American Booksellers Association and Abigail Shrier

[lionheart]

Sorry if there is already a thread--I couldn't find it.

@Olderbadger1

One of the totally proportionate responses on twatter, that edifice of reasonable eloquence...

@AnneOgborn
Replace every single person on your selection committee with a trans person. Commit to sending a pro trans book with every order for the next 5 years and drop the book's publisher, and any other publisher who publishes hate. Publish a complete account of how this happened, including names of all employees involved. Fire all involved in the decision and their managers, transitively up to the CEO.

Brings to mind Veruca Salt. Are we supposed to take these dickheads seriously?

I’d assumed that was an ironic spoof message. It wasn’t serious, surely.

@IsItShining

I’d assumed that was an ironic spoof message. It wasn’t serious, surely.

If that's the real Anne Ogborn, it would be absolutely on brand:

medium.com/gender-2-0/we-had-some-gender-chaos-e1fd178e92be

"Fire all involved in the decision and their managers, transitively up to the CEO."

I've just looked up the word "transitively":

What does Transitively mean?
1 : characterized by having or containing a direct object a transitive verb. 2 : being or relating to a relation with the property that if the relation holds between a first element and a second and between the second element and a third, it holds between the first and third elements equality is a transitive relation.

Or could all the TRAs just sit down together and read a copy of The Crucible?

‘I see Goody Rawlings with a copy of a scientific book...’

PrincessNutella

You're one of those bleeding heart liberal types aren't you?

@IsItShining

Just back on the deliberate misinterpretation of Troubled Blood, this is a quote from The Times dated today.

They are discussing the hundreds of rape and death threats JKR has received, and her response to them.

"Her crime novel Troubled Blood, written under the name Robert Galbraith and featuring a male killer who dresses as a woman, sold 65,000 copies in its first five days last September."

This isn't the worst description of the book I have seen in terms of the entire plot of a massive book being misrepresented, but for two brief mentions in 900 pages, I'm not sure why they need to say the book features this or any character at all, especially in an article talking about a woman receiving rape and death threats for holding a perfectly reasonable viewpoint protected in law.

As far as I can see, the only reason ‘X sometimes wore a woman’s coat’ is in the book at all is to offer plausible plot confusion between two or three pairs of ‘women in raincoats struggling on the street’.

There’s also an important thematic reason but I don’t think I could say any more without spoilers.
It’s very hard to explain what JKR is doing here without giving clues away but when you have read the whole thing you come away thinking it is the absolute opposite of transphobic imo.
Trouble is it’s rather long and TRAs typically don’t seem to have much practice in reading long texts.

Agreed, Countess; but other similar thematic tie-ins could have been used, whereas the woman’s coat seemed essential here for plot obfuscation (along with the relatively short stature of the man concerned).

Apologies for derail. There’s a Strike/Robin chat going on in What We’re Reading that has spoilers galore- are you on that?