If you’d prefer reasoned debate, it will start with a collective realization that mobs can’t do much except make noise. They’re not actually very big, for starters — the number of people who replied to Rowling’s tweet wouldn’t fill most Texas college football stadiums, and reasonable people don’t choose their views by polling the crowd at the Aggies-Longhorns game.
More important, most mobs aren’t committed to the effort beyond flicking a thumb. Institutions that ignore the mob are often astonished at how little difference all the outrage makes to their business — and I’d bet Rowling won’t see much evidence of this controversy in her royalty statements.
The censorious power of Mrs. Grundys always depends on the cooperation of the governed, which is why their regime collapsed the moment the baby boomers shrugged off their finger-wagging. If Rowling provides an unmissable public demonstration that it is safe to ignore the current crop, we can hope others will follow her example, and the dictatorship of the proscriptariat will fall as quickly as it arose.
Megan McArdle writing in the Washington Post, quoted by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, 2020-01-02.
October 7, 2024
June 4, 2024
J.K. Rowling’s most convincing and true-to-life villain in the Harry Potter stories
I’m with Jon Miltimore on this — J.K. Rowling’s most disturbing and best-written villain isn’t “He Who Must Not Be Named” or any of the other (frankly cardboard-y) magical villains … it’s Dolores Umbridge, a career bureaucrat who could have been drawn from any western civil service senior management position:
Umbridge, portrayed in the films by English actress Imelda Staunton, isn’t some apparition of the underworld or a creature of the Dark Forest. She’s the Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic, the man who runs the government (the Ministry of Magic) in Rowling’s fictional world.
Umbridge wears pink, preaches about “decorum” in a saccharine voice, smiles constantly, and resembles a sweet but stern grandmother. Her intense, unblinking eyes, however, suggest something malevolent lurks beneath. And boy, does it.
“The gently smiling Dolores Umbridge, with her girlish voice, toadlike face, and clutching, stubby fingers, is the greatest make-believe villain to come along since Hannibal Lecter,” horror author Stephen King wrote in a review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the book in which Umbridge is introduced.
Umbridge’s “Desire to Control, to Punish”
What makes Umbridge so evil that King would compare her to Hannibal Lecter, the man widely considered the greatest villain of all time?
I asked myself this question, and I believe the answer lies in the fact that Dolores Umbridge is so real — and in more ways than one.
First, it’s noteworthy that Rowling based Umbridge on an actual person from her past, a teacher she once had “whom I disliked intensely on sight”.
In a blog post written years ago, Rowling explained that her dislike of the woman was almost irrational (and apparently mutual). Though the woman had a “pronounced taste for twee accessories” — including “a tiny little plastic bow slide” and a fondness for “pale lemon” colors which Rowling said was more “appropriate to a girl of three” — Rowling said “a lack of real warmth or charity” lurked below her sugary exterior.
The description reminded me of another detestable literary villain: Nurse Ratched, the despicable antagonist of Randle Murphy in Ken Kesey’s magnificent 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Kesey’s description of Nurse Ratched conjures to mind a character much like Umbridge.
“Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive baby doll, skin like flesh-colored enamel, blend of white and cream and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils — everything working together except the color on her lips and fingernails …”
While there are similarities in the appearances of Dolores Umbridge and Nurse Ratched, their true commonality is what’s underneath their saccharine exteriors.
April 8, 2024
“At the time of writing, the Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf edges J. K. Rowling in the battle for the inaugural title of Scotland’s Most Hateful Person”
At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage updates us on the mental gymnastics required to navigate Scotland’s new hate crime law:
To the surprise of many terminally online folks, J.K. Rowling is not the top offender under Scotland’s new hate crime law. That “honour” goes to Scotland’s current first minister, Humza Yousaf for a speech delivered several years ago.
One-third of the Scottish police are yet to receive any training on this sweeping new law. Amongst the rank-and-file, the spectre of threatening and abusive material seeping out of public performances such as plays creeps like sarin gas. Such forbidden filth threatens to mutate ordinary Scots into far-right zombies, parroting Andrew Tate’s pitiful jock philosophy.
