Unfortunately I think enough people don’t feel strongly enough that transphobia is wrong to really take a stand on it. They might not be actively terfs themselves or whatever but they don’t care enough to be inconvenienced by having to take a stance. If that makes sense.
It might be because they genuinely don't know. Like, they might've heard something about her bigotry, but there's a surprising amount of people who don't know the full extent of it.
*I* didn't know the full extent of it until after I realized I was trans myself, to my great shame.
I knew she had bad views. My attitude at the time was "she's always been off, I don't need to agree with someone 100% to enjoy their work."
I still generally agree with that principle. But I had no idea how extreme her views were, nor how central they were to her public persona. I also didn't know how mean-spirited she was, I was only familiar with the polite, massaged, PR-approved crap that always contained statements like "I know and love trans people" and "live your best life in peace and security."
It was only after I realized that I was trans and became personally invested in trans issues that I began to educate myself, and that included learning about how bad Rowling really is.
And I'm really ashamed of that, because it shouldn't take becoming a member of a marginalized group to educate yourself about their experiences and the issues they face.
On the other hand, no one is ever gonna know as much about an issue they don't have a personal investment in as people that do.
My point in all this is to say: most people don't understand what's going on with JK Rowling. They know she said some controversial things about trans people. And that's probably the extent of it.
Yeah, it's a very niche issue for most people and they may tend to swallow the propaganda that there are a lot of trans people just being difficult.
It's a bit like Palestine, a lot of people are casually Zionist because their attitude is "well, the Jews deserve a homeland, they have had a hard time, why can't the Arabs just share"
Bingo, a lot of people that are still huge fans of her genuinely don't really get it... and I understand why... if I loved someone and their work that much I would actively try to avoid any bad press surrounding that person
but usually once they're exposed to her shit they drop her like a fucking rock
I still love Harry Potter and that universe and its lore, I disregard that Jo has anything to do with it whenever possible \*shrug\* she's so detached from the property now, all she does is get residual royalties whenever her books are sold or the books are used as a source for some media... WB has basically bought her out of the Wizarding World, so she no longer has anything or earns anything from the Wizarding World products (movies, tv, games, products, etc.). I mean, they had to move fucking heaven and earth and promise Jo wouldn't be anywhere within 15 miles of the set of the HBO Harry Potter reunion special in order to get Emma and Rupert to consider showing up lol so yeah
Like many, I grew up reading Harry Potter and went through that phase when I was 11-12 when it was my whole personality. I saw all the movies, re-read all the books, went to all the theme parks, watched HP youtubers etc. And JK Rowling was part of that love for Harry Potter, I found her so inspiring and she made me fall in love with reading again.
So when around 2020 I first started hearing things about her I’ll admit I was not quick to condemn her. Tbh I didn’t really look into it all that much and dismissed it, thinking someone who wrote such wonderful books about schools where you were welcome, whatever your background and even if you were a little different to others couldn’t possibly be the transphobic bigot people were calling her.
Sadly around the beginning of 2022, even I couldn’t look away from the absolutely awful and ridiculous things she was spouting on Twitter around trans people, and it was clear she was completely obsessed. I wish I had seen it sooner. I think a lot of people might be like I was, looking away, thinking people must be being dramatic, or just don’t care all that much about trans rights. They need to wake up.
Because rocking the boat is a cardinal social sin in many people's view. There is a lot of social pressure to be agreeable and to take the most generous possible view of disagreement as it favours someone who has social capital.
And Rowling has a *lot* of social capital, with her plucky origin story, her status as beloved children's author, and her image as benevolent billionaire patron of women's charities. She seems superficially *nice* and *sensible*. Superficially.
She is also much cannier in how she weaponises prejudices than someone like Linehan, so she knows how to win arguments without looking so much like a weirdo.
> She is also much cannier in how she weaponises prejudices than someone like Linehan, so she knows how to win arguments without looking so much like a weirdo.
You can tell when her statements have been publicist vetted. Her other statements are full of slurs and misgendering, when her statements are publicist vetted, suddenly it's about nothing besides women right. Woman defined in such a way as to eliminate all trans civil rights. Just like to defend white rights we need to eliminate black people's civil rights - just an extension of that same argument. You talk about "white rights" and eliminate black people from the discussion.
I guess it’s a toxic cocktail of a few things.
