Cancel Culture

[fergieisold]

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?

 

[dumbo]

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.

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):

Spoiler

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:

‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

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:

It’s not clear what Rowling’s motivations or reasons were for the follows and likes highlighted by Fairchild and others, and it’s not clear what Rowling’s views are on trans issues. As such, the claim that she had “confirmed [her] stance against transgender women” was false on two grounds. First, Rowling had not herself made substantive public utterances about trans issues, so there was no clear “stance” to be confirmed, and second, even if there had been, Rowling’s following of Berns’ account in June 2019 would not constitute relevant reliable evidence, since it had several possible explanations.

(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:

Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill

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:

If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.

The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades, feeling kinship because they’re vulnerable in the same way as women - ie, to male violence - ‘hate’ trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences - is a nonsense.

I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so.

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]

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

 

[fergieisold]

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):

Spoiler

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:


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

I shall have a read today, cheers!

 

[fergieisold]

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):

Spoiler

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:


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

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?

 

[Sweet Square]

Good thread

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Also

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[jeff_goldblum]

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?

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.

 

[SteveJ]

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.”'

------------------------------

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.

 

[entropy]

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[dumbo]

Joseph Conrad seems to have been an anti-Belgian-imperialismist but had much less of a problem with the old "get it done" British Imperialism. A text for our times indeed.

 

[fergieisold]

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.

I guess I'm just not quite convinced that she's anti-trans. Seems more to me that she has views around the trans debate that are not accepted by some and therefore she is labelled anti-trans.

Going through the responses to her tweets trying to find trans responses it's a mixed bag, some supporting her, some hating her...such is life I guess!

 

[fergieisold]

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.

One other thing I couldn't work out is has she said trans women are not women full stop. Biologically they aren't, but for me gender is a bit different...

 

[jeff_goldblum]

One other thing I couldn't work out is has she said trans women are not women full stop. Biologically they aren't, but for me gender is a bit different...

Yeah this would be one of those transphobic dog whistles I mentioned. To a casual observer, 'trans women aren't women' can look like a pretty uncontroversial statement about the fact that trans women are biologically and anatomically different to cis women. But, as you note, it goes beyond sex into gender, and to someone who has seen this debate play out time and again, it's a pretty solid marker of a bigot.

Imagine if public policy was set based on Rowling's 'trans women are men' argument. It would mean that, despite being a group that disproportionately experiences sexual violence and domestic abuse from men as well as transphobic abuse and violence (again largely from men), trans women would have no choice but to use men's toilets and changing rooms in public spaces. They would have to make a choice between 'out'-ing themselves at work by using men's facilities or not using bathroom facilities for 8 hours straight every day. They would have no recourse to women's support services in the aftermath of a sexual assault, rape or having fled domestic abuse.

Rowling and her ilk believe a lot of falsehoods about trans women despite evidence to the contrary, and they let these falsehoods dictate their views on whether trans women deserve to access basic amenities and to live their lives with dignity. To me that's a pretty cut and dry definition of bigotry.

 

[NotThatSoph]

One other thing I couldn't work out is has she said trans women are not women full stop. Biologically they aren't, but for me gender is a bit different...

I don't know if she has, but one thing I think is interesting. She tweeted out some really high praise for Stephen King. When he later tweeted that "Trans women are women", she then deleted her praise.

It seems like she not only thinks that trans women aren't women, but that this position is so repugnant to her that she can't be seen praising someone who holds it. I have a hard time seeing how one can both behave like this and not be anti trans.

 

[Mr Pigeon]

Cancel culture going on at the beeb as they've been bullied by the right wing snowflakes to cancel Andrew Neil's show before he says something upsetting about their blonde overlord again.

 

[SteveJ]

It's ridiculous. Neil will be sipping Pimms at a Johnson garden party this summer; hardly 'welcome to the resistance' material, is he?

 

[Berbasbullet]

Is this even a thing? I’ve never met anyone in my life that bangs on about cancelling x y and z, and I’ve met well over 100 people.

 

[noodlehair]

I either don't understand what the word culture means or don't understand what cancel culture is.

I hate how there has to be a stupid slogan for everything that happens now.