Police have absorbed over 4,000 reports of hate crimes in the first 48 hours. Mercifully, many Scots are still evidently well-versed in the timeless Scottish art of taking the piss. At the time of writing, the Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf edges J. K. Rowling in the battle for the inaugural title of Scotland’s Most Hateful Person. Second prize, I believe, is a set of steak knives.
Not to worry, those coppers recently announced a new “proportional response strategy”. Police will no longer investigate crimes such as smashed windows, or run-of-the-mill thefts. This “new approach” to policing, which contravenes the very definition of policing, saves the rozzers 24,000 fewer investigations and 130,000 man-hours per year. That leaves plenty of time to investigate those unenlightened beings poxed with the false belief that women don’t have cocks.
Nobody has any idea what is going on. On the first day of the Scottish Unenlightenment, a Scottish National Party minister said J. K. Rowling’s gender-critical tweets could bring the coppers to her door.
On Twitter, J. K. Rowling had reeled off a string of photographs of trans people. She then called those biological men “men”.
Siobhian Brown, the SNP’s community safety minister, had claimed referring to a trans woman as a “he” would not break the new law. Later on, she said the police would decide whether such misgendering would count as a hate crime.
“It could be reported, and it could be investigated. Whether or not the police would think it was criminal is up to Police Scotland for that”, said Brown.
You could taste the acrid, small-town glee steaming from the repressive and literal minded. Rajan Barot, a former fraud prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, warned Rowling that her Twitter posts, many of which state that biological men are not and cannot become women, would most likely contravene the new law and advised her to delete them.
Police later confirmed the very rich and very visible author would not face prosecution for her stubborn grasp of biological reality — at least whilst the universe watched on in a state of unadulterated fremdschämen.
February 16, 2023
The mass spell to destroy Hogwarts Legacy turns out to be a squib
All the angry people on social media had a new thing to be angry about: the release of a new online game based on the works of she-who-must-not-be-named (that’d be J.K. Rowling if you haven’t been keeping up with the woke’s ledger book of cancelled persons). They’d gather in their mighty legions, denounce the evil woman and the tech company would shiver and shake and then apologize for offending them and pull the game from the market, just like so many other companies had fallen to their online rage before.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way, as Tom Knighton relates:
The extreme left, those we term as “woke”, like to think they have a great deal of power. They think they’re the majority of the nation, and that they can shift the world based on their own whims.
And, in the past, it sure looked like it.
They’d get on Twitter and scream in outrage and brands would back down. They’d issue apologies and capitulate with the mob.
Then JK Rowling got on their bad side. She doesn’t think transwomen are women, that they haven’t lived with the struggles that women grow up with.
So, they decided to destroy anything they can associate with her.
That included the new video game, Hogwarts Legacy. Before the game came out, they tried to sabotage it on Steam, describing it as a “genocide simulator”.
I’ll be honest, that made me want to play the game. Apparently, I was far from alone.
Hogwarts Legacy has got off to a very big start at UK games retail, and is comfortably the No.1 game of the week (GfK data).
It is the biggest launch for any Harry Potter game ever, with sales 64% higher than the previous best — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone from 2001. In fact, the biggest week for a Harry Potter game wasn’t a launch week at all, it was the second week of the Philosopher’s Stone (due to hype around the movie). Even compared to that week, Hogwarts Legacy was still bigger by 2%.
This result is more impressive when you consider this is just for physical sales. Hogwarts Legacy would have received a substantial number of digital downloads (that data will come later in the week), whereas Philosopher’s Stone didn’t have any digital sales back in 2001. Therefore, the success will be even more pronounced once all the data is in.
In other words, the woke don’t have the pull they like to believe they do.
In a rational world, companies would see this and take it to heart: despite their apparent popularity on some social media sites, the very very woke are a tiny layer of froth on the ocean of non-woke customers. It’s often said that the terminally online think that Twitter is the real world — which is why Elon Musk taking over their preferred online megaphone was so traumatic to so many of them — but they’re mostly bellowing at one another, not at the population as a whole.
