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Terf Island
I hate it here.
JK Rowling toasts ‘TERF VE Day’ and confirms donation to group behind Supreme Court case
Someone said that she's basically our Musk (meaning that HP is like Tesla) and alas they are right. :( The billionaire to Bond villain pipeline is definitely a thing.
Here is a link to all current gov.uk Trans petitions.
Also, let's remember that some people are wonderful. From 2020:
Daniel Radcliffe declares ‘trans women are women’ in response to JK Rowling’s anti-trans tirade
And via Owls (behind paywall for me, but might work for others):
Trans people like me will still be protected by law, no matter what opponents think
ETA: Via Kerk:
A brief summary of the Transgender/Equality Act court case
And from that post, a change.org petition:
Overturn the UK's New Legal Definition of a Woman
~
Also since I am here, a post about the benefits changes, also with many links.
(Icon from this fanart.)
JK Rowling toasts ‘TERF VE Day’ and confirms donation to group behind Supreme Court case
Someone said that she's basically our Musk (meaning that HP is like Tesla) and alas they are right. :( The billionaire to Bond villain pipeline is definitely a thing.
Here is a link to all current gov.uk Trans petitions.
Also, let's remember that some people are wonderful. From 2020:
Daniel Radcliffe declares ‘trans women are women’ in response to JK Rowling’s anti-trans tirade
And via Owls (behind paywall for me, but might work for others):
Trans people like me will still be protected by law, no matter what opponents think
ETA: Via Kerk:
A brief summary of the Transgender/Equality Act court case
And from that post, a change.org petition:
Overturn the UK's New Legal Definition of a Woman
~
Also since I am here, a post about the benefits changes, also with many links.
(Icon from this fanart.)
no subject
no subject
This. :(
I hate that someone who wrote a franchise I still love is so bigoted...
Online radicalisation is a terrible thing.
You know things are serious when the introverts arrive etc
(Anonymous) 2025-04-22 09:20 pm (UTC)(link)--------------------------------------------------------
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Okay, let’s do this. TERF island is doing its thing again, what else is new.
On JK Rowling, update, or a reply to (xxx):
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1. TLDR: No, I was not right about Rowling, wooooow, has the transphobia gone through the roof, Jesus Christ Superstar, there’s the benefit of the doubt, and then there’s 5 years of this. My perspective has matched yours for some time now (xxx). As opposed to Rowling, I *am* open to changing my mind when presented with new information. So yes, to quote the other protesters at parliament square earlier today, fuck her. (But I will add some things on Art and Literature and Stuff, and the Healthy Approach).
2. This is not a brand new development, I should have posted this like a year earlier; this has been the case for some time now and I apologise for the delay. But a) I am a busy man and don’t do public posts all that often, b) very few people read my posts, it’s not like I have a Big Influence, so I didn’t think there was any rush, and c) I was planning to make a post on 20/06 so that it would be exactly 5 years, anniversary, symbolism, (it's like poetry, it's sort of, they rhyme), my OCD was acting up, and all that.
3. No, seriously, I was tempted to name this “Lines Composed in my Room in London, On Revisiting the Issue of Queen TERF during a rare Break. April 19, 2025”(… Five years have past; five summers, with the length/ Of five long winters! and again I hear/ She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named doing her thing…), because I am joining the War on Pretentiousness on the side of pretentiousness, and you should never underestimate the level of insane I operate at; but then I was like “naaaah, no one will get it.
4. Anyway. Said earlier defense of JK was a) me giving the benefit of the doubt to someone who had otherwise shown herself to be a progressive person (while still repeatedly stressing that this was just my possibly wrong opinion, that I completely understood why most people were not doing that etc), b) a chance to rant about some seriously annoying but only tangentially related things about the Harry Potter fandom and the online trans community (TLDR we should cancel Contrapoints because she was hanging out with Hillary fucking Clinton, not because she had a guest who used some outdated trans terminology etc) that I still largely stand by, but they don’t really affect anything, comparatively, so who cares.
5. And most importantly, c) it was predicated on the possibility that she was genuinely misinformed and was not coming from a hateful place, just being your typical Boomer aunt, which I still think was not that outlandish a reading in 2020 and/or regarding that essay of hers in particular (I mean that might also be a hype thing, the way people were going on about it, I thought it would say “fuck trans people, I wanna kill all of them with a chainsaw” and I then found it comparatively harmless). That she was arguing in good faith and indeed meant it when she said that “if you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship”, or that “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. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men. So I want trans women to be safe” etc. That as someone who’s usually famous for bluntly speaking her mind, dog-whistles were not really her style, etc. That she would not cause any harm and was open to being educated.
