Post hog.
Cancel Culture
- Thread starter Buchan
- Start date
Post hog.
i thought i escaped seeing that line forever!
Sorry.
Great article but I'm disturbed at the possibility of having to throw out my Hawaiian shirts
Small Business Owner STRIKES BACK against CANCEL CULTURE and JEZBOLLAH
For the less streetwise people like me, what exactly is Cancel Culture?
Essentially getting people fired/cancelled/put out of business because they do something or believe something the twitter hivemind don't like. In some cases it might justified but with most vigilantism there's a tendency for it to get out of control.
Cancel culture isn't a thing.
Yes!
Been saying this for years. Social media is warping people’s minds. On both sides of the political spectrum. Cancel culture wouldn’t exist without Twitter and Facebook. And Donald Trump wouldn’t be president.
It's the 21st century version of Carol from around the corner writing to OFCOM, because she didn't like the comment Bob Geldof made on Parkinson last night, except a load of idiots claim it's a brand new phenomenon that has been invented by 'the left' to destroy the whole world as we know it.
Basiclly people being fired or punished for saying or doing something deemed offensive and shows being cancelled or censored for offensive content.
I disagree with that. Social media's haven't warped people's minds, they have just given a larger platform to behaviours that already existed, the issue is that some people fail to realize that they need to choose the platform they use in function of the the type of interaction that they want, Twitter and Facebook are like your local pub, they are for gossiping, while many people treat it like a place where you can or should have deep conversations, you can't and the characters limits on Twitter should have been a hint.
The other thing is that we are both on a social media when we are on Redcafe and because it is a discussion forum, we are in the right place when it comes to discuss things. We picked the appropriate social media for people who wants to discuss when many people simply don't and then cry about how they haven't been able to start a complex debate on a platform that isn't went for that.
That's not a new thing, people have been fired or punished, shows have been cancelled and censored for offensive contents since the beginning of times.
Well yeah, that's why the conversation about freedom of speech and individual freedom is ongoing neverending discussion since what is deemed offensive is redefined all the time.
"Sorry, Im j.k."
"ok ty"
"No I mean I'm you now"
Also from this account:
“i can’t go because of coronavirus”
- whiny
- boring
- weak
“i’ve sworn an oath of solitude til the blight is purged from these lands”
- heroic, valiant
- they will assume you have a sword
- impossible to check if you really have a sword because of coronavirus
Would definitely follow him if I hadn't been banned from Twitter.
This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. You can say what you want but when you said it people are free to have the relationship that they want with you, you have no right to impose yourself on them.
Edit: Also freedom of speech isn't absolute or uniform.
Well I agree, but when discussing cancel culture we are discussing quite broad. Like the "don't mention the war" episode being cancelled on UKTV. That is not really about imposing yourself on anyone.
And it has nothing to do with freedom of speech and no one asked them to do that and was reinstated.
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Well I concede, as pr. the law you're right.
the coward deleted the tweet and blamed his wife. the hypocrisy of these free speech people isn't new (bari herself is the prime example), the absolute cowardice may be.
@berbatrick what's your take on this article - https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/cancel-culture-harpers-letter-free-speech
Points I specifically agree with in this piece
Points I specifically agree with in this piece
It's mostly a good article. I've already said what i feel about people getting fired, and about the hypocrisy of the public faces of the free speech movement, so of course i agree with those part. I also like that it goes from left to right and finds the inconsistencies in all positions. That's pretty much what i've seen. Every one has their own lines about what is good or isn't. Liberals and libertarians will not see the power of non-governmental organisations (like corporations), the left and right will draw morality based lines.
The thing is, i don't know what that is supposed to lead us to. The online mobs are exercising their free speech rights. The corporations and employers are exercising theirs.
Ok, now onto what i disagree with. I think free speech absolutists are naive. The example in the article is the ACLU Jewish lawyer defending nazis, my example is 4chan. /pol/ had pretty open speech rules, outside a ban on some hentai. It was also a nazi haven. I'm generally skeptical that fully uncensored "debate" leads anywhere productive. I think Nehru and Patel should have used their powers to squash one particular organisation after January 30 1948, that would surely have been an act of censorship and state repression, and I also believe that we would be a healthier nation if they had. I think Bal Thackeray should have been prosecuted just for his words- his editorials in Saamna in December 1992 and January 1993, as his party members killed people on the streets.
