Disaggregating the Leavitts
Meanwhile let’s get this straight. There’s a prolific women-hater on Twitter named David Leavitt but he is NOT repeat NOT the novelist named David Leavitt. They are two different people.
I don’t know if the novelist is on Twitter, but the journalist definitely is. He’s a very bad man.
Also either dishonest or stupid. Rowling does not say what he claims she says in the tweet he singles out to demonstrate her saying the thing she didn’t say.
A very bad man. Not the novelist.
The “more likely to be victims than perpetrators” claim is conflating two different problems.
It’s entirely possible for members of group X to be more likely than the average person to be a victim of a crime, AND more likely than the average person to be a perpetrator of a crime.
This comes up a lot in discussions about the homeless and the mentally ill. I have no reason to doubt the claims that statistically speaking, members of those (often overlapping) groups are more likely to be victims than perpetrators. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have cause to be nervous about the people shouting randomly at passers-by in my neighborhood. I hope that those people are not victimized, but I’d like not to be victimized, too.
Math. How does it work? I’m beginning to suspect the entire world is innumerate, but some of them are selectively innumerate.
Unfortunately I think JKR misfired on this one. Zachary spoke of trans women as the subject, and JKR responded by calling him a rapist rights activist’ – equating defence of trans people as defence of rapists.
The topic under discussion was forcing rape victims to refer to their assailants as “she”, and Zachary decided to step in to merge “treating women so cruelly” with treating transwomen cruelly, treating all transwomen as predators. It seems Zachary is stretching things badly here, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable of JKR to take this deflection of the topic as being more concerned with the transwoman assailant than the victim.