Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Fox and Owl and Drew.

I despise people who worry about being “seen as.”

People who were worried about being “seen as”, let gangs of rapists sexually enslave little girls in the North of England, because when the rapist is Muslim one has to worry about being called racist.

And this isn’t a knock on the Muslim community, the Catholic Church covered up child rapers for decades if not centuries, because it was worried that if word got out that they were basically a giant pedophile and money laundering ring their moral credibility would be undermined.

During all this time, they didn’t stop raping kids or embezzling money the Irish state gave them to run orphanages, they just covered it up because they were more worried about being “seen as” than actually doing anything about the abuse. The abuse you see, made them money.

Fuck the optics, reality matters, and reality requires that people are free to disagree. That’s what this all boils down to.

JK Rowling doesn’t agree with all of trans ideology, there are bits she disagrees with, there are bits she questions and because of that there is this tremendous pressure to shut her down.

Oh, but she’s rich and powerful, who cares? Well, its like this, if Rowling can be shut down, anybody can be shut down. If a publisher can be pressured to give up an author who nets them billions of dollars, what about all the critical authors who don’t?

A while back, I read a few Wild Cards stories, its a series of short stories curated by George RR Martin. One of the stories was about “Golden Boy” – a superhero during the setting’s version of the McCarthy trials.

The whole point of the story was how HUAC broke the titular character, and why did they break him? Because if they could break him, they could break anybody. Because he broke, nobody was safe from the witch hunts.

That is the case with Rowling. I personally don’t actually like the Harry Potter books, but I have to stand by her for the sake of all the good authors who might come along who don’t buy into what is a modern orthodoxy.

This isn’t even really about trans issues. This is the same issue that hit Amelie Wen Zhao, a native of Beijing who had the temerity to write a novel involving slavery in a non-western, non-racial context. You see to the “seen as” crowd, popularly known as the woke, not being racist pile of trash is less important than not being “seen as” a racist pile of trash.

So forcing their cultural lens onto writers who do not share that lens isn’t being colonialist bastards its tooting their virtue horn. She’s “anti black” because she was more influenced by the history of China, where she’s from, than Alabama.

And if they can toot that horn so loud Rowling falls, they’ll toot that horn at anybody over any perceived slight to their holy wokeness (provided the person has a vagina, you’ll be amazed at the shit you can get way with if you’ve got a penis) just to demonstrate that they can.

One doesn’t give bullies a pass because you think they’re “punching up” – there are a lot of much smaller people who get flattened if Rowling falls.