the criticism.
TERFs are shitty, but going by experience, TERF-adjacent (for lack of a better word) ideas can be easy to accept for people who donât know a lot about what âtransgenderâ actually means. And thatâs where listening and trying to understand comes into the picture, because once you understand that a trans woman is not a âman pretending/trying to be a womanâ you also understand how shitty the ideas spouted by TERFs are. But that takes having an open mind and making an effort to listen and understand, something a lot of people seem to lack.
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Seen in the wild:
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A free upgrade from Satan?
I guess thatâs good, right?
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