Another comment here mentioned that a lot of people grew up with these books. I’d add that a lot of people probably also have children that grew up with them, or have read and enjoyed the books themselves. I know my mom at one point was loving the first book. I don’t think she finished the series. And for parents happy that their children were reading it was probably a godsend.
In addition, Rowling is rich and has a lot of powerful friends in high places. There are probably authors who have “blurbs” from Rowling praising their books on the back cover of them. Anything with her name on it is gilded, no matter how poorly written it is. Her publishers love that.
She’s also very litigious and prone to threatening lawsuits over the smallest things. Like the meme that mocked her poorly worded “porn being shown to kids” comment. Or when she basically showed the faces of three activists protesting outside of her castle. With that in mind, most may be afraid to speak up and out for fear of repercussions, whether it be from her angry mob or her lawyers.
And the foundation of this is…people just not caring about trans folks in general.
While we have cis allies (and damn good ones at that in some cases), a lot of cis people for the most part just…don’t care about trans rights or culture. Or care to learn. It doesn’t affect them. So they can have opinions like “yeah if they say they’re not their assigned sex at birth that’s fine, none of my business” or “I support trans people living and doing whatever they like but some of this is going too far for me.” So Rowling’s words sound reasonable, because said cis people aren’t curious or interested in learning.
That’s all a perfect storm for people shutting their mouths when it comes to Rowling and being unwilling to condemn her.
I always think it's important to emphasise to people that everyone suffers from prejudice like that. It's not the case that transphobia doesn't affect cis people.
For me, as someone in a same-sex relationship, the thing I find particularly disturbing is the constant obsession with trans women in women's sports, which here in the UK they've been allowed to do for almost twenty years. My partner's a candidate at the upcoming UK General Election, and the incumbent Conservative MP (who has been there since 2005) has mentioned this multiple times at the hustings. After one of them, I approached him and asked if he talked about this matter so much during his first election campaign in 2005. He said he didn't, because it wasn't an issue then. I said, 'That was one year after it was legalised - why is it more of an issue twenty years later than it was then, if it matters to you so much?' He said, 'There are more people doing it now.' I was just like, 'Well, of course there are going to be more people doing something twenty years after it's legalised that there will be one year after it's legalised! You could make that point about the legalisation of anything.'
But the very fact that he used this logic means that anyone could have their rights taken away. And I take same-sex marriage as an example, which was legalised in the UK in 2013 with the first ceremonies taking place in 2014. It's entirely possible, using the exact same logic, that a few years down the line right-wing politicians could say, 'You know what, we made that decision at the time, but there are just too many same-sex couples getting married now' and take away our rights on that. This is something I think it's really important to emphasise over and over - that if taking away people's rights is legitimised, it could happen to anyone. We all suffer from being in a society that accepts the removal of people's rights as being legitimate.
She hides behind the veneer of feminism which confuses people, in my opinion. Also, lots of people are unfortunately transphobic/bigoted. Finally, she has a lot of resources, and has already used them against some of her critics.
> She hides behind the veneer of feminism which confuses people, in my opinion.
Recently when terfs do this I've begun criticizing them for "wokeness" and "identity politics". They're always flabbergasted. They are the only ones allowed to talk out of two sides of their mouth apparently. Intersectional parasites.
She was a cultural icon for a time in the UK, not just for Harry Potter, but for donating so much of her wealth that she effectively downgraded herself on the richest lists. She supported centre-left policies like benefits and social housing. She had a classic rags to riches story, presented herself well, and came off like a genuinely nice lady. So I think it's hard for a lot of people to believe she'd be so hateful and most of the general public don't know the full story and think she merely said one or two slightly controversial things about gender on Twitter.
Incidentally, the rags to riches story has been exaggerated quite a lot. She didn't grow up in poverty, and she had a University education.
It's true that she was quite hard up at the time of the publication of the first book, but that had only been the case for a short while and came about as a result of her having hurriedly escaped an abusive marriage (which of course is still something to admire no matter your opinion of the person themselves). But she had friends she could rely on, and would likely have got back on her feet before long anyway. It's not the case that she was this poverty-stricken woman who lifted herself out of poverty with her books.
In their eyes she hasn't gone far enough, or what she's doing doesn't impact them directly. That said, a lot of those opinions are changing over the recent months.
I think a lot of people are not on Twitter, or don't read that type of news at all that reports stuff like this. I just realised how bad the situation actually was with her quite recently.