February 15, 2023
J.K. Rowling’s critics reach the “Burn the witch!” phase
In The Free Press, Megan Phelps-Roper introduces a new audio series featuring extensive interaction with J.K. Rowling herself:
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books were insanely popular among Millennials until she had the temerity to say things the Trans* activists hated. Now, they try to sell customized copies of her books that omit her name completely.
J.K. Rowling is arguably the most successful author in the history of publishing, with the possible exception of God. And “Harry Potter” was a kind of bible for my generation. Since its publication beginning in the late ’90s, the series has taught tens of millions of children about virtues like loyalty, courage, and love — about the inclusion of outsiders and the celebration of difference. The books illustrated the idea of moral complexity, how a person who may at first appear sinister can turn out to be a hero after all.
The author herself became part of the legend, too. A broke, abused, and depressed single mother — writing in longhand at cafes across Edinburgh while her baby girl slept in a stroller beside her — she had spun a tale that begat a global phenomenon. If “Harry Potter” was a bible, then Rowling became a kind of saint.
When she gave the Harvard commencement address in 2008, she was introduced as a social, moral, and political inspiration. Her speech that day was partly about imagination: “the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared”.
“We do not need magic to transform our world,” Rowling told the rapt audience. “We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.”
The uproarious applause that greeted her in 2008 is hard to imagine today. It’s hard to imagine Harvard — let alone any prestigious American university — welcoming Rowling. Indeed, I’m not sure she’d be allowed to give a reading at many local libraries.
That’s because to many, Rowling has since become a kind of Voldemort — the villain of villains in her own stories.
It all blew up in the summer of 2020.
“‘People who menstruate'”, Rowling wrote on Twitter, quoting a headline. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
She continued: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
It’s hard to capture the breadth of the firestorm that followed.
September 9, 2022
“Far from fighting against the establishment, the woke are the establishment”
In Spiked, Andrew Doyle discusses the reactions to his announcement that he was writing a book about the ongoing culture wars:
“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle
My new book is about intolerance. I am fascinated by those who prefer only to associate with people who share their own identical worldview, and who interpret the slightest point of political disagreement as evidence of evil. The new religion of group identity and “social justice” has driven once rational people into a state of frenzied bigotry. I want to understand why.
So, back in May, when I announced I was working on a book called The New Puritans, I wasn’t all that surprised to see so many self-proclaimed advocates of “social justice” rush to demonstrate the very phenomenon that I was attempting to explore. Some suggested that they would acquire copies only to burn them. One said that he intended to kick it under the bookshop shelf “so that it could rot in darkness”. Another simply declared that I was “pure scum”. Were any of these people aware that they were proving my point?
Byline Times even claimed that I was waging “a perpetual battle against social justice – fighting against a contrived present world of aggressive ‘woke snowflakes’ in order to return to an imagined past”. This was news to me, given that my book is a defence of progressive and liberal values, and it explicitly criticises those who resort to the “snowflake” slur. I particularly enjoyed the suggestion that my book was an example of someone imagining enemies into existence in order to fight them. It takes some chutzpah to make such a claim of a book you haven’t actually read.
It would seem that the title alone – The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World – was enough to stir the ire of these culture warriors. In a sense, this is unsurprising. One of the key aspects of this ideological movement is that its adherents treat all challenges as a form of heresy that must be quashed. For all that they like to smear their detractors as “bigots”, they forget that the main definition of the word – “a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief or opinion” – applies most accurately to themselves.
Why is it, for instance, that JK Rowling can be so routinely monstered as “hateful” and “transphobic” despite having never said anything hateful or transphobic? Only this week, the Harry Potter author found herself in an exasperating Twitter exchange with someone claiming she had been “outwardly hateful of an entire community”. Rowling quite rightly asked for evidence, to which her detractor replied: “I don’t know where you said it, but I bet you do.” For those taking part in the witch-hunt, the total lack of evidence is simply an inconvenience to be brushed aside.
This is why my book draws comparisons between the hysteria of the “woke” movement and the witch hunts of Salem in the late 17th century. In a burst of collective madness that lasted a little over a year (from February 1692 to May 1693), 20 people were executed for witchcraft on the basis of the testimony of local girls. All of the prosecutions were secured on the basis of “spectral evidence” – what today we might call “lived experience”. The girls simply declared that they had seen these innocent people sign the devil’s book, or that they had been “sending out their spirits” to torment people. This was their “truth”, and so it had to be believed.