I think it's funny that people think speech is so important and fundamental, and at the same time "words cannot hurt me" etc is a defence for hate speech. No, words can induce people to hurt you, that's why free speech is so important and fundamental in the first place. It has real world effects, otherwise there is no reason to fetishise free expression so much if it can't do anything at all. If the Nazis in Chicago were better organised and the conditions more favourable, we would be living under the effects of that. They didn't march because they felt like it, they exercised their rights with an aim in mind.
And this goes beyond politics. Eugenics ideas started to leave biology (they didn't really leave) only after the Nazis lost WW2 and that kind of talk became un-PC. Otherwise there was relatively free discourse, and the greatest biologists wrote extensively about racial superiority and inspired forced sterilisations. Today there are once again eugenics conferences, race deteminists, and "race realists" in psychology and genetics. There are publications with IQ claims that imply half of sub-Saharan Africans are clincally retarded.
An online mob managed to successfully cancel a professor in Michigan. He is a physics professor who went to talk about race and IQ with Stefan Molyneux. He was also in charge of all hiring for all natural science departments. The mob wanted and got him removed from his post in charge of recruitment (he still has his tenured position in physics). They also got the journal to remove some of those papers with those IQ numbers.
If twitter likes mean anything, I participated in the Michigan professor's cancellation, and I think we the mob got it exactly right. Many of the free speech people in the letter and elsewhere (like Quilette) have defended him and the research quite vehemently. The guy who started the petition to temove him has deleted his account.
Do you think a person who believes that, on average, black people are inferior, and on average, women disinclined for scientific work, should be in charge of recruitment? Or do you think an online mob should dictate a university's staffing decisions and remove someone just for his views?
A lot of the concept of free speech is about the impossibility of drawing lines, and who draws lines. It' always going to be a sliperry slope, etc, hence the right to free speech must be absolute. Ok, let's see where that takes us.
Tucker Carlson's speechwriter, in his private time, under a fake name, wrote stuff online that is more racist than what he wrote for his boss. His employer was embarrased that he crossed a line and they fired him. But I don't like employers having this power! What to do? I am ok with drawing a line around explicit, hateful, racism. But then, a principled free speech defender must ask, who defines racism? Why racism against blacks and not reverse racism against whites? Why Nazism and not socialism? What about sexism and transphobia, etc etc etc.
So, what do you think should happen to him? Do you support the online mob, the privacy invading press, and the crushing power of the employer that worked together to remove his livelihood? Should one's political viewpoints make one unemployable? Won't they come for you next, having come for him?
There are many parts to this problem - online discourse, free speech on both sides, corporate free speech rights, corporate monopoly power, and the real-world implications of speech. I don't think there's an easy answer.
these people are insane.
I think it's definitely a thing, but it's not quite real...it seems to exist on the internet but real life people don't actually believe a lot of the crap spouted on social media. I enjoyed this video about the J K Rowling stuff, comforting to know I'm not completely mad!
Are you gaslighting me?
haha!
Also this article
https://theobjective.substack.com/p/a-more-specific-letter-on-justice
But people will continue to shout about how cancel culture is a big problem through publications in national newspapers.
Blaire White is such a tabloid weasel. A false premise (it wasn't "this fiasco" that "officially labeled J.K Rowling transphobic" and the accusations don't stem from just "three tweets") followed by a bunch of "most of us", " almost all trans people", "most think". I guess that structuring an argument doesn't really matter when you're trying to appeal to the socially-progressive wing of the Pepe gang, but It's still an ear-sore to listen to.
You can break down the three tweets mentioned and debate the scientific validity, transphobicness and truthiness of these statements in isolation if you want to but that doesn't address the Rowling issue.
Doesn't it? Because even before watching the Blaire video I'd tried my own search to find Rowling being transphobic...I couldn't find anything, other than some tweets that aren't transphobic.
Well, maybe it is the truth? at least in her friend group. She also pointed out the overwhelming support Rowling got but nobody listened to it...is that false too?