(When I read news I normally go for local news about my community or news about ongoing war in Europe, not celebrity gossip)
Nothing appears in the news from her besides her publicist vetted statements. Nobody reads her actual twitter feed where she constantly sexually harasses people solely for their being trans, or being trans allies. Because she is so litigious, and the darling of the British establishment, the papers are afraid to print anything true about her.
She still is good using flowery most of the time and be insidious passive agressive evil.
harder to pinpoint. Plus she hides as lovely lady she isnt , and victim.
I don't think it's that people are unwilling to condemn her. It could be that they genuinely don't know how bigoted she has become, or perhaps always has been.
But she's shown before that she thinks anyone that does condemn her is either a woman who seeks male approval or doesn't want to ruin their career, or a man who is either a misogynist or - to paraphrase her own words - "is arguing for his own right to enter single-sex spaces, and feign outrage when this point is put to them, gibbering that they're just being good, virtuous progressives, but are personally enthralled by the idea of women and girls losing basic protections" - so perhaps they think it would be rather fruitless to waste their time condemning someone who has shown time and again she has no desire whatsoever to entertain another point of view, despite claiming otherwise.
Additionally, she is known to threaten legal action for the slightest critique, like when she forced that journalist to apologize to her because she was called out for denying an actual Nazi war crime, and she knows that few people have the financial means to challenge her legally. Very, very manipulative, if you ask me.
I feel like at some point, her obsession with threatening legal action will come back to bite her. She'll say it to someone who actually does turn out to have a decent amount of money, and they'll say, 'All right then, bring it on.'
Or else, it will happen the other way around, like when Jack Monroe was libelled by Katie Hopkins (who mistook her for the journalist Laurie Penny). Monroe told Hopkins they wouldn't sue as long as she donated a certain amount of money to a refugee charity. Hopkins refused, so Monroe sued her and won that case. I'd love to see that happen, and I think it could - Rowling is so unhinged nowadays I can easily imagine that there'll come a point where she says something about someone that is provably untrue, and that person is able to fight back.
I know this isn't what the quote means, but it holds true
"Can't, doesn't have a penis." The Worlds Strongest - TFS
People like Rowling play off the fact that their women as a way of silencing their opponents and making it look like their more oppressed than they actually are. It's also the reason why we constantly hear about trans women and not trans men in sports. If a guy used that excuse, they would be laughed out of their league, and well, those women laughed out of their leagues but not be given front page articles and prime time airing.
> making it look like their more oppressed than they actually are
They are not just victims, they are exceptional victims, and no one's victimhood can amount to more than a molehill weighed against them.
I think it’s a combination of many things.
The first HP book was published 27 years ago and had a massive impact on society.
The publishers initially targeted children but the book was enjoyed by adults too. At a time when mobile phones and video game consoles were increasing in popularity, the Harry Potter books encouraged children to read. I personally remember sitting impatiently in my living room at nine years old, face pressed against the window, watching the Royal Mail van make its way down my street and stopping at almost every house to deliver pre-ordered copies of The Goblet of Fire.
The first film was released in 2001 with a cast of well-established, popular actors. At this point, Rowling had already published the fourth book. The film was a success and so it naturally made sense to adapt the rest of the books to film.
The whole franchise has been an international success and has become about so much more than Rowling - there’s the studio tour in London, Wizarding World in Orlando, The Cursed Child… In the UK, it’s boosted tourism and contributed an insane amount to the economy. It’s probably for this reason that Rowling’s views are not heavily publicised.
She spouts her bullshit on Twitter which is nowhere near as popular as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. If she were to post across other platforms there may be a greater awareness of just how vile and harmful her rhetoric is.
And as others have mentioned, the lack of support and understanding of the trans community means that people simply don’t care.
It’s unfortunate (yet well-deserved) that her blatant, hateful transphobia is now part of the legacy she will leave behind.
I think this is the best summation. At its peak, Harry Potter was the 21st century’s equivalent of the Beatles. Imagine trying to cancel the Beatles after one of them said something controversial. Spoiler alert: the Christian Right circa 1966 absolutely tried to cancel the Beatles after an American teen magazine reprinted a series of profiles on the individual Beatles that had originally appeared in a London newspaper. John Lennon’s profile had a brief passage where he talked about religion and had said “the Beatles are more popular than Jesus”, which was the quote the US teen mag used as the front cover headline. Records were banned by radio stations in the south, radio stations organized record burnings, even the KKK protested the Beatles’ concert in Memphis. The cancelling didn’t work because, for one, reasonable people saw through the bullshit, and secondly, they were Too Big To Take Down. The only difference between canceling the Beatles and cancelling JK Rowling is this:people who think themselves as “reasonable” think they are seeing through what they think is bullshit. Even though the reason for cancelling JKR is not bullshit.