January 4, 2022
J.K. Rowling’s subversive tale of a government “controlled by and for the benefit of the self-interested bureaucrat”
No, it’s not a new work by Rowling … it’s a deeply embedded thread of her best-known books in the Harry Potter series (as related in a 2005 article by Benjamin H. Barton for the Michigan Law Review):
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books include a very strong anti-authoritarian thread.
This Essay examines what the Harry Potter series (and particularly the most recent book, The Half-Blood Prince) tells us about government and bureaucracy. There are two short answers. The first is that Rowling presents a government (The Ministry of Magic) that is 100% bureaucracy. There is no discernable executive or legislative branch, and no elections. There is a modified judicial function, but it appears to be completely dominated by the bureaucracy, and certainly does not serve as an independent check on governmental excess.
Second, government is controlled by and for the benefit of the self-interested bureaucrat. The most cold-blooded public choice theorist could not present a bleaker portrait of a government captured by special interests and motivated solely by a desire to increase bureaucratic power and influence. Consider this partial list of government activities: a) torturing children for lying; b) utilizing a prison designed and staffed specifically to suck all life and hope out of the inmates; c) placing citizens in that prison without a hearing; d) allows the death penalty without a trial; e) allowing the powerful, rich or famous to control policy and practice; f) selective prosecution (the powerful go unpunished and the unpopular face trumped-up charges); g) conducting criminal trials without independent defense counsel; h) using truth serum to force confessions; i) maintaining constant surveillance over all citizens; j) allowing no elections whatsoever and no democratic lawmaking process; k) controlling the press.
This partial list of activities brings home just how bleak Rowling’s portrait of government is. The critique is even more devastating because the governmental actors and actions in the book look and feel so authentic and familiar. Cornelius Fudge, the original Minister of Magic, perfectly fits our notion of a bumbling politician just trying to hang onto his job. Delores Umbridge is the classic small-minded bureaucrat who only cares about rules, discipline, and her own power. Rufus Scrimgeour is a George Bush-like war leader, inspiring confidence through his steely resolve. The Ministry itself is made up of various sub-ministries with goofy names (e.g., The Goblin Liaison Office or the Ludicrous Patents Office) enforcing silly sounding regulations (e.g., The Decree for the Treatment of Non-Wizard Part-Humans or The Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery). These descriptions of government jibe with our own sarcastic views of bureaucracy and bureaucrats: bureaucrats tend to be amusing characters that propagate and enforce laws of limited utility with unwieldy names. When you combine the light-hearted satire with the above list of government activities, however, Rowling’s critique of government becomes substantially darker and more powerful. Furthermore, Rowling eliminates many of the progressive defenses of bureaucracy. The most obvious omission is the elimination of the democratic defense. The first line of attack against public choice theory is always that bureaucrats must answer to elected officials, who must in turn answer to the voters. Rowling eliminates this defense by presenting a wholly unelected government.
H/T to Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds for the link.
September 17, 2020
Book burning’s back on the menu, boys!
Brendan O’Neill on the latest fad for the ultrawoke celebrities — book burning.
J.K. Rowling
So it turns out that Jedward, with their quiffed Aryan hair and strangely intense mannerisms, don’t only look like a couple of members of Hitler Youth who’ve been on a shopping spree at TK Maxx. They sound like it too. Yesterday, ever keen to jump on a bandwagon, even if it’s a bandwagon of misogynistic hate, the Shining twins of Irish pop suggested to their Twitter followers that they should burn JK Rowling’s next novel when it is published. “Does anyone need firewood this winter!”, they tweeted. “JK’s new book is perfect to burn next to a Romantic fire. Aww get all cozy and comfy can’t wait.”
Let’s leave to one side the industrial levels of gall it must require for two blokes who don’t know the difference between an exclamation mark and a question mark to have a pop at the most successful British author of all time. The more striking thing about Jedward’s tweet is that it suggests book-burning is back. Their tween-fascist cry for the burning of Rowling’s forthcoming novel was retweeted and liked thousands of times, by armies of so-called trans allies who now look upon Rowling as a real-life Voldemort: a despicable, evil figure whose works should be tossed on to raging bonfires as the woke mob yelps with delight.
