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Controversy over transphobia in J.K Rowling's new book


Ser Drewy

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Without the other writing, the other book is not transphobic as you describe it. It’s more about disguise and / or compartmentalism, even dissociation, in a guy whose sick to start with. If she makes it causal, than we have a problem. Like Silence of the lambs is not transphobic, what do you think? It could be thought of that way.

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46 minutes ago, Lord Patrek said:

She could lose more than half of her readership and still outsell 99% of the rest of the authors on the market. . .

If she lost half her book sales, the only other living authors who would still be outselling her are Danielle Steele and Stephen King. She's not going to be hurting at all, which makes all her piteous mewling about being cancelled all the more risible.

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1 hour ago, HoodedCrow said:

Without the other writing, the other book is not transphobic as you describe it. It’s more about disguise and / or compartmentalism, even dissociation, in a guy whose sick to start with. If she makes it causal, than we have a problem. Like Silence of the lambs is not transphobic, what do you think? It could be thought of that way.

The thing is though, she has already articulated her views on the subject, and is now doubling down on them.  This is beyond a "depiction is not endorsement" angle when that's been her argument the entire time.

This is essentially like arguing that if Donald Trump wrote a book about a Mexican rapist supergangmember serial killee, that if we hadn't heard all the other racist shit he's said on the subject that maybe no one would think it was that fucked up.

 

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Trump hasn’t donated half his riches to charity or written bestselling liberal children’s books.  He is not self made. He hasn’t done anything good or smart except to exploit other people’s weaknesses or strengths. Rowling should not double down. Now I have to have Rowling under artists with serious blind spots. It would be like learning that George Martin eats cats and then writes a cat cookbook. wha?

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7 minutes ago, Shaun Snow said:

Yet it can't be overlooked that she has done more good in the world than 99.99% of the people who despise her ever will. Well, it can, I suppose, but you have to be a bit delusional to do it.

Good deeds do not cancel bad. You can be a completely shitty person and still donate a lot to charity. You can't buy goodness. You can make great art (not that Harry Potter is great art) and still hold abhorrent views. And you shouldn't still still be lauded, celebrated, and held up as a hero and example for any good you've done once the bad shit comes out.

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11 hours ago, Mr Meeseeks said:

Do her mysteries even sell that well? I was under the impression they didn't but that may have been before it was revealed who she was.

Also I've heard from people who read and (mostly) enjoyed the previews ones that this one is just plain shit, blatant transphobia aside.

Damn 924 pages? I hope it has a giant font. What's the word count on this fucker?

I remember trying to read the first one and it was pretty crap. She'd made almost zero attempt to update her prose style from Potter, so it felt like it was still aimed at 8 year olds but with occasional swearing.

They do sell very well, but a minute fraction of her Potter sales. When your main series has sold over 600 million copies, even a tiny fraction of that is still a figure that crushes almost all other comers.

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Yet it can't be overlooked that she has done more good in the world than 99.99% of the people who despise her ever will. Well, it can, I suppose, but you have to be a bit delusional to do it.

She's also done more bad in the world than 99.99% of the population who laud her ever will. The good does not balance out the bad, or the inverse.

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for a philanthropist to later become or be revealed as a bigoted asshole

this is precisely the critique of a system that eschews public assistance in favor of private charity; the decision is not taken by duly constituted democratic authority deliberating with due process, but is rather arrogated to a private decision, rooted apparently in 'bigotry' covered by a 'blindness' that allows no criticism. her alleged charitable contributions are accordingly not unimpeachable, even sequestrated fictitiously in isolation from the rightwing politics.

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3 minutes ago, sologdin said:

for a philanthropist to later become or be revealed as a bigoted asshole

this is precisely the critique of a system that eschews public assistance in favor of private charity; the decision is not taken by duly constituted democratic authority deliberating with due process, but is rather arrogated to a private decision, rooted apparently in 'bigotry' covered by a 'blindness' that allows no criticism. her alleged charitable contributions are accordingly not unimpeachable, even sequestrated fictitiously in isolation from the rightwing politics.

