JK Rowling - Thread 2

[MoleSmokes]

Thread 1 started by @MsMcWibble here:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3772685-JK-Rowling
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twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1207646162813100033

Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill
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To start off thread 2 - everyone saying the time was right for this to hit the news stands right after the Election was right!

Maya Forstater's Employment Tribunal case is, by virtue of JK Rowling's support, more popular in The Spectator than Boris Johnson by Boris Johnson, The Tories and The Labour Party!

MOST POPULAR in The Spectator

1. In just a few words, JK Rowling has changed the transgender debate (James Kirkup)

1. Boris Johnson: Perhaps my campaign was ‘clunking’. But sometimes, clunking is what you need (Boris Johnson)
2. We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously (Matt Ridley)
3. Keir Starmer looks and sounds middle class precisely because he’s working class (Isabel Hardman)
4. Let’s make David Lammy Labour’s next leader (Rod Liddle)
5. A new leader won’t stop the far left’s domination of Labour (Nick Cohen)

www.spectator.co.uk/

Lamahaha

I'm not surprised to hear your experience in the writing community. And yes, JKR is wonderful for this, not only as a woman, but also as a writer, the profession that should be most invested in freedom of expression.

Re JKR and responsibility to the reader:

Absolute bullshit. She has none. Writers have a responsibility to the TEXT. What a reader does from there is not the writer's responsibility.

All the tantruming fans are basically trying to say 'We made you, Rowling, because we bought your books and paid for Pottermore, and saw the movies'. No. You don't buy the author. You buy the text. You own the text, your own individual copy, you own memory of the film, your own time spent pretending you were at Hogwarts. You don't own the woman!

Hey, has anyone seen people who disagree with JKR supporting Maya, but who also are clearly calling out the rape threats etc ? Just curious to know if there is any good faith opposition out there - you know, people who disagree, but don't believe a woman's opinion means she can be threatened with dick ?

Arielle made a video.

She still couches it in some inclusive language but she's climbing that mountain fast. This is furthest off the fence I think I've seen her.

as a writer, the profession that should be most invested in freedom of expression.

Interesting how many 'in the arts' & creative industries seem to think that this freedom of expression only goes one way when it comes to any discussion about transpeople and self-ID.

Many opportunities and schemes previously just open to female screenwriters, playwrights, poets, directors, creative producers and novelists are now open to 'women and non-binary people and those self-identifying' as women.

There are many men in the above professions who begrudge any opportunity that excludes them and who think that, hypothetically speaking, X theatre isn't sexist and excluding female directors because a woman directed a play in January, never mind that all directors since have been male. So if they can apply for a particularly plum job by self-IDing, a few of them may well do that, including doing so 'ironically'.

Meanwhile, so many London theatres have gender neutral toilets now.

Given JKR's reach in various mediums - novels, films, plays - it's especially excellent & liberating that she made the statement she did. I'm enjoying seeing the frothing tweets. And I do wonder how many actors currently outraged with her stance will turn down the opportunity to audition for The Cursed Child play or any future films ...

Many opportunities and schemes previously just open to female screenwriters, playwrights, poets, directors, creative producers and novelists are now open to 'women and non-binary people and those self-identifying' as women

The only IRL friend I lost over this is in the theatre. For objecting loudly and angrily to the above.

OvaHere

Thanks for the link. Arielle spoke well.
My lesbian dd won't use 'queer' either.

@JanesKettle assuming it was you and not them who objected loudly and angrily?

Have I imagined it or has JKR's follower count on Twitter just gone up from 14.6 to 14.7 million?

ScotiaNova

lol, yeah it was me :)

People think, because I have GNC kids with GD, that I am onboard the crazy train. So they share the crazy with me, and then get surprised and offended that I was never on the train to begin with!

You are not imagining it Countess

Janes I find Arielle a bit frustrating at times but I can see she is probably a useful voice for teens/young women who want to be a part of and want to be respectful of the wider LGBTQ community.

They're in a sticky position with their peer group and it's valuable to have someone they can relate to who acknowledges boundaries as well as inclusion.

Yeah, I don't know if dd watches Arielle at all, and she and I do not discuss 'queer' controversies (her choice) but at least young lesbians watching that video just heard - clearly - that lesbians don't do dick. On any gender of person.

JanesKettle Thought so but wanted to check before I put my foot in it

Including non-binary and trans women in women's pieces or creative opportunities is rife. And it's bananas and at times extremely rage-making.

I know of a woman, a self-described feminist, who was producing a verbatim show about the female orgasm. They recorded interviews with women about orgasms and put a casting call out for a handful of female actors. They received much criticism for not including non-binary people and trans women. So much so, that they changed the show so that, as officially described, it became a production "exploring the world of non cis-male pleasure".

While the word 'male' was mentioned several times in the show description in the programme, the word 'female' was not mentioned at all. Feminism in action.

Ricky has made tweet jokes in the past about trans women and their cock and balls, so he's definitely critical.