The hatred for JK Rowling is out of control. It goes far beyond the everyday attempted cancellations and screeching Twittermob assaults on anyone who dares to deviate from the correct-think of the PC elites. The hatred for Rowling is far more raw, far more intense, far more irrational.
Her intellectual sin, her speechcrime, is of course that she believes in biological sex. She thinks there are differences between men and women. She thinks biological males should bugger off out of women’s changing rooms, sporting tournaments, prisons, rape-crisis centres, and so on. Many of us agree with her. And for this, she is frequently bombarded with rape threats and death threats. “Suck my cock!”, sexist pigs tweet at her. They invite her to die in a fire. They send her explicit pornography. This week #RIPJKRowling trended on Twitter. These people are insane. When your “activism” involves tirelessly insulting and sexually harassing a woman for having a thought that is different to your own, you need to have a serious word with yourself.
The deranged Rowling hate intensified this week after it was reported that her next Strike novel – the detective series she writes under the name Robert Galbraith – will involve a backstory about a man who dresses as a woman and then goes around murdering women. “Transphobia!”, the woke Twitterati predictably yelled. Not for the first time the sexist fury with Rowling for having the temerity to be a woman who thinks for herself was in large part inflamed by Pink News, the online gay magazine that has done more than most to depict women who are sceptical of certain aspects of transgenderism as “TERFs” – that is, witches, bitches, uppity broads who really ought to do what the editors at Pink News tell them to.
July 26, 2020
J.K. Rowling receives an apology
In his first Weekly Dish newsletter, Andrew Sullivan reports on the retraction and apology by The Day to J.K. Rowling:
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books have been pivotal for many Millennials in encouraging them to move away from traditional religious beliefs.
We’re used to public apologies by now, but this one is a little different. It comes from a magazine for schoolchildren in England, called The Day. It reads:
We accept that our article implied that … JK Rowling … had attacked and harmed trans people. The article was critical of JK Rowling personally and suggested that our readers should boycott her work and shame her into changing her behaviour … We did not intend to suggest that JK Rowling was transphobic or that she should be boycotted. We accept that our comparisons of JK Rowling to people such as Picasso, who celebrated sexual violence, and Wagner, who was praised by the Nazis for his antisemitic and racist views, were clumsy, offensive and wrong … We unreservedly apologise to JK Rowling for the offence caused, and are happy to retract these false allegations and to set the record straight.
The Day had been referring to JK Rowling’s open letter on trans issues, which you can read in its entirety here and judge for yourself.
I have to say it’s good to see this apology in print. It remains simply amazing to me that the author of the Harry Potter books, a bone fide liberal, a passionate feminist and a strong supporter of gay equality can be casually described, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp did yesterday, as “one of the most visible anti-trans figures in our culture.” It is, in fact, bonkers. Rowling has absolutely no issue with the existence, dignity and equality of transgender people. Her now infamous letter is elegant, calm, reasonable and open-hearted. Among other things, Rowling wrote: “I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection.”
She became interested in the question after a consultant, Maya Forsteter, lost a contract in the UK for believing and saying that sex is a biological reality. When Forsteter took her case to an employment tribunal, the judge ruled against her, arguing that such a view was a form of bigotry, in so far as it seemed to deny the gender of trans people (which, of course, it doesn’t). Rowling was perturbed by this. And I can see why: in order either to defend or oppose transgender rights, you need to be able to discuss what being transgender means. That will necessarily require an understanding of the human mind and body, the architectonic role of biology in the creation of two sexes, and the nature of the small minority whose genital and biological sex differs from the sex of their brain.
This is not an easy question. It requires some thinking through. And in a liberal democracy, we should be able to debate the subject freely and openly. I’ve done my best to do that in this column, and have come to many of the conclusions Rowling has. She does not question the existence of trans people, or the imperative to respect their dignity and equality as fully-formed human beings. She believes they should be protected from discrimination in every field, and given the same opportunities as anyone else. She would address any trans person as the gender they present, as would I. Of course. That those of us who hold these views are now deemed bigots is, quite simply, preposterous.