She's the darling of the British establishment, anything negative you say about Saint Joanne is going to be universal front page news in every paper with a distorted and disingenuous headline and article.
To quote Contrapoints:
>...is the backlash against J.K. Rowling a witch hunt? Unequivocally, no. It's very thoroughly deserved. But I will say this, a movement can't get along without a devil, and across the whole political spectrum there is a misogynistic tendency to choose a female devil, whether it's Anita Bryant, Hillary Clinton, Marie Antoinette, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or J.K. Rowling. And there's always gonna be people who seize on any opportunity to be misogynistic. So I would advise trans people and our allies to keep in mind, that J.K. Rowling is not the final boss of transphobia. She's not our devil. The devil is the Republican Party, the Conservative Party. The devil is patriarchy. It's the right-wing men who will be the ones to put Gender Critical theory into brutal practice.
>Anita Bryant, Posie Parker, and J.K. Rowling, are, to borrow a term from TERFs, handmaidens. TERFs are the real handmaidens. They're useful idiots who put a concerned female face on the patriarchal violence against trans people that will ultimately be enacted by right-wing men.
My approach is that JKR should absolutely be blocked, boycotted, criticized, etc. But don't waste all of your energy on her because the real policy makers are hiding behind her while they follow their own agenda behind the scenes. Call out JKR but remember that she is not the end all be all of transphobia and even if/when she does leave Twitter, there will still be bigger policy makes enforcing transphobia and sexism
EDIT: rereading your post I feel like you aren't talking about the people that recognize there are bigger evils LOL mb, but yeah good to keep in mind there is more to JKR
After seeing many comments about this, the definitive answer is that people think there's far more dangerous people than her around, and also that because she's written a book centered around the topic of inclusion etc, her opinion towards the trans community is rational and it's there because of her feminists stances.
Unfortunately I think enough people don’t feel strongly enough that transphobia is wrong to really take a stand on it. They might not be actively terfs themselves or whatever but they don’t care enough to be inconvenienced by having to take a stance. If that makes sense.
It might be because they genuinely don't know. Like, they might've heard something about her bigotry, but there's a surprising amount of people who don't know the full extent of it.
*I* didn't know the full extent of it until after I realized I was trans myself, to my great shame. I knew she had bad views. My attitude at the time was "she's always been off, I don't need to agree with someone 100% to enjoy their work." I still generally agree with that principle. But I had no idea how extreme her views were, nor how central they were to her public persona. I also didn't know how mean-spirited she was, I was only familiar with the polite, massaged, PR-approved crap that always contained statements like "I know and love trans people" and "live your best life in peace and security." It was only after I realized that I was trans and became personally invested in trans issues that I began to educate myself, and that included learning about how bad Rowling really is. And I'm really ashamed of that, because it shouldn't take becoming a member of a marginalized group to educate yourself about their experiences and the issues they face. On the other hand, no one is ever gonna know as much about an issue they don't have a personal investment in as people that do. My point in all this is to say: most people don't understand what's going on with JK Rowling. They know she said some controversial things about trans people. And that's probably the extent of it.
Yeah, it's a very niche issue for most people and they may tend to swallow the propaganda that there are a lot of trans people just being difficult. It's a bit like Palestine, a lot of people are casually Zionist because their attitude is "well, the Jews deserve a homeland, they have had a hard time, why can't the Arabs just share"
Bingo, a lot of people that are still huge fans of her genuinely don't really get it... and I understand why... if I loved someone and their work that much I would actively try to avoid any bad press surrounding that person but usually once they're exposed to her shit they drop her like a fucking rock I still love Harry Potter and that universe and its lore, I disregard that Jo has anything to do with it whenever possible \*shrug\* she's so detached from the property now, all she does is get residual royalties whenever her books are sold or the books are used as a source for some media... WB has basically bought her out of the Wizarding World, so she no longer has anything or earns anything from the Wizarding World products (movies, tv, games, products, etc.). I mean, they had to move fucking heaven and earth and promise Jo wouldn't be anywhere within 15 miles of the set of the HBO Harry Potter reunion special in order to get Emma and Rupert to consider showing up lol so yeah
Like many, I grew up reading Harry Potter and went through that phase when I was 11-12 when it was my whole personality. I saw all the movies, re-read all the books, went to all the theme parks, watched HP youtubers etc. And JK Rowling was part of that love for Harry Potter, I found her so inspiring and she made me fall in love with reading again. So when around 2020 I first started hearing things about her I’ll admit I was not quick to condemn her. Tbh I didn’t really look into it all that much and dismissed it, thinking someone who wrote such wonderful books about schools where you were welcome, whatever your background and even if you were a little different to others couldn’t possibly be the transphobic bigot people were calling her. Sadly around the beginning of 2022, even I couldn’t look away from the absolutely awful and ridiculous things she was spouting on Twitter around trans people, and it was clear she was completely obsessed. I wish I had seen it sooner. I think a lot of people might be like I was, looking away, thinking people must be being dramatic, or just don’t care all that much about trans rights. They need to wake up.
