Washington Post oped - J.K. Rowling’s transphobia shows it’s time to put down the pen

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Depressing. Written by a woman, Molly Roberts. Article starts:

A TERF, as it turns out, is not a fantastic beast — but J.K. Rowling continues to insist on showing us where to find one.

The term trans-exclusionary radical feminist, meaning someone who denies transgender women’s womanhood on the theory that it detracts from cis women’s womanhood, is more of a mouthful even than tarantallegra. This jinx, one of many conjured into the cultural canon by the Harry Potter author, sends the legs of the subject into uncontrollable, tap-dancing-like spasms, and Rowling herself in recent years appears afflicted. She flails around on the Internet, upending her legacy piece by piece.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/09/jk-rowlings-transphobia-shows-its-time-put-down-pen/

I saw a Tweet from WaPo puffing this earlier and the comments under it were not great either.

• Ha ha, the left is eating itself
• Liberalism is a mental illness, this just proves it
• I wrote her off a long time ago after she said [insert political/social opinion of choice]
• JKR is hateful/out of touch
• This is so disappointing, what can have got into her?

Very, very few saying they agree with her on this issue.

Is this a US-specific thing? I have the impression that politics over there is even more tribal than it is here. If you support the Dems overall, you seem to be expected to swing behind them on everything, even if some of it is extremely questionable. If you've always voted Republican, you seem to be expected to shut your eyes to what Trump and his sidekicks are doing because it's utterly unthinkable to vote Democrat.

Oh fuck off Molly.

"She should stop writing because we don't like what she says?"

God, these 'journos' are just little authoritarian reactionaries.

Oh fuck off is all i seem to be able to muster at the moment

America follows the money...so I don’t think JKR has anything to worry about legacy wise

I think something is being unsettled. Go JKR!!

Yes Becles The Wokington Post has put all its eggs in the TWAW basket, and someone as famous as JKR can certainly change the conversations we are having around this.

Get Woke Go Broke? (They already laid a lot of staff off a while ago, iirc.)

That's some really shoddy journalism, even for an op-ed. I notice the writer characterizes the issue as women feeling our "womanhood" is threatened, making it look as if this is a debate all about hurt feelings or self-identity. It isn't. It's about the sex based rights women fought, marched, and died for.

We aren't some club of meanies trying to keep the weird girl out of a schoolyard game. (To use the same infantile analogies as Molly.) We're an oppressed group trying to protect our rights.

They don't even understand what it is they hate so much.

To depict Jo's eloquent, succinct arguments as the unhinged flailings of a bigot is equally outrageous. You may not agree with her but she made her points well. I wonder if Molly even dared to read them. It doesn't seem like it

Absolutely American politics is more tribal, and also I would say more empty of content generally.

Their liberals also are now almost reflexively against anything that any Republican leader, and especially Trump, says.

Didn't the Washington Post used to be a real newspaper? Broke Watergate and all. Even worse than the Grauniad now.

The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon.

The sad death of journalism is a whole other issue. Research, critical analysis, integrity all take second place to advocacy of a partisan position. Seriously hope the 21st century will manage to rise above all this nonsense before all sanity is wiped out.

Article getting slammed on WaPo twitter

That second sentence is dreadful- I had to re-read it three times to make sense of it.

This is unbelievable.

Funnily enough, I haven't seen a huge amount of outraged posts about no.1 best selling children's author David Walliams and his multiple blackface characters in his TV career. Is Gangster Granny a BLM issue due to his cashing in on inverted stereotypes?

Seriously hope the 21st century will manage to rise above all this nonsense before all sanity is wiped out

My feeling is that this shit ( inter-sectionalist, tribalistic, extremely polarised shit of every persuasion) is going to get worse before it gets better. The best thing that can be said, that in about twenty years time, it will have become exposed for what it is.

One of the ironies for me is that the left, certainly in Britain, is usually knee jerk anti-american on just about everything......but when it comes to American style identity politics has already signed the trade deal. And Brexit hasn't even been done, yet.

making it look as if this is a debate all about hurt feelings or self-identity. It isn't

It is, though. For the TRAs it is about exactly that.

Whereas for women it is about something far more fundamental, which everybody supporting the trans ideology refuses to acknowledge.

There were some good twitter threads this week about the differences between the UK and US. Many of her detractors (and twitter in general) will be US based. The threads stemmed from a few people asking why the UK is T*RF central.

Lachlan Stuart did an excellent thread and I think Jane Clare Jones might have tackled it too.

A lot of it stems from UK women and transgender people having strong protections in law via the EqA. In the US there are fewer protections for everyone and unlike the UK a trans person could be discriminated against in employment and housing with no legal recourse to fall back on.

Perhaps that creates a stronger sense of kinship and solidarity. Trans people in the US no doubt are fighting for protections that their UK peers already have in the form of the Equality Act.

US women should take note though that despite the UK cohort already having those protections the lobbyists are not stopping there and have their sights set on taking women's rights.

There are still glaring issues in the US such as sport but that's the best summation I have on the cultural differences and why perhaps things don't translate well on twitter with people who don't understand the UK (looking at you Naomi Wolf).