[…]
It pains me to see where this debate has gone. There’s so much common ground. And I do not doubt that taking into account the lived experiences of trans people is important. But if we cannot state an objective fact without being deemed a bigot, and if we cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate, we have all but abandoned any pretense of liberal democracy. And if a woman as sophisticated and eloquent and humane as JK Rowling is now deemed a foul bigot for having a different opinion, then the word bigotry has ceased to have any meaning at all.
July 8, 2020
Harry Potter fandom, Millennials, and the continued decline of traditional religious beliefs
In The Critic, Oliver Wiseman talks to Tara Isabella Burton about her book Strange Rites:
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books have been pivotal for many Millennials in encouraging them to move away from traditional religious beliefs.
I want to start with Harry Potter, which is — perhaps surprisingly — central to the argument you make in the book, so, as an introduction to your broader thesis, what does Harry Potter have to do with America’s new religions?
It’s funny. When Harry Potter first came out in the nineties, there was a flurry American Christian voices saying “This book promotes witchcraft. There’s going to be a whole new religious movement devoted to Harry Potter books.” In the way they meant it, that was absolutely not true. But I think that there was something to it in terms of an inadvertent change to the religious landscape.
What Harry Potter did, or, more accurately, what it was the canary in the coal mine for, was a transformation, linked to the rise of at-home internet access, in how we talk about cultural properties andhow we relate to cultural properties. The transition to an internet space defined by user-generated content and what is often called participatory culture coincided with the publication of the Harry Potter books.
Between the first Harry Potter book’s release in 1997 and the fourth book’s publication in 2000 we went from 19 million Americans with internet access to more than 100 million. It’s that backdrop that really explains the shift. You did have fan cultures before. There were Star Wars conventions, for example, but there was quite a high bar to entry. You had to get on the right mailing list and it was done via post. It was quite a lot of work. You couldn’t just log on and enter a community, which is really what could happen with Harry Potter fandom.
J.K. Rowling was also one of the first major writers to openly accept and embrace fan fiction. So what you ended up seeing was something that started with Harry Potter fandom that then became an element of fandom online more broadly which in turn, I would argue, shaped millennial-and-younger culture. It was this idea that you weren’t just a reader of consumer of texts. It wasn’t just a top down hierarchical thing. Instead, mediated through the anonymity of the internet, you a kind of tribalism from talking to people in different geographical areas as well as things like fan fiction and later meme culture that meant you could change, shift, reimagine a text in your own way. And what’s so interesting about that is that sensibility — the sensibility that we have not only the right but the responsibility, the authority as consumers to also be creators, to rework ideas outside of existing texts — has spilled over into all aspects of our political life and of our religious life. And that is really something that is the product of user generated content and the internet.
To bring this to religion more specifically, 36 per cent of Americans born after 1985 are religiously unaffiliated, compared to about 23 per cent of the national average. That’s a huge generational shift in religious affiliation and organisation. That is not the same thing as saying that these are atheists or that these people are not religious. Some 72 per cent of them say they believe in some sort of higher power. About 17 per cent say they believe in the Judaeo-Christian God.
We’re in a religious or spiritual landscape that privileges mixing and matching, and unbundling — a bit of tarot here, a bit of meditation there. And a resistance to institutional and authoritative declarations in terms of how religion should be practised is very much something that has its roots in internet culture, of which Harry Potter was a forerunner.
June 12, 2020
J.K. Rowling on her most recent “cancellation”
I know a lot of Harry Potter fans are upset with their formerly favourite author for her stance on transgenderism … or what they’ve heard about her stance … or what their friends have said about her stance … so J.K. Rowling has posted an essay on her own site explaining what happened and how she has been coping with being “cancelled” so many times:
… as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.
The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.
Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.
The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:
“Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.”
Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification “youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.”
Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.
The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not “align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.”
The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.
When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a “mental hermaphrodite” and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: “It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.”
As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.
I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to “just meet some trans people.” I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.
December 21, 2019
J.K. Rowling falls afoul of the woke zeitgeist on Twitter
The author of the immensely popular Harry Potter books suddenly finds herself on the wrong side of a Twitter firing squad:
The persecution of women who question transgenderism has got to stop.