Because rocking the boat is a cardinal social sin in many people's view. There is a lot of social pressure to be agreeable and to take the most generous possible view of disagreement as it favours someone who has social capital. And Rowling has a *lot* of social capital, with her plucky origin story, her status as beloved children's author, and her image as benevolent billionaire patron of women's charities. She seems superficially *nice* and *sensible*. Superficially. She is also much cannier in how she weaponises prejudices than someone like Linehan, so she knows how to win arguments without looking so much like a weirdo.
> She is also much cannier in how she weaponises prejudices than someone like Linehan, so she knows how to win arguments without looking so much like a weirdo. You can tell when her statements have been publicist vetted. Her other statements are full of slurs and misgendering, when her statements are publicist vetted, suddenly it's about nothing besides women right. Woman defined in such a way as to eliminate all trans civil rights. Just like to defend white rights we need to eliminate black people's civil rights - just an extension of that same argument. You talk about "white rights" and eliminate black people from the discussion.
Also cis women previledges.
I guess it’s a toxic cocktail of a few things. Another comment here mentioned that a lot of people grew up with these books. I’d add that a lot of people probably also have children that grew up with them, or have read and enjoyed the books themselves. I know my mom at one point was loving the first book. I don’t think she finished the series. And for parents happy that their children were reading it was probably a godsend. In addition, Rowling is rich and has a lot of powerful friends in high places. There are probably authors who have “blurbs” from Rowling praising their books on the back cover of them. Anything with her name on it is gilded, no matter how poorly written it is. Her publishers love that. She’s also very litigious and prone to threatening lawsuits over the smallest things. Like the meme that mocked her poorly worded “porn being shown to kids” comment. Or when she basically showed the faces of three activists protesting outside of her castle. With that in mind, most may be afraid to speak up and out for fear of repercussions, whether it be from her angry mob or her lawyers. And the foundation of this is…people just not caring about trans folks in general. While we have cis allies (and damn good ones at that in some cases), a lot of cis people for the most part just…don’t care about trans rights or culture. Or care to learn. It doesn’t affect them. So they can have opinions like “yeah if they say they’re not their assigned sex at birth that’s fine, none of my business” or “I support trans people living and doing whatever they like but some of this is going too far for me.” So Rowling’s words sound reasonable, because said cis people aren’t curious or interested in learning. That’s all a perfect storm for people shutting their mouths when it comes to Rowling and being unwilling to condemn her.
I always think it's important to emphasise to people that everyone suffers from prejudice like that. It's not the case that transphobia doesn't affect cis people. For me, as someone in a same-sex relationship, the thing I find particularly disturbing is the constant obsession with trans women in women's sports, which here in the UK they've been allowed to do for almost twenty years. My partner's a candidate at the upcoming UK General Election, and the incumbent Conservative MP (who has been there since 2005) has mentioned this multiple times at the hustings. After one of them, I approached him and asked if he talked about this matter so much during his first election campaign in 2005. He said he didn't, because it wasn't an issue then. I said, 'That was one year after it was legalised - why is it more of an issue twenty years later than it was then, if it matters to you so much?' He said, 'There are more people doing it now.' I was just like, 'Well, of course there are going to be more people doing something twenty years after it's legalised that there will be one year after it's legalised! You could make that point about the legalisation of anything.' But the very fact that he used this logic means that anyone could have their rights taken away. And I take same-sex marriage as an example, which was legalised in the UK in 2013 with the first ceremonies taking place in 2014. It's entirely possible, using the exact same logic, that a few years down the line right-wing politicians could say, 'You know what, we made that decision at the time, but there are just too many same-sex couples getting married now' and take away our rights on that. This is something I think it's really important to emphasise over and over - that if taking away people's rights is legitimised, it could happen to anyone. We all suffer from being in a society that accepts the removal of people's rights as being legitimate.