 

[fergieisold]

Is this even a thing? I’ve never met anyone in my life that bangs on about cancelling x y and z, and I’ve met well over 100 people.

I think it’s a thing in limited situations...college campuses and with the regressive left there’s definitely been instances of people being cancelled or pressure for people to be cancelled. Seems a big problem with comedians being told not to make certain jokes.

However in real life...nobody gives a shit. The internet just amplifies people that moan about things that don’t matter. I’ve never met a real person that has experienced being cancelled...

 

[berbatrick]

Statue pulled down in Bristol... History being destroyed in front of our eyes... How will the children learn about BLM??

 

[SalfordRed18]

Statue pulled down in Bristol... History being destroyed in front of our eyes... How will the children learn about BLM??

Satire?

 

[dumbo]

It's amazing how influential Marxist cancel culture is. Just look at the lefty media and establishment it has reduced us to: Sun, Sky, Torygraph, BBC sans testes, anti-trans centrist Graun, Brexit, huge Tory majority. Is there anything these socialist vampires don't have their claws dug deep into.

 

[SteveJ]

Even someone as blithely ignorant as me noticed years ago how the U.S. right-wing endlessly complained about the 'leftist media'. This astonishingly ridiculous and transparent tactic somehow succeeded over there, and now it's over here. Similar to the apparently successful illusion of a wealthy blowhard like Limbaugh (or Trump) who, just because he wears his shirt-sleeves rolled up, passes for a regular Joe who's standing up for the little guy. Incredible that such tactics actually work.

 

[berbatrick]

Tweet

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I have a feeling about this tweet, so screenshotting here.

Let's look at the vital research being curbed.

Oh. Oh no. How embarrasing. Not even high schoolers would fall for this. Big oof.

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Aaaaaah. Hand-drawn. The highest form of graph authenticity. What will academia do without Noah Carl. Thank god he has Epstein's friend, THE Harvard legend, THE high priest of capitalism, Steven Pinker himself, to bat for him and his ability to tell the truth about those Bangaldeshis succumbing to their genes and doing fraud. I find it funny and not at all tragic that my academic career is going to end before it began while Noah will join Quilette, the Ark for grievance study martyrs, backed by someone far more powerful than my boss' boss. I am actually laughing and not at all crying.

 

[berbatrick]

Interesting thread in the comments about Pinker btw.
This was around 2010 and I was about 18 at the time. I remember reading a small blurb-type article that the Harvard president was in trouble for saying that women generally don't have the temperament for science, and I wondered why people weren't allowed to speak the truth anymore.

 

[Mogget]

Tweet

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I have a feeling about this tweet, so screenshotting here.

Let's look at the vital research being curbed.

Oh. Oh no. How embarrasing. Not even high schoolers would fall for this. Big oof.

Tweet

— Twitter API (@user) date

Aaaaaah. Hand-drawn. The highest form of graph authenticity. What will academia do without Noah Carl. Thank god he has Epstein's friend, THE Harvard legend, THE high priest of capitalism, Steven Pinker himself, to bat for him and his ability to tell the truth about those Bangaldeshis succumbing to their genes and doing fraud. I find it funny and not at all tragic that my academic career is going to end before it began while Noah will join Quilette, the Ark for grievance study martyrs, backed by someone far more powerful than my boss' boss. I am actually laughing and not at all crying.

feck me, there's no way those graphs can be real. That's insane

 

[berbatrick]

feck me, there's no way those graphs can be real. That's insane

Full paper is behind a paywall, here's the abstract

Several reports have highlighted that, within Britain, allegations of electoral fraud tend to be more common in areas with large Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. However, the extent of this association has not yet been quantified. Using data at the local authority level, this paper shows that percentage Pakistani and Bangladeshi (logged) is a robust predictor of two measures of electoral fraud allegations: one based on designations by the Electoral Commission, and one based on police enquiries. Indeed, the association persists after controlling for other minority shares, demographic characteristics, socio-economic deprivation, and anti-immigration attitudes. I interpret this finding with reference to the growing literature on consanguinity (cousin marriage) and corruption. Rates of cousin marriage tend to be high in countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, which may have fostered norms of nepotism and in-group favoritism that persist over time. To bolster my interpretation, I use individual level survey data to show that, within Europe, migrants from countries with high rates of cousin marriage are more likely to say that family should be one's main priority in life, and are less likely to say it is wrong for a public official to request a bribe.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379417300811

Here's figure 2 btw. Especially for the left-hand-side one, I'd love to see any measure of fit.

