Three blasphemously ungrateful actors
Who was not invited to participate in the Harry Potter 20th anniversary special? Why, the very woman, who in the most difficult of circumstances, and by the power of her own will and invention, brought the entire phenomenon into existence. She was effectively blacklisted from the celebration of what she created while three pretentious and above all blasphemously ungrateful actors held the spotlight, and further — I’m looking for an elegant verb — dumped on the woman who made them. Made them, almost as completely as she made Harry Potter.
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Last year when certain authorities began promoting the phrase “people who menstruate” as a replacement for a term familiar since the birth of language and the emergence of conscious life (that would be “woman”), Rowling mocked it. Which is the only both correct and necessary response to these faddish idiocies. Very recently — you will find this hard to believe — when the Scottish police issued a guidance that rapes could be recorded as being carried out by a woman if the perpetrator “identifies as female,” Rowling gave that lunacy an apt Orwell-inspired response: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.”
What if the perpetrator identifies as a five-year-old girl with a pacifier in her mouth?
Well then surely she can’t be held responsible for her crime. Five-year-olds are not responsible for their actions. But shhh, we shouldn’t talk about this too much out loud, because then criminals that don’t really identity as minors will start identifying as minors in order to get out of crimes, and then that will make true trans-age people look bad, and thus will play into the hands of conservative bigots.
When this reunion show was publicised in the TV Entertainment section of Stuff, there were only three comments. All supportive of JKR and making quite clear they didn’t think much of the actors whose careers, indeed lives, she made.
Totally gobsmacked yesterday to hear my Lesbian stepdaughter is anti JKR and pro the blasphemously ungrateful actors.
@Rob, only 3 comments? It Shows NZ is still a way off being infected by the biology denying pronoun people.
Keep yourselves immunised.
Radcliffe, Watson and Grint: could have something of a future as a stage act in some bog-standard pub down by the Liverpool docks. Or perhaps not.
Time will tell. The plughole of history awaits.
Maybe this’ll be an unpopular view but even if your benefactor is Harvey fuckiy Weinstein if you don’t know anything that the FBI needs to know you owe him your silence if not your praise. With Rowling it’s even more egregiously.
Omar:
Dickensian solicitors.
When a pompous, right-wing shill like Rex Murphy agrees with me, I feel a twinge of doubt. Then I remember the avalanche of bad-faith arguments and the self-serving motives of the TRA movement and I carry on.
@Me (feels weird typing that: “Gonna sit right down and write myself a letter”), from #8
I get that same feeling, too. But I think it helps us keep a check on ourselves, always questioninig to make sure we aren’t just going along to get along, or living in an echo chamber. When I see all the Tory or Republicans with red shinigami profiles, my initial response is “Are we the baddies?”
Then I recall telling someone I object to the way that TERFs are threatened, and she shouldn’t put “Fuck TERFs” in a Planned Parenthood shared page. And her first response, rather than “What do you mean?” which would have opened a dialogue, was to say “DON’T YOU BELIEVE THAT TRANSWOMEN ARE WOMEN?” What followed was unpleasantness, when there could have been dialog about how as volunteers we were shielding women from threats and hatred, and that it was incongruous to go along with it in another frame.
No, we don’t have the Skulls on our uniforms. We’re not the baddies.
I think that JKRowling deserves the admiration that she gets for taking and holding a stand, and the actors she gave characters to, (even though they don’t seem to have followed up in their film careers well,) should give her a bit of consideration. They know her. They know she isn’t hateful. They’re just afraid of the abuse they saw her get.
Would that more of the adults who were already established when the films were made would talk to them and give them some sense of gratitude.
Me @ 8 – Same here, and Rex Murphy is particularly pompous, but…that’s the crazy situation we’re in.
If they didn’t have the bit about using archival footage of Rowling I’d wonder if this were even a real story, since most of the cast reunions I’ve seen have just featured the cast, not producers or directors or screenplay writers or, in this case, the person who wrote the original book the screenplay was based on.
So if they’d been a little smarter about it they could have fooled me at least (cue the jokes), but they had to show their hand with that archival-footage bit. And what’s the theory there, that it’s OK to show her before she went evil? Or maybe showing her on video is better because people would “feel unsafe” if she were there in person?
Why can’t people just disagree but still be cordial? John McWhorter is right that wokeism has become a religion, complete with heretics.
The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on. Alternatively, the wokes bark, and the heretics clear out. Or better still, the wokes bark and the heretics chuck a bucket of something or other all over ’em.
The important thing to remember is that the confluence of conclusions re: Trans Rights Activism between GCFs and socio-religious conservatives is a classic example of the latter being liked a stopped clock–right twice a day, for all the wrong reasons.
They aren’t allies, or fellow-travelers in this fight. They don’t oppose trans rights because they want to protect women from rape or to shield Title IX funding, they do it because they think that gender (here I mean strictly femininity and masculinity, and all the stereotyped traits and enforced social roles that go along with them) follows from biological sex. They don’t merely want men in dresses to not be identified as women; they want men in dresses to go to jail, and they quite readily want women to be shoved into roles of quite subservience (at least, subservience to sufficiently ‘masculine’ men, by their standards).