A pretty comprehensive summation of many of the instances of Rowlings run-ins with the trans community. However I see it is missing at least one case of liking a transphobic comment ( that Rowling later claimed to have accidently clicked on) and it doesn't mention the representation issue with one of her characters in one of her books (google outoftheloop rowling if you need the link because redcafe hates it):
J. K. Rowling (author of the Harry Potter book series) has... somewhat of a history of statements that have been construed as being anti-trans (and promoting people whose statements are definitely anti-trans). In this particular case, she tweeted in response to a specific article entitled Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate:
But this fits into a larger pattern of behaviour for Rowling, which is why people are so willing to crack down on her now. This is not even the first time this year she's been embroiled in a story like this; there was also the case of the #IStandWithMaya hashtag. (I wrote a long, long breakdown of that story here, which goes into more detail; I'm re-using some of that material now to explain Rowling's history rather than typing it all out again.)
A Brief History of Rowling and TERFs
There's a bit of history with J. K. Rowling and cases of potential -- or at least rumoured -- sympathy for TERF causes. (TERF, in this case, stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism; it's a big sticking point within feminist movements, but it's usually not considered a compliment.) For TERFs, one of the main points of contention is with the idea that trans women (here defined as 'people who were assigned male at birth, but who don't identify with being male now) aren't 'real' women. As such, there's a general opposition to specific rights and access to things like female-only spaces and workplace protection based on gender; it's illegal to discriminate in employment based on sex in the UK, and that includes cis/trans status. (For anyone who's confused about the specifics of sex and gender, and exactly what the difference is between the two, I wrote a BestOf'ed piece that touched on the topic here that should serve as a primer.)
Rowling isn't unique in this, by any stretch. There have been a number of relatively high-profile individuals on Twitter who have found themselves at odds with the trans community based on what are often views as regressive views. Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd, regularly courts controversy with his TERF views, and Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts has his work cut from a then-upcoming story anthology because of anti-trans tweets. Rowling has been singled out, perhaps because she has a reputation for being progressive -- or pandering to progressives, depending on which side of the argument you fall down on -- but also because she hasn't publicly come out and said her views either way. There was minor outrage when, in March 2018, Rowling liked a tweet that said that 'men in dresses' were treated better than women; however, her representative later said it was an accident, stating: 'I’m afraid J.K Rowling had a clumsy and middle-aged moment and this is not the first time she has favourited by holding her phone incorrectly.'
In June of 2019, a viral blog post suggested that Rowling was a TERF based on her following a notable YouTuber who aligned herself with the TERF movement, Magdalen Berns. Berns has said some stuff that many people didn't agree with, including that trans women are 'blackface actors' and 'men who get sexual kicks from being treated like women'. (Berns, it's worth noting, was a lesbian and intimately involved with the LGBT activist community; conflicts around the issue of whether trans women are somehow contrary to the idea of lesbianism, or whether one is inherently exclusionary to the other, have been pretty significant.) Snopes gave this a rating of 'false', but it was with the -- entirely reasonable -- caveat that retweets and follows aren't the same as a full-throated endorsement of all of someone's views:
#RowlingStandsWithMaya
So Rowling has been on a lot of people's TERF-radars for a while now. This came to a head recently with the case of Maya Forstater, a visiting fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), an international thinktank that campaigns against poverty and inequality. This is a charitable organisation based in Washington and London, where Forstater was a tax expert. Her contract expired and was not renewed in March 2019; Forstater claims this is as a direct result of several tweets she made opposing the idea that sex changes were even possible, or that trans individuals should be seen and referred to as the gender they claim. She lost an employment tribunal where she claimed that she had been unfairly discriminated against due to her comments. (Forstater had actually doubled-down on her comments; when she first heard the complaints against her, in December 2018, she noted: '“I have been told that it is offensive to say "transwomen are men" or that women means "adult human female". However since these statement are true I will continue to say them.') You can read an absolute smorgasbord of anti-trans statements from Forstater in the judgement, so the idea that's being touted is that it's just because of a few tweets and no action is... flawed, at best.
Earlier this year, Rowling tweeted:
So what does Rowling believe?
