Opinion of J.K. Rowling

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

oh my God why are people unironically replying to Higgins?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

If you support JK Rowling, you're on the same side as the person who made this. And do you really want that?

Better that than being on the side of the person who created Assigned Male.

That is easily one of the worst webcomics I've ever seen. Got to love how the main character is supposed to be something like 10 and yet talks like a gender studies student at a private liberal arts college.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

If you support JK Rowling, you're on the same side as the person who made this. And do you really want that?

Better that than being on the side of the person who created Assigned Male.

That is easily one of the worst webcomics I've ever seen. Got to love how the main character is supposed to be something like 10 and yet talks like a gender studies student at a private liberal arts college.

Assigned Male is transphobic in the same way that glam rap is racist: it engages in so much trans community self-stereotyping and shows so little capacity for being tongue-in-cheek about that fact that anti-trans bigots take it as "confirming" their worst impressions of trans people.

I recall hearing that the creator has been banned from some trans groups on Facebook and was deplatformed at a local LGBT group.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I'm a fan of Harry Potter, but...politically I'd now support schools banning Harry Potter books because Rowling is a TERF.

Oh come on. Rowling has some of the most repulsive views of any nominally leftist and feminist public figure in the English-speaking world (Linda Sarsour I guess would be another such example), but when your typical English curriculum includes or might include stuff by a convicted rapist (Thomas Malory), a man most of whose literary corpus revolves around someone he was stalking (Dante), multiple Stalinists (Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, others whose names I'm forgetting), and someone who supported reestablishing slavery (Charlotte Perkins Gilman), why exactly would this be where you draw the line?

I think comparing Rowling to those people or Linda Sarsour or saying she has some of the most repulsive views is a bit over the top? All she's done essentially is make some fairly insensitive comments on Twitter.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

As a kid I read the first few Harry Potter books but gave up the series somewhere in the middle of the Goblet of Fire, when it started getting too elaborate and teenage angsty and Rowling started to write this epic hero's journey about something or other. Didn't think she's good enough of a writer to carry that to completion, not that I ever went back and checked...

As for the transphobic stuff, it's obviously very disappointing. I have some empathy for her in that given her childhood/upbringing, but that doesn't excuse wilfully spreading misinformation that damages the lives of thousands of people because it reconfirms your priors. Sad to think about.

Seeing that transgender people who get sex reassignment are still massively more likely to commit suicide than non-transgender people, it does raise the question, whether sex reassignment is the correct treatment. In this it's a major problem that any such discussion end up being called transphobic.

On the other hand Rowling didn't help her argument about her not being a TERF by writing her latest book.

For Rowling to be a TERF she'd have to be a radical feminist in the first place which she is not, she's a mainstream liberal feminist. And the controversy over her latest book is blown way out of proportion, the mention of a cis male crossdressing serial killer happens once as a reference to a cold case. It's not a main character or big role in the plot. Nor is it even trans-related as the killer is still a cis male.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The main problem with TERFs is not that they're radical feminists...

It absolutely is. Nasty pathological cult. It's where the real insane viciousness of the full-on 'TERF' position on these issues comes from.

Can you elaborate on this? I've had much more benign experiences with self-described radical feminists than a lot of people in my life seem to have had, and I'm wondering if it's maybe a particularly toxic milieu in Britain, or among relatively-older people, or among straight women, etc.

However, I read one of Rowling's longer public utterances on this for myself and she actually mentions radical feminism in so many words as an influence on her thought, so BRTD's "but technically"-ing the definition of "TERF" is simply inaccurate in her case.

I'm pretty sure J. K. Rowling does not support any of the radical feminist notions I've seen endorsed by actual TERFs such a curfew on men, a special tax only men pay, eliminating presumption of innocence in rape cases or any of the other absolutely batsh!t things real TERFs propose.

Also compare Rowling's controversial tweets to the type of things on trans people written by women like Shelia Jeffreys, Julie Bindel and Megan Murphy. It's not even the same ballpark. It's like comparing someone who once made a slughtly offensive joke about Jews to an outright Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi. Rowling is quite honestly probably more tolerant of trans people than the median person and FAR more than the median 50something British woman if we're being honest. I can understand why trans fans of hers feel betrayed but she's not one of the great villains of our time by any means.