 

[BobbyManc]

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There were others apparently who wished to sign it whose personal views led the leading signatories to ‘cancel’ them from signing it. How ironic and what a fitting expose of the farcical myth of some ultra-woke all powerful cancel culture.

 

[sebsheep]

Tweet

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There were others apparently who wished to sign it whose personal views led the leading signatories to ‘cancel’ them from signing it. How ironic and what a fitting expose of the farcical myth of some ultra-woke all powerful cancel culture.

 

[Needham]

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.

What if in all previous conversations with this "friend", he/she/gender non-specific has never shown the slightest inclination to views antisemitic? What if your friend has even expressed views couched in that well known guise for deep seated antisemitism, philosemitism -yet meant them in good faith? What if they didn't even know the politician was Jewish? What if they are Jewish and never told you? Why are you even choosing a Jewish individual as an example? Do Jews leap to the front of the benighted stereotype queue in your head because they are always there, somewhere in your head? Are you mentioning them -consciously or unconsciously- to reignite the idea of linkage between Jews and a "shadowy cabal", even as you eschew it? How do I know what's going on in your head? And how the feck do you know what's going on in your friend's head? You don't. Understand that, and you might get more friends, with or without a knowledge of commonly used shorthands, tropes and subtext-laden terminology..

 

[jeff_goldblum]

@Needham - You've entirely missed the point of that example, I suspect purposefully. In any case I'm not sure if "We should give people using anti-semitic tropes a pass because we can't be 100% sure what their thought processes are" is the gotcha you think it is. Obviously context is important in judging any action, but if you were to follow your argument to its logical conclusion, no-one should judge anyone for anything they say or do because, hey, for all we know they might have had a very good reason for doing it, or might have been ignorant of the fact they were doing it. I'm sorry if my unwillingness to put in the time to craft a suitably comprehensive backstory for my imaginary character has upset you.

The example is there to demonstrate that every form of hate speech has a vocabulary which extends beyond obvious slurs, and that some of these vocabularies are widely understand and others aren't. Many of us will recognise the shorthands, euphemisms, tropes or whatever you want to call them antisemites have historically used to stir up fear and hatred against Jews because, at least in the UK, the rise of Nazi Germany and the role of antisemitism in that rise is a major topic of study in history lessons, and because it's been in the British news a lot recently. That's why it's a good example to use on an English-speaking forum for fans of an English team.

 

[Sweet Square]

@Needham - You've entirely missed the point

in the current atmosphere of Orwellian wokeness

 

[Needham]

@Needham - You've entirely missed the point of that example, I suspect purposefully. In any case I'm not sure if "We should give people using anti-semitic tropes a pass because we can't be 100% sure what their thought processes are" is the gotcha you think it is. Obviously context is important in judging any action, but if you were to follow your argument to its logical conclusion, no-one should judge anyone for anything they say or do because, hey, for all we know they might have had a very good reason for doing it, or might have been ignorant of the fact they were doing it. I'm sorry if my unwillingness to put in the time to craft a suitably comprehensive backstory for my imaginary character has upset you.

The example is there to demonstrate that every form of hate speech has a vocabulary which extends beyond obvious slurs, and that some of these vocabularies are widely understand and others aren't. Many of us will recognise the shorthands, euphemisms, tropes or whatever you want to call them antisemites have historically used to stir up fear and hatred against Jews because, at least in the UK, the rise of Nazi Germany and the role of antisemitism in that rise is a major topic of study in history lessons, and because it's been in the British news a lot recently. That's why it's a good example to use on an English-speaking forum for fans of an English team.

Not about giving anyone a pass. It's about you and others going straight to bigotry as an explanation for viewpoints that don't coincide with the new orthodoxy. It's a kind of higher level reactionaryism based on your reputed superior education (tropes, euphemisms and whatnot). And of course I don't think you're antisemtic. But you get a sense of how tediously unarguable it might be to be reflexively accused of any form of bigotry in this way.