The biggest issue with all of this is that Rowling steadfastly conflates biological sex and gender. This goes against the current scientific understanding, as well as as progressive cultural trends. This is one of Reddit's bêtes noires, as you'll see by people in pretty much any thread that discusses the issue of gender when some wag decides to point out that there are only two. (Source: check the comments on this thread in an hour and you'll see what I mean.) This is false -- and before any of you decide to get snippy, I'll point out that I am now a) safely out of the top-level and b) factually correct -- and it's almost always either a misunderstanding of the terms or a wilful effort to troll. The thing is, sex and gender are different concepts, albeit ones that have a lot in common.
Sex is a biological characteristic: generally speaking, it's determined by the 23rd chromosome, XY for males and XX for females. (There are other chromosomal variants, such as XO, which leads to Turner syndrome, or XXY, which leads to Klinefelter syndrome. I'm not going to wade into that in any detail right now -- not because it's not important, but because I'm trying for a broad-strokes approach -- but for the moment just know that more than 98% of people will likely fall into the chromosomal category of either XX or XY.)
Gender is a cultural characteristic. In the west, we generally have two genders, which we also often (somewhat confusingly) call male and female. (This is also not helped by the fact that, outside of humans, gender is occasionally also used to refer to biological sex. Language is messy like that sometimes.) In this sense, 'gender' is often used to encompass both 'psychological sex' -- that is, the way you feel you are, also known as 'gender identity' -- as well as 'social sex' (the gender role that you're socialised into).
Sex and gender have a lot of crossover, but they don't line up 100%. There have been numerous studies that indicate that gender and sex are not the same thing. To what extent the former affects the latter is an important question, and one worthy of study, but there is strong scientific evidence that the brains of transgender individuals generally have more in common with the gender they identify with than the sex that is on their birth certificate, or whatever they've got going on downstairs.
(It's important to note that this post is generally going to discuss trans issues from a binary perspective, male or female. There are also individuals that feel as though they don't fit into either of these groups, and are usually described as 'non-binary'. In several countries, such gender identities are legally recognised, and several non-western cultures have had the concept of a third gender since time immemorial. This is not, despite what people might have you believe, an entirely new concept.)
Rowling's Response
After receiving a lot of pushback about this, Rowling tweeted:
The problem is that it completely breaks down if you view sex and gender as distinct definitions with a crossover. No one's saying 'sex isn't real'; they're just saying that sex isn't important in this particular instance. (This is important because you can see a shift in the terminology over the past fifty or so years; 'transgender' is now massively preferred in the community to 'transsexual'.) When Rowling says 'my life has been shaped by being female' and 'I do not believe it’s hateful to say so', what she's really saying is that her life has been shaped by her female sex and her female gender, but she's refusing that same category to other female-gendered individuals (such as trans women), and lumping people who are not female-gendered but chromosomally XX (NB individuals and trans men) in the same category as her by virtue of their genetics. (For example, not many people are going to see these guys in a relationship with a femme-presenting woman and treat them as though they're in a lesbian relationship, nor would they see them in a relationship with a male-presenting individual and call them 'straight' just because of their chromosomes.)
Why do people even care?
For a lot of people, Harry Potter was a formative part of their childhood. Fundamentally, it had somewhat of a progressive stance as a series of books -- 'blood purity' is bad, anyone can be a hero, acceptance of people is important -- but in the years since the last book came out Rowling's views have been shown to be considerably less than progressive in a couple of ways. (There are also arguments that the books aren't particularly accepting of minorities, but that's... really a question for another time.)
The cohort that grew up with Harry Potter are more likely than older generations to accept trans issues as significant and meaningful; acceptance of trans issues is correlated with age (among other things); the younger you are, the more likely you are to have a favourable view of trans rights and trans equality. Now they're collectively seeing that the person who wrote a book that was important to them growing up may have views that do not align with -- and in some ways stand in direct opposition to -- other views on social equality that they hold deeply.
A Note on Gold
This is one of those posts that occasionally takes off and gets gilded. Please don't. I've got something like eighteen years of Reddit Premium at this point, so I get absolutely zero benefit out of it.