6. (Quoth me, I remind you: “I *still* haven't seen anything from her that's actually TERFy. Conservative about sex? Sure, but not outright TERFy. Is it because she acknowledges that trans women are different form cis women in non-PC ways? I've never heard her call trans women men or trans men women. She’s not donating to anti-trans organizations. She recognized a difference in different kinds of people under the trans umbrella. She used female pronouns for a trans woman, and she stated that her issue is with those who don’t physically transition (…)TERFS say and do much, much worse. Like, harassing and even doxxing trans women. Rowling isn't doing any of that, and she at least accepts trans people exist and claims to fully support their existence. It's perfectly normal for someone from her demographic to be confused about sex and gender. If we were to weed out every single individual who can't tell the difference… Yes, educate them. But please chill”.)
7. Alas, suffice to say, this has not been the case in the last couple of years, and I don’t believe giving her the benefit of the doubt has been possible for some time now. She has moved on to actively pushing harmful legislation, misgendering people left and right, excluding trans women from her sexual assault crisis centre, donating money to transphobic campaign groups, blocking and ignoring people who patiently tried to explain that the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was a whole thing, that bullshit with Imane Khelif last year, throwing the Harry Potter actors who disagree with her under the bus, going after asexual people just for variety recently, and oh my god, I don’t need to go on, Jesus Christ woman, if you put this much effort into ANYTHING ELSE you could solve world hunger or something. Like, another reason I didn’t upload this sooner is that I just went “eeeeeh, no rush, she’s bound to be shitty again next month, I can chill”.
8. Also also, after a certain point, it doesn’t matter. Yes, Hanlon’s Razor urges us to never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. But to quote a very insightful online addendum whose exact source eludes me at the moment “Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice; because the results are the same, and at a certain point it requires malice to wilfully and willingly remain this stupid”. So you know, again, fuck her.
9. There’s also the fact that well, we live under a general climate of transphobia. I simply didn’t think that her beliefs were anything that out of the ordinary for her demographic. Her general second-wave feminist style *would* make her particularly susceptible to TERFy rhetoric in my opinion, and she was most probably radicalized online; one does not start worrying about bathrooms out of nowhere. But you know, the world *is* moving forward, it’s been like half a decade, and people have reached out, repeatedly, and she has refused to listen. Be like Larry, etc.
10. Also, it would be one thing if she, you know, did something else that was worthwhile in all this time, had something else to offer, to counterbalance things a little? So we could maybe sometimes go “well, we honour her because of other things as well” to quote the old joke. Like, the church is largely transphobic; I still go to church because I believe God exists and that the Orthodox tradition has good and true things to offer that outweigh the bad. The Communist Party of Greece is transphobic; I still vote for them, because they do other stuff too, I would rather *they* be in my debt instead of vice versa, they have shown some basic signs of improvement, and I believe they’re the best choice we have in the unimaginably horrific hellscape we call reality in 2025. And wow, JK, look at your life, look at your choices. A whole-ass genocide has been happening and she’s just like “BuT MAh geNdEr NeUtRal baThRoOms”, and promoting the new HP series, (oh my god nobody cares, I cannot emphasize enough how much nobody cares, move on).
Re: You know things are serious when the introverts arrive etc
(Anonymous) 2025-04-22 09:30 pm (UTC)(link).
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1. There is no denying that my previous stance was at least partly motivated by my general disagreement on the whole Problematic ™ thing, that I just wanted to express. As in, purity culture helps nobody, no ethical consumption under capitalism, fandom is not activism. Of course, yes, still don’t support her, but like, going The Text Itself Is Bad, Go Read Rick Riordan Instead is a) an unfathomably stupid solution, b) not how art works or should work, c) predicated on the belief that he won’t pull a Neil Gaiman in a couple of years –which you know, I hope is the case, but nobody can guarantee. I guess what I’m trying to say is that you should always pirate everything anyway-- (gets tackled off-screen)
2. I also recognise that I am in a privileged position when it comes to that, because well, I DO NOT care about ANY piece of Harry Potter, apart from the original books (which I have, they are mine, nobody can take them away from me, and at present they do not benefit JKR in any way, shape, or form). Movies, video games, shows, theme-parks etc, they are not good, I don’t like them, overrated, don’t care. So, you know, Rowling being shitty has been largely irrelevant to me when viewing her as The Person Who Wrote Harry Potter, Oh My Childhood since like 2011, and that was the last time I materially supported her or actively engaged with the fandom in any way. So it was easy for me to go “eeeeeh, I think the books are fine; and me thinking that literally harms NOBODY, and affects NOTHING, so I am allowed to continue to think that”.
