Blunt?
Why can’t India Willoughby be accurate?
Rowling doesn’t “view” trans women as men, she just knows that’s what they are, because it is what they are. Women are just called women; the modifier “trans” means “not literally.” The word “trans” points to fiction, pretending, fantasy, playacting, imagining.
Of course Rowling believes trans women should use “the right facilities.” It’s Willoughby who thinks trans women should intrude on women.
As for the clumsy “uses cases from around the world as proof to fear us” I suppose he means she cites examples of trans women assaulting women. Well? What’s the point here? That we should keep our bitchy mouths shut about men assaulting women? That’s not going to happen.
Has Ms. Willoughby ever given a clear and succinct definition of “transwoman”? I like to keep their feet to the fire (metaphorically speaking, if that was not obvious). “Men who say they think they’re women” is mine.
Giving a clear and succinct definition of transwoman would make it painfully obvious that transwomen are NOT women. They can’t handle that. Must throw tantrums instead.
Correct me if I’ve unknowingly materialized in an alternate universe sometime in the past few minutes, but there’s nothing particularly dehumanizing or degrading about calling someone a man, now is there? I’ll grant that some individuals maliciously misgender butch women as a means of bullying, but that usually takes the form of calling them “it” or pretending that they’re some kind of neither-nor he-she freaks of nature—in other words, treating them as failed women rather than as men.
Those are some far fetched (and wrong) assumptions about what JKR thinks and believes. Willoughby persists as if he has not understood what she’s said on the subject. I’m guessing he has probably read parts of it, but villifying her like the rest of the illiterati who don’t know what she stands for better suits his purposes. It’s a dishonest tactic by an agenda driven twitter troll. JKR is also an easy target for this nonsense, and sure to get the reactions and attention he’s obviously striving for. He’s a pathetic clown and a bully.
Back when JKR published her essay, and I expressed support, a friend rebutted by sharing a bad-faith fisking of her essay. It was an utter, ignorant, disingenuous mess. I imagine Willoughby may have read something like that and thinks he understands what she said that way.
In fairness, I do like a good takedown and insightful analysis, often finding the good ones are better and easier to understand than the original material. But it’s usually pretty easy to tell what is editorializing and what is not.
It’s interesting to note how much of this shitstorm was almost “foreshadowed” in the Harry Potter books themselves. One recurring theme of the series is innocent people suffering public slander and shaming, and in some cases even imprisonment*, for things they have not done. In second book of the series, The Chamber of Secrets, both Hagrid and Harry himself are at various times suspected of being the heir of Slytherin, opening the Chamber of Secrets, and releasing Slytherin’s monster into the Hogwarts castle. In The Prisoner of Azkaban Sirius Black is falsely believed to be a mass-murderer as well as the traitor who sold out Harry’s parents to Voldemort, and even after we (the readers as well as Harry himself) learn that Black was innocent all along, he remains convicted and a fugitive from the law for the rest of his life. In The Goblet of Fire Harry is falsely suspected – initially even by his best friend Ron – of having cheated his way into the Tri-Wizard Cup. In The Order of the Phoenix he is accused of lying about Voldemort’s return, not only by many of his fellow students, but by the mainstream media and even the Ministry of Magic itself. There are clear parallels to both institutional capture (i.e. the ministry interfering at Hogwarts) and the erosion of democratic norms (the Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge arranging a full-fledged show-trial against Harry and changing the time and place of the proceedings at the last moment without informing Harry himself, obviously hoping to be able to convict him on a technicality in absentia. When Professor Dumbledore – Harry’s defense attorney for the occasion – points out that the law does not prohibit under-age wizards from using magic in self-defense, Fudge warns ominously “Laws can be changed!”). And, of course, once the institutional capture is complete and Voldemort controls the Ministry in The Deathly Hallows, Harry is portrayed as Undesirable #1 all over the media. These are just the examples that come to mind here and now. I’m probably forgetting some. In all these cases the common disregard for the truth and indifference to facts are very much in line with the logic of the “Post-Truth” era.
Lord Voldemort himself might be too much of a super-villain to be a good analogy for anything, but there sure are lots of Rita Skeeter (the Journalist from Hell), and Cornelius Fudge, and Dolores Umbridge (Fudge’s shill at Hogwarts) characters out there…
The predominant virtue of the House of Gryffindor, and the one most valued by its founder Godric Gryffindor, was courage. I seem to remember J.K. herself once mentioning (long before you-know-what) that this was also her own favorite virtue. In this fight, unlike so many others, she has proven herself true to her stated values and a worthy representative of the House of Gryffindor. The ungrateful (b)rats who owe their whole careers to her, on the other hand, have all been revealed as Wormtail.
*The fact that (in the fictional universe of the books) there is pretty much always a magical way to fake any piece of evidence never seems to make people less eager to jump to conclusions…
Bjarte, have you read The Ickabog? It’s all about people who lie and people who pretend to believe those lies, and the reasons they do it. It all starts to look horribly familiar when ordinary soldiers and servants are faced with the choice of playing along or being banned from twitter. I mean, thrown in the dungeon.
Catwhisperer, I haven’t but now I want to. Thank you.
Sackbutt:
One clue is when the ‘rebuttal’ is seventeen times the length of the original article. It’s often an indication that so much additional material was required to make the original seem sufficiently bad that there’s little or nothing left of the original.
Whenever someone asks what JKR has said that’s transphobic, they’re pointed to either an enormous essay that drags in the usual far-fetched insinuations or a 50 minute video that does the same. Neither actually say what – in her essay or her tweets – is transphobic, which you’d imagine should be child’s play.
It’s a bit of a giveaway, to say the least.