It was no April Fool’s joke.
Harry Potter author-turned culture warrior J.K. Rowling kicked off the month with an 11-tweet social media thread in which she argued 10 transgender women were men — and dared Scottish police to arrest her.
Rowling’s intervention came as a controversial new Scottish government law, aimed at protecting minority groups from hate crimes, took effect. And it landed amid a fierce debate over both the legal status of transgender people in Scotland and over what actually constitutes a hate crime.
Already the law has generated far more international buzz than is normal for legislation passed by a small nation’s devolved parliament.
Rowling was literally on Twitter breaking the law and daring anyone to do anything about.
They likely won’t, because she’s rich as fuck.
So yeah, they’re being treated unfairly, just not how they think.
Her hostile fixation with trans people is just bizarre at this point.
I understand she is concerned about biologically-born women (sorry, I don’t know what the correct term is) being at risk from a very small minority of criminal trans women assaulting them in bathrooms etc. But statistically that risk seems far out of context to the shouting she keeps making on it. And her ranting is just doing harm to the vast majority of trans people who just want to live their lives, because it sows animosity towards them and emboldens bigots and their hate crimes.
It’s basically an axe-grinding exercise on her part. And she probably keeps going due to the fact that people keep calling her out. So she then doubles, triples, quadruples down out of pride.
It’s just irritating. I wish she’d just calm down and either keep her opinions to herself or be more tactful.
It makes perfect sense.
Bigots are rarely just bigoted about one thing. And this is the current “battleground”.
If they win this and this kind of discrimination becomes acceptable again, they’ll go back to homosexuals. If they lose they’ll move to another group.
It’s why you can never stop fighting them and the facsim they want, they’re never honest about their end goals
If you don’t defend the human next to you, there might not be anyone to defend you later. So we don’t even need people to get this for the right reasons, they should agree with it on a base instinct of self preservation.
The same thing the bigots exploit to gain followers.
Good points.
That kind of anger and fear towards people who are different from yourself just sounds exhausting. But I guess what’s exhausting to me and many other ‘live and let live’ people is invigorating to some people. Just seems like a really shitty way of wasting your life.
Transphobia, more than any other bigotry, seems to rot the mind. It’s not obvious to me why it’s that way, but there are several cases where you can watch someone start at some vaguely terfy position, and end by losing their work and nobody wanting to hire them and getting divorced because they just will not shut up about how trans people, a subset of humanity roughly on par with genetic redheads in the general population, are destroying society and making everything awful and ruining their bodies and on and on and on.
The term you’re looking for is cisgender. Trans = “on the other side of”, cis = “on this side of”
Thanks.
ThePowerOfGreek
Also, wouldnt some biological women also assault women in bathrooms?
Great point! I doubt Rowling, Musk, or Rogan would ever bring up that inconvenient point.
I’m not quite sure why anybody gives a fuck about what she tweets.
She wrote a handful of successful books (I can’t comment on the content, I never read them), made a fucktonne of money, wrote a few other plays and books under a rando name… and yet she’s being quoted and reported on every five seconds.
Taking a step back a bit - my entirely personal opinion is that 95% of the people ranting and raving about this new law are the people who are gobshites anyway. The other 5% are quite rightly asking the question whether the law is proportionate, whether the police service is the right way to enforce the laws, and whether this could have been delayed to launch with the misogyny bill.
edit while I’m on a soapbox: as for Musk and Rogan, who gives a fuck what they have to say? Musk has probably been in Scottish airspace more than he’s been on Scottish soil, and Rogan is so far removed from Scotland politics that he might as well be on Pluto.
Well, in this case people care because she breaking a law…
I didn’t quite catch your username first time round, a happy co-incidence!
I was under the impression that her tweets weren’t illegal - even if she is being a bit of a bellend about it. I’m not sure whether it is outright legal, or whether it just doesn’t meet the threshold to secure a likely conviction.
Not 100% sure but:
The recent law is against “deadnaming” so Rowling keeps dead naming people on Twitter and daring cops to do something about it.
Which I don’t think they will, because she’ll throw millions of dollars worth of lawyers at them.
So she is (as far as I know) breaking the law
I don’t understand how throwing millions of dollars at lawyers will help if she’s indeed breaking the law. Wouldn’t that be something easy to prove for a regular lawyer?
Have you heard of the paradox of tolerance? It states, “if a society’s practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate.”
Seems to me like something we all have to care about.
I have yeah, it’s a fine line where to draw the line though. That can equally be used to silence people whose views are entirely sensible but inconvenient to whoever is writing the rules.
The question I’m struggling to grasp is why her? How come she’s the lightning rod for these opinions when she’s just spewing nonsensical bollocks and bile?
She might be “just spewing nonsensical bollocks and bile” OR she might be publicly and seemingly proudly flouting Scottish law.
So why not her?
I mean in fairness it will probably end up being both. It would appear she’s danced along the line of being incendiary-but-not-enough-to-get-charged up to now, but I can’t see it being long until she talks enough shit that she ends up with a fine - which is a bit pointless in her position as it’s probably lost in the noise of whatever riches she sits on.
As for why not her, I’d argue that - based admittedly on some pretty big assumptions - what experience has she had of being marginalised in recent times? How have the struggles for trans rights recognition negatively (or positively) affected her? What has she done to constructively make life better for the LGBTQIA+ communities which may have averted the need for a hate crime law?
My assumption is that the answer will largely be fuck all, where there are people - a set that I couldn’t possibly quantify - who are actively struggling with getting to grips with their own identity, or have lived experiences of marginalisation or ill-treatment that can actually speak on the issue of how the hate crime law is a net positive or net negative for those communities.
Those are the people I feel are the ones who are best placed to make for a constructive discussion on the matter, not someone who’s opinion is somehow disproportionately amplified because of her bank balance and status. That’s the argument I’m trying (and probably failing to do so articulately enough) to make - not just for Rowling, but for Musk and Rogan too seeing as they were named in the initial article.
Interesting stuff though, and I appreciate your input!
the answer to your question is basically that we’re just seeing the sort of, crystallized wisdom that anger is a great marketing motivator. musk, rogan, and rowling sell news headlines, not in spite of their brainlet idiot takes, but because of their brainlet idiot takes. people (broadly, also, said disparagingly), don’t want to hear from a well-spoken, humanized, smart trans woman who knows what the fuck she’s talking about, both because, on a meta level, that works to cut down on the propaganda driven controversy, but also because the things which she might say would not be as controversial as these dickheads.
free market news, and in free markets, everyone tends to race to the bottom, because, given an even playing field, the cheapest possible growth strategies tend to be the ones that win and accumulate mass quicker than the others.
Yes, we have all heard about the paradox of tolerance, because it gets posted in every thread.
It doesn’t really add much to the conversation, because it’s really not that insightful - if you let the wolves amongst the sheep then eventually there won’t be any sheep left.
A man’s name, at that.
Not even just a man’s name, but the name of one of the most infamous conversion therapy “psychiatrists” from the 20th century.
U wot.
Edit: I just went through the wiki of the book and I cannot see any mention of the fact she tried to pass her work off under a male name. Has this been washed of it so that she can continue her ridiculous campaign without apparent hypocrisy?
She didn’t write the Harry Potter books under her pseudonym, but a lot of her mediocre crime dramas are written under the name Robert Galbraith. The conversion therapy psychiatrist I’m talking about was named Robert Galbraith Heath.
Yes, and I checked the Wiki for The Casual Vacancy and it conveniently does not mention that she did that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Casual_Vacancy