@Lamahaha I'm a member of a media women's forum also based in the US which is, in your very apt phrasing, 'woker than woke'. It was meant to originally be for women and is now full of blokes not even bothering to use female pronouns and all the sub-groups have changed their names to be "inclusive" (thus either getting rid of the word "women" or adding the LGBT alphabet soup to it).

Language is constantly policed so as to be 'inclusive' - e.g. you're not allowed to start any threads with "Hi ladies". We've also been explicitly told that some women have penises.

America is fucked.

There's widespread acceptance of genuinely dysphoric homosexual transsexuals (Mn please don't delete me, this is how hsts refer to themselves, even though TRAs berate them as 'truscum' ) ie. the old school transsexuals - who feminists like Andrea Dworkin accepted all those years ago. More likely to to post OP (therefore no issue of penises in women's spaces - no autogynephiliacs looking to women for validation).

The problem - as identified by Gervais - is self ID - the 'anyone who says they are women ARE women' rhetoric - no gatekeeping, no requirement for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, no safeguarding of women. The "women can have penises too" rhetoric is the problem here. Women do not have penises.

On Ricky - I'm hoping the praying hands emoji after TWAW means he's being sarcastic.

Caitlin, though, is a huge bloody sell-out. Happy to preach feminism when it can make her some £££ but the minute there are actual, real rights at stake she's as silent as a nun.

And Lucy Mangan, btw, had a guest column in one of the papers today (can't remember which one but think it may have been the MoS) - nary a word was spoken about JK.

Cowards. The lot of them.

Homosexual transsexuals are the people for whom the GRA was introduced - it is on record in Hansard that the GRA was introduced for the "tiny number" of people suffering from severe gender dysphoria, where living in the opposite gender role would be the only thing to ease their suffering. The govt estimated it would be used by around 5000 people - and to date - around 5000 GRCs have been issued.

Seems this was a can of worms - now open. And suddenly - any male not being able to self identify into women's spaces is a human rights violation. And everyone from Julie Bindel to JK Rowling to Emily Maitliss is a hateful nazi terf

Homosexual transsexuals are the people for whom the GRA was introduced

Yes and a big part of it was so they could marry as if they were in an opposite sex relationship because marriage equality hadn't been introduced then and the government of the time was trying to avoid that.

It was also brought in via the back door - with TRAs congratulating themselves that they had managed to get it passed "without anyone throwing a fit in the press" - that is itself gives me the chills. I had no knowledge that this Act of Parliament had been passed at the time - was pregnant/breastfeeding a newborn in 2004. It was put through totally on the quiet - thin end of the wedge. And TRAs knew it, and boasted about it.

The tactic of taking some sort of legal precedent or idea, and presenting it to the public as meaning something quite different than was originally intended, is increasingly being used as a way to create public acquiescence and shut down criticism. It needs to be addressed vocally whenever it happens, even when it's a positive cause, because it sets people up to accept that kind of thing uncritically in other instances.

I'm not surprised to hear your experience in the writing community. And yes, JKR is wonderful for this, not only as a woman, but also as a writer, the profession that should be most invested in freedom of expression.

There's a trend now for some publishers to have pre-publication novels checked by "sensitivity readers". These are readers who check to see there is no inadvertent racism, sexism, ableism, no cultural appropriation, etc, that readers might object to. Up to now I've not heard of sensitivity readers specifically for "transphobic" language, but if it ever become a thing they'd have a ton of work. A whole new career opens, since just about all novels written are basically transphobic, ie, they assume gender, they don't refer to their characters as cis-men and women, they assume that all characters are the sex they present as, in other words, they ignore gender identity. Imagine if every character needed an indication as to not only their sex but their gender identity! The ladydick could very well become a perfectly ordinary appendage to your basic heroine, along with a beard and adam's apple.

I have a whole lot of online UK-based writer friend and not one of them has raised the topic. I don't know who is GC and who not -- they never say, and all of the groups I'm in forbid political posts. But none of them have reacted to JKs tweet, anywhere. It's weird, the silence, since it concerns a writer, which we all are!

I don't know if I've mentioned this before but an older, artist friend of mine, who has ties to a retreat centre, said that recently, a theatre group from the USA came for a retreat there, and they were all trans and insisted on pronouns etc.
She, and the Irish staff (it's Ireland based) were forced into complying, which for many of the staff (just ordinary folk) must have been extremely confusing. It was her first encounter with the culture and it totally um -- let's say, it took her to the summit. Once we got talking she couldn't stop! :)

People in the arts are often extremely narcissistic and think they are on the cutting edge of cultural progress, so I suppose it's to be expected that the ideology can find a good foothold there. In my experience, though, we older ladies (like my artist friend) have our feet well planted on the ground. It comes with the territory -- many of us are grandmas and we tend to have a nose for bt.

Ugh. 🤦‍♀️ my fav Terry Pratchett page on FB has been taken over by the usual Orwellian language and circular reasoning...