Guest post: Dead women can’t say No

Apr 22nd, 2022 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? in Miscellany Room 8.

Canada’s Global News reports on Manhunt author’s fantasized depiction of Rowling’s death in novel.

The reporter, Kathryn Mannie, begins with a brief description of the book:

The book is set in an apocalyptic scenario in which people with a sufficient amount of testosterone get turned into monstrous beasts. All that remains of humanity are cisgender women, non-binary people, transgender men and transgender women.

(I wonder if, in this future, fully intact “transgender women” also turn into beasts? Or do they all have testosterone dutifully reduced to the level that would allow them to join the Penn women’s swim team? And what about transmen? Is Chase Strangio’s T level still low enough to prevent her from becoming a monstrous beast, moustache notwthstanding? Not that I’m interested enough to read it and find out. I’d pay for a root canal before buying (or reading) Manhunt .)

Even with this bare bones outline, we’re in trouble already. The ideas of “cisgender women”, “non-binary people” and “transgender” men and women are plopped in without definition. We’re already supposed to know who and what these entities are. Anyone outside of the trans/GC Twitterverse would have little idea what the hell any of that really meant. Any one without the requisite familiarity with these terms of art will be counting on Mannie as their guide. That, it turns out, will be a mistake.

Then a bit of well poisoning:

In the book, the Rowling character travels with her TERF friends to a castle, where they all perish after it collapses in an inferno.

TERFs are feminists who exclude transgender women in their fight for women’s rights — Rowling is considered by some as a TERF due to transphobic tweets she has shared on social media.

The definition of TERF given here shows that the writer has taken a side, and hidden this fact from the view of most of her readers. The very definition she uses smears women and sneaks TiMs in as women in a few deceptively simple words. Anyone who didn’t know the meaning of TERF before has been given an inaccurate description cloaked in presumed journalistic “neutrality. “Pro-woman is painted as “anti-trans.” How much differently that would have come across if it were rewritten thus:

TERFs are feminists who exclude trans identified males from single-sex organizations, facilities, and institutions intended for women only.

The phrase “transphobic tweets” links to a story about the “backlash” against her “Wimpund” tweet, which is portrayed as a tone-deaf equation of “womanhood” with menstuation that “erases” trans men, as opposed to it being a satirical comment on the erasure of women in messaging intended to convey lifesaving medical information, in the interests of “inclusion”.

Here’s what I consider the least dishonest part:

Several news outlets have reported on a number of negative reviews the book has received on Amazon.

“I have no idea how this even got published. The existence of this book proves once again that misogyny is alright as long as you identify as a member of a certain group,” one reviewer complained. “If you want to read a messed-up individual’s unhinged violent sexual fantasies against women then this is the book for you!”

A handful of other reviews also deride the novel for being misogynistic and promoting violence against women. One reviewer wrote that the book “describes horrible violence towards an actual living person which could be interpret (sic) by extreme activists as an instruction manual.”

But it’s okay, all those bad reviews are by evilTERFs who have axes to grind:

In response to the online backlash, the author is claiming that supporters of Rowling are flooding the Amazon and Good Reads pages for her book with negative comments….Some reviews on Amazon are acknowledging the controversy the book has whipped up, with one person writing, “This book is being bombed with one star reviews because it’s written by a trans woman. The terms ‘misogyny’ and ‘women hating’ are being thrown around because cis women can (sic) handle the fact that a trans women (sic) has written one of the best dystopian books we’ve seen of the last century.”

It ends with quotes from the glowing NPR review, concluding the piece on an upbeat note for our Brave and Stunning trans author.

One of the problems I see with this story is that it focuses too much on the whole “Let’s kill off JKR” theme. Not that fantasizing the death of an actual living, breathing woman isn’t bad. It’s terrible, cruel, and uncalled for. The biggest problem for me is that it takes for granted that Rowling, as well as her supporters and followers, actually want to murder trans people. It’s taken as read that this supposed desire is an accurate and truthful portrayal of what feminists believe, that this could be a possible future if they had their way. It’s another installment of the transperbolic lie that “THEY WANT US ALL DEAD!” The journalist’s definition of TERF reinforces the “anti-trans, not pro-woman” portrayal of feminists, making this dystopian exaggeration into a legitimate artistic act of pre-emptive “self-defence”, instead of a sick, misogynistic projection.

It’s curious that a movement that views “misgendering” and “deadnaming” as unspeakably violent, is so unabashedly and self-righteously violent in its own rhetoric on social media. And now, long form fiction. The writer of this Global piece would be hard pressed to find anything at all from the feminist side that comes anywhere close to the years of demonization, harassment, and threats that trans activists and their allies have heaped upon women who dare to say “no” to male entitlement dressed in a frock. This extreme asymmetry suggests that the question of exactly who, if given the opportunity, would be killing whom a somewhat different answer than Felker-Martin is positing in his screed. If feminists had been threatening rape and murder against TAs, it would have been front page news; the writer of this article would pointed it out. It would be being retweeted over and over. But rape and death threats to women? Same old same old. This book is just more of the same. It sounds like little more than a bog standard trans activist’s “Shut up, TERF; choke to death on my dick!” tweet, padded out to the length of a novel. Dead women can’t say “No.”

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