Standing up for women’s rights is a risky business these days. Just ask JK Rowling. She has had merry hell rained down upon her over the past 24 hours. She has been called a stupid cunt, a bitch, trash, an old woman and so fucking ugly by an army of tweeting sexists. Her crime? She defended the right of a woman to express her opinion about sex and gender without losing her job.
The witch-hunting of JK Rowling, the ceaseless online abuse of her over the past day and night, exposes how unhinged, hateful and outright misogynistic the transgender movement has become. Rowling’s sin was to tweet in defence of Maya Forstater, the charity worker who was sacked for her belief that there are two sexes and that sex is immutable. That is, a man cannot become a woman, and vice versa. This week, an employment tribunal outrageously upheld Ms Forstater’s sacking and in the process it decreed what it is acceptable for people in the workplace to think and say. The judge said the kind of views held by Forstater are “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”. This essentially gives a green light to the harassment, isolation and expulsion from the workplace of anyone who questions the transgender ideology.
Not surprisingly, this chilling diktat, this judge-led effort to outline what opinions we are allowed to hold, alarmed people who care about freedom of conscience and freedom of speech and who think that women should not be punished for holding particular opinions. There is a foul, pre-modern vibe to the idea that women should keep their filthy opinions to themselves and if they don’t they should be expelled from polite society. Trans-sceptical feminists in academia and the cultural sphere responded to the censorious persecution of Ms Forstater by tweeting their backing of her – #IStandWithMaya – and calling for freedom of speech for women who think biological sex is an actual thing. Rowling joined in. The bile she has since received perfectly illustrates the problem at hand – that it has become tantamount to a speechcrime to say there are two sexes.
[…]
There is a powerfully Orwellian streak in the punishment of people for expressing obvious truths. That you can now be sacked and demonised for saying men are men and women are women confirms that the trans tyranny is out of control. This is why Rowling’s intervention was so important. The only way this woke censorship and persecution of disobedient women will be countered is if more individuals and institutions stand up to it. Everyone must now say what has, surreally, become unsayable: that sex is real, that sex is immutable, and that if you are born male, you will die male, regardless of what you do to yourself.
July 16, 2015
A not-so-crazy fan theory about the Harry Potter series
J.M. McNabb makes the case that one particular fan theory explains so much of the J.K. Rowling books:
It always seemed odd that Harry Potter’s aunt and uncle, the Dursleys, would be good enough to take him in and raise him, only to keep him locked in a cupboard under the stairs and generally treat him like a moldering hunk of Hitler’s shit. Why not just dump him in an orphanage if they were planning on treating him like an old boot for the entirety of his childhood? In a series full of magical beings, one of the most fantastic elements is that these completely normal people managed to be so terrible without the use of any spells
… or did they? A theory by Graphic Nerdity claims that the Dursleys were originally a normal, supportive couple, but continued exposure to Harry’s cursed ass turned them into resentful hate beasts.
Why It’s Not That Crazy:
Harry, as we eventually find out, is technically a horcrux. For those of you who aren’t fluent in nerd, horcruxes are cursed objects containing fragments of the evil Voldemort’s soul, and they’ve been known to turn people into assholes. In the second movie, Ginny Weasley is brainwashed by a book that doesn’t even have “Dianetics” in the title, because it’s a horcrux. It contains a piece of the venomous soul of the lord of hate magic and wizard murder. We also see Ron start acting like a total dick after putting on a locket that’s, you guessed it, also a horcrux.
Most importantly, we find out later in the series that Harry himself has a part of Voldemort’s soul trapped inside of him, like Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest. So if Ron and Ginny turned evil after being exposed to a horcrux over a matter of weeks and months, just imagine how the Dursleys could be affected after living with one for 10 years. Harry Potter was a magical cancer gnawing hungrily away their souls.
This discovery makes the biggest douchebags of the Potter-verse not villains, but victims. Heroes, even. The fact that their adoption of a child who was also a cursed object merely resulted in them turning into emotionally abusive turds instead of a family of secret cannibals is cause for commendation.