3. On that, yes, I am allowed to continue to think that, that the books are good regardless, and I will; and that’s where I facepalm when Tumblr comes along and says its piece. Because, get this, there is not always a correlation between morality and artistic merit. What, are we gonna pretend like idk Dali was not a great artist? (I mean, he's dead, and therefore harmless, I know, but so will Rowling one day, everyone chill and consign her to irrelevancy in the meantime by not buying or caring about her stuff).
4. Though to be fair, yes, I do also totally get people like Miriam Margoyles who are going ‘omg, move on’. Like yes, cringe, this should not be your entire personality. And come on, diversify a little, I had read all 7 books before I was 13.
5. Now, on that, I totally understand if the books have been irreversibly tainted for some people, the ability to separate the art from the artist varies from person to person. But at the same time, I can’t help that this hasn’t been the case for me; not yet, not completely. I can still enjoy them, it’s all right if you can’t, but don’t tell me I’m not allowed to. I still watch Woody Allen movies. The Pianist is a breathtaking masterpiece, and Polanski is a piece of shit, these things can both be true at the same time (Oh and on that, I think Rowling *was* right to be pissed to be compared to the likes of Polanski and Woody Allen, what the fuck you guys, not all crimes are equal, etc).
6. And in general, I think many people’s stance *is* wrong regardless. Let me put it this way: in Revenge of the Sith, (spoilers for a 20-year-old movie and endless internal screaming at how time works), Anakin falls to the Dark Side and becomes Darth Vader. Well, Obi Wan does not go “you're a big stupid meanie face and I never liked you either”. He goes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiZNSzWIaLo , you were my brother Anakin, I loved you etc. Because the books *are* good, inspired pieces of literature; basically, recognise that (I mean, you are of course allowed to not like them, that’s how art works. I just do think they Have Merit, if we can be objective about these things, which we can’t, I know). You can’t go through them and nitpick them to oblivion to try and retroactively make them bad *because* you don’t like the author now –and you’re completely right not to-- I’m sorry. And the very reason you feel so betrayed is that she did seem like a good person a decade ago. I guess the moral of the story is don’t make people into Chosen Ones, which you know, duh, preaching to the choir here.
7. Basically, don’t go “I always knew/never liked them” hypothetical random person reading this, I *will* punch you in the face. Basically, this: https://siphersaysstuff.tumblr.com/post/733571116389613568
(though I do disagree about the Elon Musk bit. To paraphrase that one guy, it’s easy to say with hindsight that he is a humongous piece of shit, but it was also easy at the beginning to say that and through the middle too).
8. On the books, yes, I also get it if you’re still going “eeh, they’re a bit Liberal for me regardless”; and yes, I can see that, but not everything can or has to be Brecht, okay? I think they can be read as reasonably progressive anyway; and I’m sorry, but there are good things I genuinely enjoy that I ideologically disagree with (see idk, the Dark Knight Trilogy). And again, they *can* be good, unfortunately leftists do not have a monopoly on good art. And not everyone is the same, but I seriously doubt that most Harry Potter fans are just more communist/anarchist/whatever than me and are thus only now going “boooo, I cannot enjoy this book because it does not promote the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism, or advocate for the dictatorship of the proletariat” or something. I’m sorry, but if I could only enjoy art and literature that completely agrees with my political/economic/ideological beliefs, 90% of art humanity has ever produced would be off-limits. I don’t believe anyone lives like that, and if you do, I pity you. Shakespeare is good, go read Macbeth, you don’t have to believe in the divine right of kings, it’s okay, go for a walk, you dork etc.
9. And finally, I *would* rather art itself be good than Not Problematic, (though you can of course, obviously do both), and I’m afraid there’s a growing tendency to forget that, and focus on the wrong things. Like, yeah, The Umbrella Academy was heckin’ wholesome UwU and did some nice trans representation with Elliot Page, but the final season was uuuuh, bad, so you know, nobody wins here.
10. But anyway, who cares, Harry Potter has won a bunch of awards, she’s a multi-millionaire. Would I like it if people were able to use more nuance about how they engage with literature, in general? Yes, but I would rather the particular author in question somehow, magically (ba dum tss) changed her mind and stopped being a bigot; for the sake of who she was or at least appeared to be once, if nothing else. Because the former is just annoying, while the latter causes far, far greater harm.
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Anyway, well done if you have read all this, fuck JK Rowling, I am very sleep deprived and certainly forgetting something but what can you do etc. And I do think the loudness of the minority makes us forget public perception of trans people has gotten better, there were a lot of people at the protest today.
Happy Easter!