If you have Reddit Coins that you'd want to spend on this post, I'd appreciate it if you'd instead use them to highlight other posts that emphasise trans rights or the access to sanitary products to all people who need them. If you wanted to spend actual money on this post, please consider instead donating to an organisation like Freedom4Girls which works to eliminate period poverty around the world for everyone who menstruates, no matter their gender identity.
[/s]
Now, quite aside from the trans issue -- which we'll be getting to in a sec -- there are plenty of issues with what she said. If her objection is to them replacing the phrase 'People who menstruate' with 'women', the article was specifically about the provision of sanitary and menstrual supplies around the globe; if her objection is to them using the word 'people' instead of 'women', there are plenty of cis-females who we wouldn't count as 'women'. (Menstruation normally starts at around age twelve, and it's not unusual to be as early as ten -- not a 'woman' by any reasonable definition.) For a lot of people, then, it feels like Rowling went out of her way to make a transphobic shot at an article that made the barest effort to include non-cis women. (Quite literally the only reference to non-cis women in the article is the following line: 'An estimated 1.8 billion girls, women, and gender non-binary persons menstruate, and this has not stopped because of the pandemic.' That's it. This is not an article that's doing its best to wade into the trans debate, and it's very much been dragged there.)
But this fits into a larger pattern of behaviour for Rowling, which is why people are so willing to crack down on her now. This is not even the first time this year she's been embroiled in a story like this; there was also the case of the #IStandWithMaya hashtag. (I wrote a long, long breakdown of that story here, which goes into more detail; I'm re-using some of that material now to explain Rowling's history rather than typing it all out again.)
A Brief History of Rowling and TERFs
There's a bit of history with J. K. Rowling and cases of potential -- or at least rumoured -- sympathy for TERF causes. (TERF, in this case, stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism; it's a big sticking point within feminist movements, but it's usually not considered a compliment.) For TERFs, one of the main points of contention is with the idea that trans women (here defined as 'people who were assigned male at birth, but who don't identify with being male now) aren't 'real' women. As such, there's a general opposition to specific rights and access to things like female-only spaces and workplace protection based on gender; it's illegal to discriminate in employment based on sex in the UK, and that includes cis/trans status. (For anyone who's confused about the specifics of sex and gender, and exactly what the difference is between the two, I wrote a BestOf'ed piece that touched on the topic here that should serve as a primer.)
Rowling isn't unique in this, by any stretch. There have been a number of relatively high-profile individuals on Twitter who have found themselves at odds with the trans community based on what are often views as regressive views. Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd, regularly courts controversy with his TERF views, and Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts has his work cut from a then-upcoming story anthology because of anti-trans tweets. Rowling has been singled out, perhaps because she has a reputation for being progressive -- or pandering to progressives, depending on which side of the argument you fall down on -- but also because she hasn't publicly come out and said her views either way. There was minor outrage when, in March 2018, Rowling liked a tweet that said that 'men in dresses' were treated better than women; however, her representative later said it was an accident, stating: 'I’m afraid J.K Rowling had a clumsy and middle-aged moment and this is not the first time she has favourited by holding her phone incorrectly.'
In June of 2019, a viral blog post suggested that Rowling was a TERF based on her following a notable YouTuber who aligned herself with the TERF movement, Magdalen Berns. Berns has said some stuff that many people didn't agree with, including that trans women are 'blackface actors' and 'men who get sexual kicks from being treated like women'. (Berns, it's worth noting, was a lesbian and intimately involved with the LGBT activist community; conflicts around the issue of whether trans women are somehow contrary to the idea of lesbianism, or whether one is inherently exclusionary to the other, have been pretty significant.) Snopes gave this a rating of 'false', but it was with the -- entirely reasonable -- caveat that retweets and follows aren't the same as a full-throated endorsement of all of someone's views:
(Berns died of a brain tumour in September 2019. That's not really relevant to the story here, but if you're wondering why she hasn't chimed in over this, there's your explanation.)
