JK Rowling threatening legal action

[TheLashKingOfScotland]

A TRA and Canadian Green Party rep has made libellous comments about JK regarding her position on trans rights and her suitability to be trusted around children.
JK asked her to retract them or they would hear from JK's lawyers. Currently they are digging in. Seemingly unaware that JK has pursued legal cases based on Twitter comments before and that it isn't acceptable to make unfounded statements about people.
It will be interesting to see how it unfolds.
It could have wider reaching consequences if certain sectors see they can't just make unfounded accusations any more.

Part of me is wondering whether JK chose to start talking about legal action to really boost this into the public eye.

Maybe. But it's also the case that saying someone isn't safe around children is a very serious libel, and it's particularly harmful for someone who makes their living as a children's writer and who founded a children's charity (Lumos). Perhaps she would ignore it if it had been made by yet another nonentity typing from the comfort of his single bed in his mum's house, but this is from an influential person with a high public profile.

She, like Martina Navratilova before her, is in a privileged position, and is using that privilege to good effect.

The spotlight is now on the random crazies who, essentially, choose to bully women into silence.

In parallel an interesting spat has broken out between Facebook and Twitter over the monitoring of "hate speech". The context is Trump and his ...ahem...ill-advised, tweets over the George Floyd protests. Twitter is issuing warnings, Facebook's Zuckerberg is saying it is not the role of SM heads to call out elected Presidents.

The rules governing SM are a form of cultural imperialism. Twitter especially seems to be grounded in West Coast liberalism/libertarianism, which comes with a fair spattering of both misogyny and rainbow woke. Yoel Roth, whose official title at Twitter is head of Site Integrity, has an impressive academic background in both SM and LGBT social history. Who knows whether he is influencing the culture, or whether he was hired because he fits the culture. Probably a bit of both.

Twitter is silencing women, who are speaking up to protect basic rights and safeguarding. Twitter is now trying to silence an elected President. I'm with Zuckerberg here. This is not the role of a corporate entity.

(I recognise absolutely that Trump is an ass. Indeed jaw droppingly incompetent. However I believe that Government and democracy are about policies and process not personalities. And that the office of the President needs to be respected. Not least because criticising policies will show up Trump's lacunae, whereas he thrives on personal attacks. Indeed it is very possible that the latest round of awfulness may well have increased his chances of being reelected.)

JKR is great. Most important though is her standing up for her right to be heard, free of the sort of abuse and harassment she is receiving. Which then allows her and others to stand up for the rights of women and girls, and indeed other groups who have been silenced.

I do hope she does pursue things a la McAlpine.

I don't think she needs to sue them all

There are consultancies you can engage that will sift though a (long) list of potential defendants, and cherry pick the ones that can be made to pay. Certainly stateside.

Have any of them actually been able to say exactly what JR has done that is transphobic and makes her 'unfit to be around children' or are they still just having tantrums on twitter?

In parallel an interesting spat has broken out between Facebook and Twitter over the monitoring of "hate speech".

I don't engage in Twitter GC posts at all, apart from likes and follows, although I've had an account for many years - I basically have to, from a professional viewpoint. But I'm aware of the terrible pile-ons there, and want to stay away, as I'm in under my public name.

It's different on Facebook. There are quite a few closed/private GC groups, women-only GC groups. Well, hopefully women only. They ask you a few questions about your stance before letting you in, and I suppose a TRA could lie -- but any TRA posts are immediately deleted. And there I let loose and say whatever I want, and in my own name. It's really relaxing, I found, different from MN where I have to stay anonymous. And I don't engage in "hate speech"; I just am not afraid of voicing my opinion on TRA ideology, and its dangers. I couldn't/wouldn't do this on Twitter.

FB has done some censoring, as in the banning of Posie, but I find that the GC groups I'm in are left alone.

I would love to be in a closed FB group with the Baroness, JKR, etc. It's possible to speak much more openly there. But Twitter is the platform of choice, so...

An even tighter degree of privacy on FB are the "secret" groups. There, you have to be invited in so they are very private.

@DickKerrLadies

Have any of them actually been able to say exactly what JR has done that is transphobic and makes her 'unfit to be around children' or are they still just having tantrums on twitter?

No. Yes.

A small detail which gave me a laugh today.

I’ve been listening to the first Harry Potter on Audible.

The secondary school for which Harry was destined, (prior to the arrival of his letter), where, Dudley tells him, he will be bullied by having his head pushed into the toilet and flushed, is called Stonewall High.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but the idea of Stonewall as a grim school full of bullies and thugs is amusing.

Ironic that an organisation set up to create freedom and openness, has come to embody the actual meaning of the word used as its name:

I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but the idea of Stonewall as a grim school full of bullies and thugs is amusing.

It is!

Let’s not forget

Stonewall = #nodebate

Interesting that in HP the word can also be linked with bullying.

The Stonewall High thing came years before the current debate, but I am amused to see it now. Couldn't agree more about the unwitting fittingness of the name!

