“Being a white ciswoman gives me a voice”
Another twerp heaves another rock:
Harry Potter fans—yes, I’m addressing roughly the entire Millennial generation—we need to have another tough conversation with ourselves: We must end our Harry Potter fantasy now.
She goes on to detail what a passionate, indeed obsessive fan she was growing up, and then gets on with the stoning.
I’m also a ciswoman, which means my feelings are not the point right now. As significant as the franchise has been for me, if I am actually going to be the ally I fancy myself to be, that means I have to consider the damage Rowling (and potentially the entire series) has done to trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people.
She’s a woman, so her feelings don’t matter right now. Won’t somebody please think of the feelings of men for once?
Being a white ciswoman gives me a voice—like a magical power, but a shitty one, because it’s a power others are denied.
Ahhhh there it is, spotted in the wild – the core Big Lie of this whole enterprise. She frames women as domineering over men, women as the people who have privilege that men lack, women who have an illegitimate hold on power, women who oppress and dominate and exploit and exclude.
It’s my job to use that “magical power” as a force for good and say what nobody wants to say. To bring to light that if Rowling had been a Hogwarts parent and heard that Lupin was a werewolf, her Karen-self likely would have demanded he be fired for putting her little Hufflepuff in danger.
There it is again – women are Karens, so now they’re the hated oppressor class and it’s not just ok but positively virtuous to do everything you can to destroy their lives.
I think another reason so many people are piling on this particular pile is that it’s one of those great calls for ‘action’ that requires absolutely no sacrifice or indeed action at all. Presumably that’s why she spent so much time saying what a big fan of these children’s books she was – so she can pretend it’s a hardship to…. what? Stop liking them? Refuse to read them again? AND THAT’S ROWLING’S FAULT!
Oh, and a force for good something something.
My heart bleeds.
Because transwomen have no voice. They are deplatformed by libraries. They are not allowed to write columns in newspapers, magazines, or online. They are banned from Twitter just for saying they are trans (I actually heard this argument!). They can’t post on Facebook. They can’t even complain at their schools and have anyone listen to them. No one is ever disciplined for saying something perceived to be anti-trans. No police officer would dream of questioning someone who retweeted an anti-trans limerick. No court would ever uphold the firing of a woman for not spouting trans dogma. The ACLU would never support their rights. NOW would never support them. Human Rights Watch tells them to go home and forget about it. No movie stars would ever dare to come out in support of trans rights. No presidential candidate would ever put their preferred pronouns on their Twitter account. No doctor of any kind would ever ask you what gender you identify as.
Nope. They have NO VOICE. And women (sorry – “cis”-women) have all the goodies. Yeah, I noticed that, too.
Well obviously her feelings don’t count on the topic of ‘what is a woman’… we need more men to weigh in.
Re “it’s one of those great calls for ‘action’ that requires absolutely no sacrifice or indeed action at all.”
I have lost more Facebook “friends” over my support of JKR in this imbroglio than in any other incident, including elections, I think. This is probably more indicative of my circle of “friends” than anything else, but still. It’s easy to join a pile-on, harder to speak out against one, as I’m sure all of us here are aware.
Yes, funny how the breakdown of who still holds power in every government/corporate/academic institution is same as it has been for centuries in the USA (hint, white men) but we white women have to once again be Super Mommy to everybody and their problems. Sorry, Mommy’s hands are busy so if you are going to fall without Big White Woman Power holding you up, hope you land on your rear ends where most of the padding is.
Yep, that’s how the magic trick is done. “Woman” is something you can be sympathetic to, but “white ciswoman”?
We have intuitions of “woman”, because we all of us know or are women. It’s a tangible thing, solid and real. By tacking “cis” onto it, it becomes a technical, academic term. So while the propositional referent may be unchanged, the psychological connections between sign and signified are removed. That network of meaning you’ve built up over your lifetime of knowing or being a woman—gone, wiped away by a prefix. It’s not even a person anymore, just an abstract construct. Without that web of intuitions, ciswoman is just a neutral term at best. However, it’s got two features that make it immediately negative. First, cis- is strange and you’ve heard that cispeople are oppressors. Second, ciswoman sounds technical and technical language is scary.
To that mix of unfamiliarity and vague unease we add “white”. With the pervasive social coding around “white people”, of course you have picked up that white just ain’t all right. In fact, if you happen to be white and liberal (in the American usage) you’ve likely developed at least a small amount of discomfort with your race. So you transfer all the negativity you feel vis-a-vis race onto this “white ciswoman” construct. Now it’s an abstract construct that evokes guilt, disgust, and disdain.
We started with “woman”, a word that refers to a human female, a person with thoughts, emotions, hopes, family, successes, and failures. We ended with an abstract cypher for our negativity surrounding the social problems of prejudice, iniquity, and hatred. All it took was a color and an empty prefix.
The human mind is messed up.
Yup. It’s conditioning, and it’s all too effective.
The werewolf part of the comment really irks me, because all characters in the books who know about Remus being a werewolf totally acknowledge that it is absolutely necessary to take precautions to protect the kids – that’s why he is given the wolfsbane potion after all.
And of course, there is a scene in the books that seemingly all those TWAW-people carefully overlook: When one of the boys tried to enter the girls’ dormitory (I forgot , Hogwarts throws him out because he is not a girl:
(copied from here : https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Gryffindor_girls%27_staircase)
And strangely, no “puerila identifico”-spell is incanted.
So Rowling was always very clear and consistent about these issues: Yes, have compassion with people who might be dangerous, but protect the vulnerable from them nevertheless.