I think Rowling's views on transgender issues are horrible, but I think it should be pointed out that she seems to be coming at that from the "TERF" (trans-excluding radical feminist) perspective and so otherwise her politics are not "rightwing".  She seems to definitely be a supporter of the Labour Party in the UK, which of course would definitely make her leftist in terms of US politics.

I realize that is a separate issue from whether or not private charity by billionaires is a good thing or not. But the great majority of Rowling's politics aren't "rightist".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_J._K._Rowling

 

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4 minutes ago, Ormond said:

I think it should be pointed out that she seems to be coming at that from the "TERF" (trans-excluding radical feminist) perspective and so otherwise her politics are not "rightwing"

One does not cancel out the other.

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1 minute ago, IlyaP said:

One does not cancel out the other.

TERFs are definitely a leftist (or at least leftist-originating) movement. Since it's largely an on and offline hate mob it's not always easy to sort into categories, but it's a brand of leftist shitbaggery, not right-wing shitbaggery. 

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15 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

One does not cancel out the other.

Who's trying to cancel out anything? One needs to accurately understand and characterize those one disagrees with.

There's a whole cultural thing going on here. Rowling's opinions on this did not develop in a vacuum. She happens to live in the UK, where anti-trans ideas for reasons unknown to me are way more prominent among vocal leftist feminists than they now are in the USA. (I don't know about Australia or New Zealand.) She has a community supporting her ideas in Britain that she wouldn't have in the USA, and one has to take that into account in deciding how to counter the problem. 

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But those groups in the UK have been receiving funding from far right US groups for years and have been getting more and more open in their association with right wing politics. It's definitely more complicated, originated is probably reasonable although I'd put more weight on their prior alignment with left style/aesthetic rather than substance. There's always been there linkages there that the US right are exploiting now.

TERFs are also hitting the point of pivoting to open slather homophobia generally and I'd expect them to picking up other far right bigotries too. Highlight I saw recently was one of them unironically saying "the only other people saying what we're saying are nazis". And she actually used the word Nazis, that's her honesty not my interpretation.

On the off chance the up thread conversation about Silence of the Lambs was in good faith - it's possibly for a work to have an unintentionally harmful influence due to the audience associating what was depicted with a real group of people. It the case of SotL from what I've seen in the last week that harmful association was not intended by the author and subsequent statements and work have attempted to compensate for that inarguably harmful association. In this case it's very clear from JK's online activism that the association and corresponding harm is very much intentional, she's using this novel to argue exactly the same bigoted point she does online. Pointing out that it's a man disguising himself as a woman is not a defense for her when her claim is that that is exactly what trans women are. We are not, but the two are inseparable in her construction.

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 I'd put more weight on their prior alignment with left style/aesthetic rather than substance.

 

I mean it's going to depend on how doctrinaire they are (and obviously a lot of TERF's aren't really ideological in that sense, in that they don't neccessarily care or understand what their supposed arguments are beoynd using them as cudgels, but that isn't unique to TERF's by any means) and I don't think TERF's are even sortable in that sense (which makes sense for howit originated) it's "Radical feminists who for whatever reason exclude transpeople", their reasons can differ and aren't at all consistent between TERF's, although in the internet environment they tend to flow together. 

 

 

 

 

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30 minutes ago, karaddin said:

But those groups in the UK have been receiving funding from far right US groups for years and have been getting more and more open in their association with right wing politics. It's definitely more complicated, originated is probably reasonable although I'd put more weight on their prior alignment with left style/aesthetic rather than substance. There's always been there linkages there that the US right are exploiting now.

TERFs are also hitting the point of pivoting to open slather homophobia generally and I'd expect them to picking up other far right bigotries too. Highlight I saw recently was one of them unironically saying "the only other people saying what we're saying are nazis". And she actually used the word Nazis, that's her honesty not my interpretation.

 

My question would be why do "far right US groups" have to go to the UK to give funds to this issue? I am sure in a country of over 300 million people that we have a few people with "TERF" opinions in the USA, but it just isn't as prominent here. What is it about feminists in the UK that made them easier to exploit this way than feminists in the USA? No matter who is funding them, it's still the case that there is a more visible community backing these ideas in Britain. 

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