Rightly widely criticised views
Alison Flood in the Guardian reviews Rowling’s new novel. (Oh does she have a new novel? I hadn’t heard.)
Before it had even come out, criticism of JK Rowling’s new Robert Galbraith thriller, Troubled Blood, was already wall-to-wall, after an early review in the Telegraph claimed that its “moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress”.
In other words people who hadn’t read it were already tearing it to shreds because of a highly dishonest remark in the Telegraph.
As the pair look into the disappearance – and this is a spoiler – one of the avenues they investigate is the possibility Margot was murdered by Dennis Creed, a now-imprisoned and notorious serial killer who once tricked some of his female victims into his van by wearing a wig and a woman’s coat to appear unthreatening. This has now been cited across the internet as further proof of Rowling’s transphobia, after her earlier essay, tweets and decision to return a human rights award after the organisation behind it denounced her views. Amazon has now suspended reviews of the book due to “unusual reviewing activity”, while the hashtag #RIPJKRowling trends on Twitter.
The Telegraph review chose to go big on Creed, describing him as “a transvestite serial killer”, and asking “what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues” would make of it. But Creed is just one of many suspects – and without giving too much away, he is not the main villain, nor is he portrayed as trans or even called a “transvestite” by Rowling.
…
Creed is described as a “genius of misdirection in his neat little white van, dressed in the pink coat he’d stolen from [his landlady] Vi Cooper, and sometimes wearing a wig that, from a distance, to a drunk victim, gave his hazy form a feminine appearance just long enough for his large hands to close over a gasping mouth”.
Perhaps some will still consider this depiction transphobic, given Rowling’s rightly widely criticised views on trans people.
Notice that nervous “rightly.” Nervous, placating, and wrong. Anyone would think Rowling wanted trans people punished or ostracized or otherwise harmed, but she doesn’t – basically she just wants them to stop doing that to women.
It is, at best, an utterly tone-deaf decision to include an evil man who cross-dresses after months of pain among trans people and their allies.
Pain shmain. It’s worked-up pain, manufactured pain, hyperbolic pain, deranged furious socially constructed and encouraged pseudo-pain.
And we should also be wary of how one review has been reproduced without question by countless newspapers and websites, by journalists who have shown no indication of having read the book themselves.
And by cowards who think they have to say Rowling was “rightly criticised” for not echoing every word of the Trans Catechism.
H/t Arnaud
“It is, at best, an utterly tone-deaf decision to include an evil man who cross-dresses after months of pain among trans people and their allies.”
but surely this book would have been finished and off to the publisher long before those “painful months” – isn’t that how real writing works?
The ‘months of pain’ are what they have been attempting to inflict on Rowling, because they cannot bear people talking about, or caring about, anyone but them.
Everything has to be about them. Even when it isn’t. Especially when it isn’t.
What does anything a cisgender man does in a book have to do with transgender people?
Transwomen are true women in every single way, right? Are cisgender true women offended that a criminal dressed in women’s clothing? No? Then why should transgender true women be offended?
And don’t I recall transwomen bristling at suggestions that men might pretend to be transgender women to get into women’s spaces, saying that’s a problem with cisgender men and has nothing to do with transgender women? I believe I do. So why doesn’t the same principle apply here?
#RipBrains
Skeletor, do I read you right? Are you suggesting trans dogmatists should be consistent? Or rational? Well, that’s just transphobic!
In the news recently was an event where a group of drag queens were disinvited because they were deemed offensive to trans people. That women might similarly find them objectionable wasn’t brought up.
Yes, you read me right. The 100% true women I’ve known have generally been consistent and rational (although, as humans, not always), so trans women, who are also 100% true women should have no problem in that regard.
Skeletor wrote:
I don’t. I well remember suggesting that predators might pretend to be trans to get into women’s spaces, and transwomen and supporters bristling at the suggestion that this was even possible. You see, the kind of men who would want to attack or leer at women are far too macho to want to degrade themselves by pretending to be women, no matter what the incentive, or how easy the con. They knew it was an argument which would blow back on them.
Which makes them a better judge of that argument, than of the character of predators.
Gina Carano, an actor in the Disney+ Star Wars series The Mandolorian is another woman deemed to have sinned against the cult. She initially caused ‘great harm’ by not adding her pronouns to her Twitter bio after being asked by ‘fans of the show’ (I bet they weren’t really fans, just predatory TRAs looking for another famous victim) to do so to show solidarity with the trans community. Despite her polite and inoffensive refusal, tweeting “I won’t be putting them in my bio but good for all you who choose to”, she found herself the target of the usual shitshow of name-calling, threats, and having her social media scrutinized (and, horror of horrors, was found to have ‘liked’ tweets by forbidden people) so she decided to have a bit of fun at the TRAs expense, saying “After months of [harassment]. I decided to put 3 VERY controversial words in my bio.. beep/bop/boop.
That did not go down well at all.
Anyway, long story short, Carano cut through all of the bullshit and got straight to the heart of the real problem in one beautifully succinct sentence:
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
https://www.nme.com/news/tv/the-mandalorian-fans-want-gina-carano-fired-for-mocking-trans-people-2752622
And shouldn’t the catechism itself have been questioned for being “reproduced without question by countless newspapers and websites [and bloggers and social media users etc.]”? But no, the nature of articles of faith is that they are not subject to normal interrogation.
This is an example of a Guardian genre – the soft wokish. They don’t want to flat out say, this is insane and wrong, or even, this is inaccurate. They have to say, up to a point Lord Woke. The example I can best remember is one about Jessica Yaniv’s instance that immigration women wax him though they objected to waxing men. The writer from the Guardian stable conceded that it was unreasonable to force the women to wax his genitalia, but they were wrong to object to waxing any other part of his body.
And the tone of the article is so genteel and pained. Very late Victorian, when the heavy moralising and fixed standards of the mid century were taking on broader views. I can’t lay my hands on Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, but there’s a scene in the 1880s when the “advanced” lady is having a discussion with the vicar about Mrs Humphrey Ward’s Robert Elsmere, which caused a stir in its time as it was about a crisis in faith. The advanced lady thinks some pages should have been omitted, but Mrs Ward was a woman of the highest reputation.
Also how could anyone read “rightly widely” without wincing at that ugly sound.
Wow, it really is a religion now. This sounds just like the synthetic frenzy you get with cartoons and criticisms about a certain prophet, or the pandemonium that erupts when his holy book is disparaged or burned.
This is the real reason behind “No debate!”
Also, “Educate yourself!” just means “Learn the catechism! Recite!” They really don’t want people to look too closely at this stuff, just to validate, affirm, comply and submit. As Jane Clare Jones put it, “You REALLY need to stop telling people to educate themselves.
It doesn’t go well for you when they do.” https://twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1305465792977350657