#RowlingStandsWithMaya
So Rowling has been on a lot of people's TERF-radars for a while now. This came to a head recently with the case of Maya Forstater, a visiting fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), an international thinktank that campaigns against poverty and inequality. This is a charitable organisation based in Washington and London, where Forstater was a tax expert. Her contract expired and was not renewed in March 2019; Forstater claims this is as a direct result of several tweets she made opposing the idea that sex changes were even possible, or that trans individuals should be seen and referred to as the gender they claim. She lost an employment tribunal where she claimed that she had been unfairly discriminated against due to her comments. (Forstater had actually doubled-down on her comments; when she first heard the complaints against her, in December 2018, she noted: '“I have been told that it is offensive to say "transwomen are men" or that women means "adult human female". However since these statement are true I will continue to say them.') You can read an absolute smorgasbord of anti-trans statements from Forstater in the judgement, so the idea that's being touted is that it's just because of a few tweets and no action is... flawed, at best.
Earlier this year, Rowling tweeted:
This was probably her most divisive tweet since she tweeted that wizards used to just shit on the floor and vanish the evidence.
So what does Rowling believe?
The biggest issue with all of this is that Rowling steadfastly conflates biological sex and gender. This goes against the current scientific understanding, as well as as progressive cultural trends. This is one of Reddit's bêtes noires, as you'll see by people in pretty much any thread that discusses the issue of gender when some wag decides to point out that there are only two. (Source: check the comments on this thread in an hour and you'll see what I mean.) This is false -- and before any of you decide to get snippy, I'll point out that I am now a) safely out of the top-level and b) factually correct -- and it's almost always either a misunderstanding of the terms or a wilful effort to troll. The thing is, sex and gender are different concepts, albeit ones that have a lot in common.
Sex is a biological characteristic: generally speaking, it's determined by the 23rd chromosome, XY for males and XX for females. (There are other chromosomal variants, such as XO, which leads to Turner syndrome, or XXY, which leads to Klinefelter syndrome. I'm not going to wade into that in any detail right now -- not because it's not important, but because I'm trying for a broad-strokes approach -- but for the moment just know that more than 98% of people will likely fall into the chromosomal category of either XX or XY.)
Gender is a cultural characteristic. In the west, we generally have two genders, which we also often (somewhat confusingly) call male and female. (This is also not helped by the fact that, outside of humans, gender is occasionally also used to refer to biological sex. Language is messy like that sometimes.) In this sense, 'gender' is often used to encompass both 'psychological sex' -- that is, the way you feel you are, also known as 'gender identity' -- as well as 'social sex' (the gender role that you're socialised into).
Sex and gender have a lot of crossover, but they don't line up 100%. There have been numerous studies that indicate that gender and sex are not the same thing. To what extent the former affects the latter is an important question, and one worthy of study, but there is strong scientific evidence that the brains of transgender individuals generally have more in common with the gender they identify with than the sex that is on their birth certificate, or whatever they've got going on downstairs.
(It's important to note that this post is generally going to discuss trans issues from a binary perspective, male or female. There are also individuals that feel as though they don't fit into either of these groups, and are usually described as 'non-binary'. In several countries, such gender identities are legally recognised, and several non-western cultures have had the concept of a third gender since time immemorial. This is not, despite what people might have you believe, an entirely new concept.)
Rowling's Response
After receiving a lot of pushback about this, Rowling tweeted:
Now, if you conflate sex and gender and don't draw a line between them -- as is common in the TERF movement, then what Rowling says seems to make at least some sense; if you don't draw any lines about sex, how can you meaningfully discuss things like 'same-sex relationships' as being distinct from straight relationships? How can one struggle be different from another? (I didn't say it made a lot of sense, but still; there's at least a veneer there.) Additionally, there are issues that are related to sex and not gender; transwomen, for example, generally don't need to be concerned with ovulation, menstruation and getting pregnant.
