Opinion of J.K. Rowling

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Increasingly, an irrelevancy.

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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?

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The typical English curriculum includes Dante Alighieri? Lol

(which would be less strange than it including J. K. Rowling by the way)

Dante is like Shakespeare and Cervantes. He is not only an Italian medieval author, but a heritage of humanity

Of course.
However I found it a little funny as (to use your examples) I don't remember if we actually read anything by Cervantes in high school in Italian classes, and we basically skipped Shakespeare since we studied him in English classes.

"English class" in American high schools is basically "literature class with a primary but not exclusive focus on American and British lit". This also means that many Americans, even very literate ones like myself, get through their education with a pretty slipshod understanding of the technicalities of English grammar and syntax.

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To expand on my earlier thoughts, I definitely think she's a HP for her recent comments. Her new Cormoran Strike book, which is a series I've enjoyed in the past, isn't necessarily transphobic in a vacuum, but given her stance it makes it seem that was certainly her intent.

This. The relative lack of outrage about, say, The Silence of the Lambs is because Thomas Harris is not a transphobic political actor as well as a potboiler author.

Now as for cancelling Harry Potter, I don't think that's necessary. Lots of people, including LGBT, have been inspired by the books to be advocates and stand up for themselves. The author being a TERF later doesn't change that. Just think how many great book series had problematic authors. I highly doubt C.S. Lewis or rad-trad J.R.R. Tolkien would have been in favor of trans-positivity. But kids still read those books.

I have to stick up for Tolkien here and say that he wasn't really a radtrad as we understand that term today, since he accepted the legitimacy of the Second Vatican Council despite openly disliking many of its decisions. There's also circumstantial evidence in his letters that he was noticeably less homophobic than you'd expect from a severely conservative British Catholic of his generation, although relative mildness on gay issues is not the same thing as outright wokeness on trans issues.

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Also, it says a lot about Rowling's shambolic approach to the Harry Potter canon in the decade-plus since the main series ended that multiple posters haven't been able to tell Аverroës is joking.

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Wait, hold on, Аverroës wasn't joking?! Geez louise.

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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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

The excessive hyperbole inherent in some of the comparisons is my point--it's silly to draw the line at Rowling's awful views on trans people when the much more comprehensively horrible political worldviews of people like Hellman and Gilman go almost unremarked-on.

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Wait, hold on, Аverroës wasn't joking?! Geez louise.

Wait, what? I couldn't find anything confirming it from Google, so I just assumed it was a joke. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough.

It was a joke, albeit one that seems to have spread more confusion than laughter.

GeneralMacArthur taking it seriously was what got me confused. Which I guess reinforces what I was originally saying about it!

That said, I remain convinced that you could find better textual support for Luna Lovegood being trans than exists for most of Rowling's post-hoc elaborations.  "Being different isn't a bad thing. It means you're brave enough to be yourself"

She's definitely the most trans-seeming of the major characters, in the same way that Lupin is the most gay-seeming and McGonagall is the most lesbian-seeming.

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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.

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Oops

The anti-trans merchandise shop she linked to uses very offensive language so apologies;

"Womyn"

That site is crazy.
Imagine spending 10 pounds for a mug that says "Notorious transphobe".
Imagine spending 18 pounds for a T-shirt that says "Man-hating feminazi prude witch bigot TERF".

The latter crosses the line enough times to be defensible on black comedy grounds. The former is just sad.

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If he has a Y chromosome, he's a man. If she doesn't, she's a woman. Gender is a nonsensical social construct.

Really? So someone born with female genitalia, a female hormonal system, is a man if they* has a Y chromosome? A person could be a “man” their* whole life under this definition and not know it.

*I use a singular they because the term of gender is in dispute, hence why I also use it alongside a singular verb; also applies to singular adjective their with a singular noun, life.

Intersex people tend not to appreciate being used as gotchas in Trans Discourse. There are much better grounds on which to defend the validity of trans identities.