 

[Don't Kill Bill]

People don't bother to get involved in a debate like this until it affects things they use or care about. Opening up a society to accepting trans gender people doesn't bother most (yes it does does bother some) but when you start messing with who can and can't use the toilets then you have driven your gender ideological tanks straight onto their safe space lawn.

Those who achieved the policy change can't stand the idea of it being questioned as an unreasonable imposition. So they attack the questioner rather than the question and if they can find a way to damn the individual with an ism then they close down the debate. No one knows whether JKR is trans-phobic but it certainly helps the Trans rights movement's objectives if a rich and famous and up until now popular counter advocate can be shut up. Also if at the same time an example can be made of her which cows others who might start to question the basis in science for all of this, well all well and good, that is just how it works these days.

Does it really matter who makes the argument if it is a reasonable one?

Not all change is good. Even change which is good can be implemented badly or better. If change moves the weighting of contradictory rights from one group to another why wouldn't the group who feels they are losing out question its validity?

I don't think it is fair to complain about language and ascribe an alternative narratives to people who use certain words, if the people who are complaining are the ones changing their meaning in the first place.

 

[dumbo]

Nobody knows anything ladada, implication and insinuation are no, the problem of induction, we live on a flat earth in the Matrix. Bloody woke, postmodern marxists with their certianties and stuff.

Prove that this image isn't merely a malicious projection from the Cartesian demon, sat on the jar that contains my brain:

 

[Wumminator]

Nobody knows anything ladada, implication and insinuation are no, the problem of induction, we live on a flat earth in the Matrix. Bloody woke, postmodern marxists with their certianties and stuff.

Prove that this image isn't merely a malicious projection from the Cartesian demon, sat on the jar that contains my brain:

I’ve met that woman before! She used to work at MMU.

 

[jeff_goldblum]

Not about giving anyone a pass. It's about you and others going straight to bigotry as an explanation for viewpoints that don't coincide with the new orthodoxy. It's a kind of higher level reactionaryism based on your reputed superior education (tropes, euphemisms and whatnot). And of course I don't think you're antisemtic. But you get a sense of how tediously unarguable it might be to be reflexively accused of any form of bigotry in this way.

If you want to paint me, a low-level public sector worker living in a pit village council estate, as part of an aloof metropolitan elite because I know the word 'euphemism', I guess go ahead.

But it's pretty clear from your posts in this thread that your issue isn't with the argument as to whether J K Rowling is transphobic, it's more of a generic 'anti-woke' thing you have going on. Although, fair play to you, employing an epistemological argument as to whether anything is truly knowable as a way to deflect criticism of thinly-veiled bigotry is a new one on me.

 

[NotThatSoph]

Although, fair play to you, employing an epistemological argument as to whether anything is truly knowable as a way to deflect criticism of thinly-veiled bigotry is a new one on me.

This is actually an ancient topic. Pyrrhonist skepticts have held for almost 2500 years that bigotry is impossible. The academic skeptics didn't go quite as far, arguing that while bigotry might exist, it's just impossible for people to identify it. According to Carneades, even though knowledge of bigotry is fundamentally impossible and we should always suspend judgement, we have to live in the real world and it's therefore permissible to follow one's sensations about bigotry as a form of approximation to what real bigotry might conceivably look like.

Also, I don't know why this isn't more known, but Aristotle was one of the first to point out that anti-racists are in fact the real racists.

 

[BobbyManc]

Tweet

— Twitter API (@user) date

Day 1: Cancel Culture is bad plz help i signed a letter us millionaires are dying here
Day 2: You said you won’t buy my books cos you don’t like me? You’re cancelled

 

[Shamwow]

Tweet

— Twitter API (@user) date

Day 1: Cancel Culture is bad plz help i signed a letter us millionaires are dying here
Day 2: You said you won’t buy my books cos you don’t like me? You’re cancelled

Jesus christ that apology is ridiculous.

 

[NotThatSoph]

PAW Patrol clarifies it hasn't been canceled after McEnany claim.

Contrary to popular - and White House - belief the cult classic PAW Patrol is still going strong. Next time we might not be so lucky.