The problem is that it completely breaks down if you view sex and gender as distinct definitions with a crossover. No one's saying 'sex isn't real'; they're just saying that sex isn't important in this particular instance. (This is important because you can see a shift in the terminology over the past fifty or so years; 'transgender' is now massively preferred in the community to 'transsexual'.) When Rowling says 'my life has been shaped by being female' and 'I do not believe it’s hateful to say so', what she's really saying is that her life has been shaped by her female sex and her female gender, but she's refusing that same category to other female-gendered individuals (such as trans women), and lumping people who are not female-gendered but chromosomally XX (NB individuals and trans men) in the same category as her by virtue of their genetics. (For example, not many people are going to see these guys in a relationship with a femme-presenting woman and treat them as though they're in a lesbian relationship, nor would they see them in a relationship with a male-presenting individual and call them 'straight' just because of their chromosomes.)
Why do people even care?
For a lot of people, Harry Potter was a formative part of their childhood. Fundamentally, it had somewhat of a progressive stance as a series of books -- 'blood purity' is bad, anyone can be a hero, acceptance of people is important -- but in the years since the last book came out Rowling's views have been shown to be considerably less than progressive in a couple of ways. (There are also arguments that the books aren't particularly accepting of minorities, but that's... really a question for another time.)
The cohort that grew up with Harry Potter are more likely than older generations to accept trans issues as significant and meaningful; acceptance of trans issues is correlated with age (among other things); the younger you are, the more likely you are to have a favourable view of trans rights and trans equality. Now they're collectively seeing that the person who wrote a book that was important to them growing up may have views that do not align with -- and in some ways stand in direct opposition to -- other views on social equality that they hold deeply.
A Note on Gold
This is one of those posts that occasionally takes off and gets gilded. Please don't. I've got something like eighteen years of Reddit Premium at this point, so I get absolutely zero benefit out of it.
If you have Reddit Coins that you'd want to spend on this post, I'd appreciate it if you'd instead use them to highlight other posts that emphasise trans rights or the access to sanitary products to all people who need them. If you wanted to spend actual money on this post, please consider instead donating to an organisation like Freedom4Girls which works to eliminate period poverty around the world for everyone who menstruates, no matter their gender identity.
[/s]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
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I shall have a read today, cheers!
I read through the Reddit threads. I guess I’m just really struggling to see obvious anti trans sentiment. She’s discussing aspects that are part of the trans debate but it feels like people are trying very hard to spin them into anti trans sentiment.
maybe time will tell if she truly is transphobic but it doesn’t look like it to me so far...yet.
she definitely enjoys trolling though...you see her tweet from a day ago?
Good thread
Also
Also
A big problem here is that the trans 'debate', like every debate, has a history, and during that history an array of commonly used shorthands, tropes and subtext-laden terminology has emerged which people not familiar with trans issues won't recognise or read into. Bigots use this to their advantage, couching their prejudice in language that is very obvious to people who have seen transphobes employing these bad faith arguments before, but which seems quite innocuous to those who aren't well-versed in the debate.
Imagine your friend is banging on about a politician they don't like, making grandiose and unsubstantiated claims about them manipulating world events, alleged shady business dealings, allegations of corruption, bribery, theft and insinuating they're looking after the interests of a shadowy cabal to the detriment of the country. You later find out that the politician is Jewish and you immediately realise your friend's opinion of this person appears to be rooted in all classic tropes of antisemitism. If you said to your friend, 'hey, all that stuff you said was pretty antisemitic' they might turn around and say 'when did I ever mention his race?'. The reason you are able to identify that your friend's judgement reflects more on his bigotry than the character of the person he's railing against is because you have knowledge of the tropes of antisemitism and the innuendo and subtext in which antisemites couch their bigotry. The fact that he never said 'I don't like this guy because I don't trust Jewish people' doesn't make him any less bigoted, it just makes him better at marketing it (or perhaps ignorant of his own bigotry).
J K Rowling will likely never come out point-blank and say she hates trans women, but she's broadcasting it pretty openly through the words she has chosen and by employing every bad faith anti-trans dog-whistle in the book. The reason you can't recognise it isn't because it isn't there, it's that you (understandably) haven't got the same knowledge of the tropes and innuendos surrounding anti-trans bigotry as those who have it thrown at them every day.
The horror...the horror...