She hides behind the veneer of feminism which confuses people, in my opinion. Also, lots of people are unfortunately transphobic/bigoted. Finally, she has a lot of resources, and has already used them against some of her critics.
> She hides behind the veneer of feminism which confuses people, in my opinion. Recently when terfs do this I've begun criticizing them for "wokeness" and "identity politics". They're always flabbergasted. They are the only ones allowed to talk out of two sides of their mouth apparently. Intersectional parasites.
She was a cultural icon for a time in the UK, not just for Harry Potter, but for donating so much of her wealth that she effectively downgraded herself on the richest lists. She supported centre-left policies like benefits and social housing. She had a classic rags to riches story, presented herself well, and came off like a genuinely nice lady. So I think it's hard for a lot of people to believe she'd be so hateful and most of the general public don't know the full story and think she merely said one or two slightly controversial things about gender on Twitter.
Incidentally, the rags to riches story has been exaggerated quite a lot. She didn't grow up in poverty, and she had a University education. It's true that she was quite hard up at the time of the publication of the first book, but that had only been the case for a short while and came about as a result of her having hurriedly escaped an abusive marriage (which of course is still something to admire no matter your opinion of the person themselves). But she had friends she could rely on, and would likely have got back on her feet before long anyway. It's not the case that she was this poverty-stricken woman who lifted herself out of poverty with her books.
In their eyes she hasn't gone far enough, or what she's doing doesn't impact them directly. That said, a lot of those opinions are changing over the recent months.
I think a lot of people are not on Twitter, or don't read that type of news at all that reports stuff like this. I just realised how bad the situation actually was with her quite recently. (When I read news I normally go for local news about my community or news about ongoing war in Europe, not celebrity gossip)
Nothing appears in the news from her besides her publicist vetted statements. Nobody reads her actual twitter feed where she constantly sexually harasses people solely for their being trans, or being trans allies. Because she is so litigious, and the darling of the British establishment, the papers are afraid to print anything true about her.
Wait, she sexually harasses people? And she was claiming it was trans women who were the predators…
She still is good using flowery most of the time and be insidious passive agressive evil. harder to pinpoint. Plus she hides as lovely lady she isnt , and victim.
I don't think it's that people are unwilling to condemn her. It could be that they genuinely don't know how bigoted she has become, or perhaps always has been. But she's shown before that she thinks anyone that does condemn her is either a woman who seeks male approval or doesn't want to ruin their career, or a man who is either a misogynist or - to paraphrase her own words - "is arguing for his own right to enter single-sex spaces, and feign outrage when this point is put to them, gibbering that they're just being good, virtuous progressives, but are personally enthralled by the idea of women and girls losing basic protections" - so perhaps they think it would be rather fruitless to waste their time condemning someone who has shown time and again she has no desire whatsoever to entertain another point of view, despite claiming otherwise. Additionally, she is known to threaten legal action for the slightest critique, like when she forced that journalist to apologize to her because she was called out for denying an actual Nazi war crime, and she knows that few people have the financial means to challenge her legally. Very, very manipulative, if you ask me.
Terfs are the exceptional victims.
I feel like at some point, her obsession with threatening legal action will come back to bite her. She'll say it to someone who actually does turn out to have a decent amount of money, and they'll say, 'All right then, bring it on.' Or else, it will happen the other way around, like when Jack Monroe was libelled by Katie Hopkins (who mistook her for the journalist Laurie Penny). Monroe told Hopkins they wouldn't sue as long as she donated a certain amount of money to a refugee charity. Hopkins refused, so Monroe sued her and won that case. I'd love to see that happen, and I think it could - Rowling is so unhinged nowadays I can easily imagine that there'll come a point where she says something about someone that is provably untrue, and that person is able to fight back.
I know this isn't what the quote means, but it holds true "Can't, doesn't have a penis." The Worlds Strongest - TFS People like Rowling play off the fact that their women as a way of silencing their opponents and making it look like their more oppressed than they actually are. It's also the reason why we constantly hear about trans women and not trans men in sports. If a guy used that excuse, they would be laughed out of their league, and well, those women laughed out of their leagues but not be given front page articles and prime time airing.
