Pride Month post #30

[aadler]

(I was a bit embarrassed to see that my June 16th post was a duplicate of the one for the 15th. A replacement entry can be seen here.)

It’s been amazing how quickly the attitude toward J.K. Rowling changed among the ‘cool’ people. Once her success made her famous, she was — as a dutiful if fairly mild leftist — happily accepted by the gatekeepers of the left. She opined that Dumbledore was a closeted gay man, she echoed the tenets of conventional feminism, all was happy.

Then the storm started.

A case came up when a nonprofit think-tank in London dropped the employment contract of a woman who had “tweeted gender-critical views” (i.e., noted correctly that ‘transgender women’ were in fact men). They had done this specifically because of her tweets, and she filed a lawsuit challenging those grounds (which she eventually won). The case generated a certain amount of controversy, during which Rowling made a December 2019 tweet that transgender people should live their lives as they pleased — in “peace and security” — but that she didn’t care for women being “force[d] out of their jobs for stating that sex is real”.

Suddenly she was Not a Good Person, and the uproar began. In an unexpected twist, Rowling didn’t apologize and didn’t back down on her opinions. (Didn’t she realize that you HAVE to do those things when the mob comes baying? I guess being a billionaire offers a certain level of self-assurance.) Subsequently, in June 2020, Rowling mocked an article for using the phrase “people who menstruate”, and offered the opinion that women’s rights would be erased if “sex isn’t real”.

These were not outrageous statements. Everything she said was perfectly normal and sensible, the kind of thing that would have been obvious to everybody only a few years before. Her sin wasn’t that she had said anything that was untrue or intrinsically offensive, but that she had deviated from Holy Writ at all, in any particular.

(The funniest take I saw on that was when a woman tweeted that she’d been so taken with the Harry Potter world that she’d got a Hogwarts tattoo as a teenager, and now wished she hadn’t because the HP creator wasn’t on board with transgenderism. And someone else responded, “So you’re saying you got a body modification as a teen that you’re now regretting —?”)

We’re not all billionaires, no. But we should all be willing to say that idiocy is idiocy.

And when the mob comes baying, they can chew on each other.