It is an act of dominance
JKR nails it. Again.
It makes no difference how politely the person who wishes to compel my speech makes the request. The very making of the request tells me the man in question thinks he has the right to control my language, and thereby, to control me. He is asking me to acquiesce in a lie, to pretend, implicitly, that he and I are the same. It is an act of dominance, which is why the women discussing this with you keep using the word ‘demand’, as opposed to your preferred ‘request’.
In the current political climate, any request to use opposite sex pronouns when talking about a trans-identified man carries a threat. It is highly disingenuous to pretend you don’t know that many women and girls have been put through absolute hell over the past few years, either for refusing to pretend men can be women, or for hurting an individual trans-identified man’s vanity, even unintentionally.
I’m assuming that if someone put a gun to your head and told you to hand over all your money you wouldn’t much care how sweetly they’d asked. That’s where increasing numbers of women are on this issue. They’re sick of having a metaphorical gun held to their head, of the ever-present threat of being investigated, reported, harassed, sacked, defamed and dragged into court – simply because they won’t pretend men are women.
All you’ve been doing for the past two days is prove exactly how shallow your understanding is, not only of this issue, but of what women have already lost and endured. This makes your patronising ‘just be nice, ladies,’ lectures even more offensive.
As Al Capone said, “You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”
Wow. She sure can write. I’m wondering if Dan here is now wishing he’d kept his thoughts -few as they were- to himself.
Hard to get much clearer than that.
It’s the flip side of the coin. No matter how clearly she writes,the trans SS will deliberately twist it to vilify her again.
In her very first essay on the issue, JKR could hardly have been more clear in her support of ordinary rights for trans people. That’s all the opposite of “transphobia” or bigotry. Without ever once dealing with what JKR actually wrote, the TRAs simply labeled her as a transphobe and a bigot. It doesn’t matter what she says; they will lie about what she said.
A wonderful, biting reply from JKR.