Especially ironic in situations like Lily Cade
> making it look like their more oppressed than they actually are They are not just victims, they are exceptional victims, and no one's victimhood can amount to more than a molehill weighed against them.
I think it’s a combination of many things. The first HP book was published 27 years ago and had a massive impact on society. The publishers initially targeted children but the book was enjoyed by adults too. At a time when mobile phones and video game consoles were increasing in popularity, the Harry Potter books encouraged children to read. I personally remember sitting impatiently in my living room at nine years old, face pressed against the window, watching the Royal Mail van make its way down my street and stopping at almost every house to deliver pre-ordered copies of The Goblet of Fire. The first film was released in 2001 with a cast of well-established, popular actors. At this point, Rowling had already published the fourth book. The film was a success and so it naturally made sense to adapt the rest of the books to film. The whole franchise has been an international success and has become about so much more than Rowling - there’s the studio tour in London, Wizarding World in Orlando, The Cursed Child… In the UK, it’s boosted tourism and contributed an insane amount to the economy. It’s probably for this reason that Rowling’s views are not heavily publicised. She spouts her bullshit on Twitter which is nowhere near as popular as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. If she were to post across other platforms there may be a greater awareness of just how vile and harmful her rhetoric is. And as others have mentioned, the lack of support and understanding of the trans community means that people simply don’t care. It’s unfortunate (yet well-deserved) that her blatant, hateful transphobia is now part of the legacy she will leave behind.
I think this is the best summation. At its peak, Harry Potter was the 21st century’s equivalent of the Beatles. Imagine trying to cancel the Beatles after one of them said something controversial. Spoiler alert: the Christian Right circa 1966 absolutely tried to cancel the Beatles after an American teen magazine reprinted a series of profiles on the individual Beatles that had originally appeared in a London newspaper. John Lennon’s profile had a brief passage where he talked about religion and had said “the Beatles are more popular than Jesus”, which was the quote the US teen mag used as the front cover headline. Records were banned by radio stations in the south, radio stations organized record burnings, even the KKK protested the Beatles’ concert in Memphis. The cancelling didn’t work because, for one, reasonable people saw through the bullshit, and secondly, they were Too Big To Take Down. The only difference between canceling the Beatles and cancelling JK Rowling is this:people who think themselves as “reasonable” think they are seeing through what they think is bullshit. Even though the reason for cancelling JKR is not bullshit.
She's the darling of the British establishment, anything negative you say about Saint Joanne is going to be universal front page news in every paper with a distorted and disingenuous headline and article.
Then again, look how protected Jimmy Saville was…
To quote Contrapoints: >...is the backlash against J.K. Rowling a witch hunt? Unequivocally, no. It's very thoroughly deserved. But I will say this, a movement can't get along without a devil, and across the whole political spectrum there is a misogynistic tendency to choose a female devil, whether it's Anita Bryant, Hillary Clinton, Marie Antoinette, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or J.K. Rowling. And there's always gonna be people who seize on any opportunity to be misogynistic. So I would advise trans people and our allies to keep in mind, that J.K. Rowling is not the final boss of transphobia. She's not our devil. The devil is the Republican Party, the Conservative Party. The devil is patriarchy. It's the right-wing men who will be the ones to put Gender Critical theory into brutal practice. >Anita Bryant, Posie Parker, and J.K. Rowling, are, to borrow a term from TERFs, handmaidens. TERFs are the real handmaidens. They're useful idiots who put a concerned female face on the patriarchal violence against trans people that will ultimately be enacted by right-wing men. My approach is that JKR should absolutely be blocked, boycotted, criticized, etc. But don't waste all of your energy on her because the real policy makers are hiding behind her while they follow their own agenda behind the scenes. Call out JKR but remember that she is not the end all be all of transphobia and even if/when she does leave Twitter, there will still be bigger policy makes enforcing transphobia and sexism EDIT: rereading your post I feel like you aren't talking about the people that recognize there are bigger evils LOL mb, but yeah good to keep in mind there is more to JKR
I wouldn’t say handmaiden, more like a worse Stephen (if you’re wondering what I mean, it’s Calvin’s slave in Django: Unchained)
After seeing many comments about this, the definitive answer is that people think there's far more dangerous people than her around, and also that because she's written a book centered around the topic of inclusion etc, her opinion towards the trans community is rational and it's there because of her feminists stances.