Stephen Zelnick, professor of English literature:
'No one reads classics; and when they do and talk about it, you wish they hadn’t. Usually, you cannot tell when bright angels fall noiselessly to sullen earth. But Heart of Darkness fell in 1977. In a celebrated speech Chinua Achebe called Conrad “a bloody imperialist” and the worst sort racist, a liberal who hides behind a mask of tolerance. “Bloody imperialist” in British parlance does not mean “covered in blood”; it means “f*cking imperialist.” And so, a great anti-imperialist novel seems fated to be misunderstood and rarely read. Achebe claimed not to be a book banner and included Conrad’s novel in his literature courses; however, I think we know how it was read, and what kindness was there for the student who read it otherwise.
I attended a lecture on Conrad and Imperialism by (the Palestinian academic) Edward Said around that time. Said sported a polished manner and British loftiness despite leading, in imagination, the third-world bloody revolution (“bloody” means bloody). I picture Said now in his muted tweed jacket, and thinking at the time that this mantle of power cost more than the car I drove to Bryn Mawr to hear him. These were my Communist days, so I was reading theories of Imperialism, by left-wing and other authors. I had also just published a long essay on Lord Jim. And since I am foolhardy, it was a good bet I would not sit quietly once Said allowed questions.
My comments were unprepared but scholarly and respectful. I cited instances in Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1899) and An Outpost of Progress (1897) where Conrad mocked European imperialism and condemned the beastliness of Belgian slaughter in the Congo. Though my remarks were limited by time and setting, I situated them in the context of the Boer War and the jingoism it excited.
It would be pretty to think these remarks were acknowledged respectfully. Instead, I was singled out as a racist imperialist plant. Didn’t I know that Conrad wrote The N*gger of the Narcissus and used that word throughout Heart of Darkness? And not realise how offended members of that audience were that I praised a writer who used it? One large and menacing African-American woman raged at me. Members of the audience vied for Said’s approval and for my destruction, as they each competed, there on Philadelphia’s posh Main Line, for the forward ranks of bloody rebellion against “the man.”'
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In the context of both Heart of Darkness and also Zelnick's entire position on that book, the (bolded) remarks of his are absolutely astonishing not to mention ironic.
Stephen Zelnick, professor of English literature:
'No one reads classics; and when they do and talk about it, you wish they hadn’t. Usually, you cannot tell when bright angels fall noiselessly to sullen earth. But Heart of Darkness fell in 1977. In a celebrated speech Chinua Achebe called Conrad “a bloody imperialist” and the worst sort racist, a liberal who hides behind a mask of tolerance. “Bloody imperialist” in British parlance does not mean “covered in blood”; it means “f*cking imperialist.” And so, a great anti-imperialist novel seems fated to be misunderstood and rarely read. Achebe claimed not to be a book banner and included Conrad’s novel in his literature courses; however, I think we know how it was read, and what kindness was there for the student who read it otherwise.
I attended a lecture on Conrad and Imperialism by (the Palestinian academic) Edward Said around that time. Said sported a polished manner and British loftiness despite leading, in imagination, the third-world bloody revolution (“bloody” means bloody). I picture Said now in his muted tweed jacket, and thinking at the time that this mantle of power cost more than the car I drove to Bryn Mawr to hear him. These were my Communist days, so I was reading theories of Imperialism, by left-wing and other authors. I had also just published a long essay on Lord Jim. And since I am foolhardy, it was a good bet I would not sit quietly once Said allowed questions.
My comments were unprepared but scholarly and respectful. I cited instances in Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1899) and An Outpost of Progress (1897) where Conrad mocked European imperialism and condemned the beastliness of Belgian slaughter in the Congo. Though my remarks were limited by time and setting, I situated them in the context of the Boer War and the jingoism it excited.
It would be pretty to think these remarks were acknowledged respectfully. Instead, I was singled out as a racist imperialist plant. Didn’t I know that Conrad wrote The N*gger of the Narcissus and used that word throughout Heart of Darkness? And not realise how offended members of that audience were that I praised a writer who used it? One large and menacing African-American woman raged at me. Members of the audience vied for Said’s approval and for my destruction, as they each competed, there on Philadelphia’s posh Main Line, for the forward ranks of bloody rebellion against “the man.”'
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In the context of both Heart of Darkness and also Zelnick's entire position on that book, the (bolded) remarks of his are absolutely astonishing not to mention ironic.
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