I'm same sex attracted and despise Stonewall, and all they've come to stand for. They're bullies who ignore the needs of the people they were supposed to be set up as advocates for. I'd rather have an honest, if occasionally clumsy ally, on my side than a big hollow corporation whose main role is to shut me up and make it look like everything is hunky dory in the garden.

People give JK awful shit for not making Dumbledore explicitly gay in the books, but it was 2007 and they were books for children. Books which had already been banned and burned in numerous schools. She laid heavy subtext, left absolutely nothing with which you could argue Dumbledore was straight, and then confirmed he was gay in a Q&A after publication, which she didn't have to do. I sometimes feel like the teens looking at the situation ten years on honestly have no comprehension of how different the climate was back then.

JK played it safe ten and twenty years ago. She gender neutralled her pen name to appeal to boys, she waited until the books were over to confirm Dumbledore's sexuality rather than fighting with her publishers to have Harry say "Dumbledore was gay?" in the text. And legions of her own so-called fans ripped into her for that. She should have been braver, they say, she should have spoken up even if the climate of the times was against her. Even if she lost the job of her dreams or had hate pour in from total strangers. Fast forward to 2020 and she's doing EXACTLY this, and they themselves are the ones "cancelling" her and trying to disinherit her from her own stories.

I can't express how much I hate this.

Agree with contactus WRT Dumbledore being gay.

In my head, Hermione knew, but didn't let on to anyone out of respect for the privacy of their Headmaster.

A 100+ year old teacher would have learnt not to tell any of his students many details about his personal life. Harry didn't even know that Dumbledore had siblings. And why would he?

Anyway! You'd think that those trying to cancel her would understand that given how much they like to say how much more progressive they are these days than the rest of us.

Ironic that an organisation set up to create freedom and openness, has come to embody the actual meaning of the word used as its name

Yes I've thought that more than once, too.

Stonewall's name is perfect. Nominative determinism in action.

Thanks, nauticant, I've just picked that up. I'll get emailing.

The "why isn't Dumbledore explicitly gay" crew piss me right off. It's a book written from the perspective of a child. A child shouldn't be made aware of his headteacher's sexuality unless they observe them in a relationship and make a guess. None of the teachers in HP are in romantic relationships because a) it would make the whole boarding school in the middle of nowhere thing difficult, you'd have to write in stuff about staff quarters and what the spouse does all day in the middle of the Highlands and honestly what kid gives a shit about that, and b) children generally don't see teachers as actual real life people and don't tend to like imagining them as existing outside of the classroom. In a book written for children you don't need to fill in these details.

(Hearing horrified year 7s whispering, "oh my god that means she must have had SEX" when I announced my pregnancy being a good example of this! )

Yes, it appears to be a lot of adult men who are doing the complaining about the sexuality of the characters in a children's book.

What’s the expression of the day? ‘They need their hard drives examined?’

@SirSamuelVimesBlackboardMonito

The "why isn't Dumbledore explicitly gay" crew piss me right off. It's a book written from the perspective of a child. A child shouldn't be made aware of his headteacher's sexuality unless they observe them in a relationship and make a guess. None of the teachers in HP are in romantic relationships because a) it would make the whole boarding school in the middle of nowhere thing difficult, you'd have to write in stuff about staff quarters and what the spouse does all day in the middle of the Highlands and honestly what kid gives a shit about that, and b) children generally don't see teachers as actual real life people and don't tend to like imagining them as existing outside of the classroom. In a book written for children you don't need to fill in these details.

(Hearing horrified year 7s whispering, "oh my god that means she must have had SEX" when I announced my pregnancy being a good example of this! )

This is what I loved about the Dr. Who episode with the vampire teachers - Micky (I think it was) saying "I used to think the teachers slept in the school... and it turns out they do!"

But YY to "need their hard drives examined."

IIRC the original sin was writing a book about witches for children. Then there were those outraged that Hogwarts had transfiguration classes but no transgender students. After the Dumbledore kerfluffle every time she talked about her work it was guaranteed to piss someone off because her fiction did not match their fantasy.
Then she like a tweet by Maya Forstater and it was on. In response to the death threats she received over that she wrote her live and let live tweet & that confirmed to misogynists everywhere that she is standing up for women's rights which makes her transphobic.
I may have left out a few things.

Needmoresleep.

Great post. I really like i5 when posters post stuff that is so easy to read

On Dumbledore being gay: Harry was spectacularly unobservant a great deal of the time, and Dumbledore was a master of subtlety. And while a six-page spread in the Daily Prophet outing him for his great love affair with Grindelwald or whatever and calling for his immediate sacking might have been standard for the times, it really would have added nothing to the plot.

If there was going to be a gay character anywhere, book six would have been the place to put one, because the first two thirds of the book is basically just romantic high-jinx in the lower sixth, magical style. But again, I can well believe Harry simply wouldn't notice his classmates making same-sex eyes at each other. Especially as the books are set in the nineties, and homophobia in schools wasn't exactly uncommon then.

But why anyone would feel the need to get in a public tizzy about the author not accepting your headcanon is beyond me.

What was the 'live and let live's tweet? Think I missed that one

Sorry autocorrect.. live

There is a thread on it here. I'll see if I can find it.