Ralph Fiennes supports JKR

[zanahoria]

“The verbal abuse directed at her is disgusting, it’s appalling. I mean, I can understand a viewpoint that might be angry at what she says about women.

“But it’s not some obscene, uber Right-wing fascist. It’s just a woman saying, ‘I’m a woman and I feel I’m a woman and I want to be able to say that I’m a woman.’ And I understand where she’s coming from. Even though I’m not a woman.”

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/24/ralph-fiennes-verbal-abuse-directed-jk-rowling-disgusting-appalling/

I would bet they both do agree with her and both know exactly what a woman is but they're not quite that brave.... still what they've done is brave enough for now!

😂 this is so specific but could totally be real. It’s just such an achievable fantasy. I also love that in your own fantasy he doesn’t rave about how you’re so intelligent and the most beautiful person he’s seen. Just a nod of agreement.

Maybe you could study Russian literature then endeavour to bump into him and dazzle him with your thoughts on Tolstoy?

Anyway, nice to hear some people still have half a brain. Never thought I’d see the day when I was applauding somebody for saying it’s ok to say you’re a woman if you’re a female adult.

I have doubts about whether the celebs who gabble their TWAW line really believe it either though. I think they just know it’s the correct’ thing to say, but at the heart of it the heterosexual ones still date women. Natal women. The female ones still play female roles. And they’re not complete idiots, they’re aware that the statement invalidates itself. Nobody has to say ‘carrots are carrots’ or ‘cars are cars’ do they?

I don't think he quite understands the gender critical viewpoint. But he recognises the disgusting bullying of a woman saying something completely normal.

You don't expect everyone to understand exactly what gender critical means, we live in a patriarchy, after all. If they all got it, we wouldn't be living in one.

But you do expect normal people to agree that women need sex segregation when they're vulnerable, and sending them rape and death threats when they ask for it, is clearly unacceptable.

Or that, (which is what I suspect it is in this case), only woman can understand what a woman is.

You really don't need any kind of feminist understanding, or linguistic explanations, to grasp that.

He's having a normal reaction, to a woman saying something completely normal, which has been greeted in a way that is totally not normal.

My main take from it is that he's not fucking scared.

He seems to have a strong suspicion that the emperor might be stark bollock naked.

How very dare you, Kanaloa! It's quite clear that carrots are nothing more nor less than rotten cars - it's there in the name. You're being carphobic! Burn the witch! (Or is it carrotphobic? Who knows? Either would make as much sense.)

This!

Bloody autocarrot
pbs.twimg.com/media/FfbwFXRWIAAK3Pv?format=jpg&name=medium

Even the OP is a victim...

I love this. Is RF a noted expert on Russian literature? Or is he nodding and smiling for the same reason I'd be nodding and smiling (and casting about for a quick change of subject), because he's heard the names Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy, that's the sum total of his knowledge of Russian literature and he's desperately hoping to avoid being shown up?

If we're hoping all the famous Slytherins will speak out, that leaves Imelda Staunton, Jim Broadbent, Jason Isaacs and Helena Bonham Carter to go. I very much hope Alan Rickman would have spoken up for JKR, but we'll never know, sadly.

Oh my god so he's hot and sensible. Crush increased 100%.

It’s just a woman saying, ‘I’m a woman and I feel I’m a woman and I want to be able to say that I’m a woman.’

I could quibble with that. She's not just a a woman, she's a woman and a writer and a philanthropist (etcetera) and I don't think many of us feel we're women, we just are women because that's our sex and our bodies. But I won't. Put on the spot I'd babble and make a fool of myself. Thank you , RF.

😂 well I already eat them, might as well insult them. And while we’re at it they DON’T make you see in the dark!!

Point is a la Tywin Lannister ‘any man who has to say I am the king is no true king.’ You don’t have to say the obvious. By saying TWAW you’re actively implying they’re not - you aren’t even calling them women in your own slogan!

I do hope off the back of this thread RF ends up on that ‘dirty tweets’ thing on YouTube though. ‘I have a fantasy where I make an intelligent comment on Russian literature and he nods and smiles’ and ‘he’s so hot and sensible’ would be real favourites.

woohoo!
top work from Voldemort and Malfoy!
always knew you were the best!

Point is a la Tywin Lannister ‘any man who has to say I am the king is no true king.’ You don’t have to say the obvious. By saying TWAW you’re actively implying they’re not - you aren’t even calling them women in your own slogan!

Absolutely. Even as they recite the catechism of their neo-religion, they know that it is not true, and have to shout louder and louder to drown out their blasphemous awareness of reality.

Or as I slightly less cerebrally put it, it's the Posh Spice Theory. If you have to say it, it's not true.

I actually do read Dostoyevsky. For 'fun'. Can I get in on the intellectual flirting as well? Pretty please.

Lack of guts.

I’m in awe of people like Rosie Duffield and JK Rowling who stand up and say the right thing when no one will publicly support them (remember when Stephen King liked JK Rowling’s tweet, then after she thanked him he got social media backlash, and so he pretended he didn’t mean to like it? Spineless. I haven’t bought a Stephen King book since.)

I do not particularly admire people who turn up years after abuse started to mumble ‘er I don’t think it’s ok to send her death threats.’

Well, the row about JK began in mid 2020, so perhaps all the actors who made fortunes from JK’s hard work were too busy with work to defend her then. 🤔

It ought not to be thought remarkable to say what he said - or JK Rowling said, namely that she's a woman. I could quibble with his statement in that he said he could understand a viewpoint that could be angry about it. That's a bit remarkable - women saying they're women and that a viewpoint exists which is angry about it. But he did speak for her, which is good. Too few public figures or people she's worked with and in the wider industry she works or worked in have done that.

I think it's slightly unfair to say lack of guts has kept him silent until now.

It could just be the nature of media. I'm not sure what the original purpose of the interview (in the NYT?) was, but presumably he's got something to promote, and they asked him about this because it's a perennial hot topic. So this segment of a longer interview, and his quote, gets circulated on social media without context.

For the same reason I'm inclined to excuse his clumsy phrasing of 'feel I'm a woman'. I'm guessing he was trying to field a fairly unexpected (and unwelcome) question diplomatically but while being honest and supportive. It's a feature of this shitshow that we have to police our own language to such an extent we end up talking in riddles sometimes.

Feinnes is 59. Coltrane was in his 70s.

As far as I know Emma Watson and the other HP cast members who spoke out in support of transpeople are all much younger.

It depends on each person of course but in general views on the "gender critical" topic do seem do differ from the older generation to the younger generation don't they?

Not sure anyone is claiming Fiennes or Coltrane are/were “gender critical” - just critical of death threats and silencing of women and their concerns.

Another person who voiced similar “death threat + silencing critical” concerns is Tom Felton - aged 35…

I would be AMAZED if Ralph fiennes disagree with the fact that there are only two sexes.

How unpleasant to imply that the younger generation are okay with rape and death rates.

What I thought, they should have spoken up sooner.

Yes, when I was younger I also believed TWAW. I accepted it when I was told a "woman's" brain could somehow grow in a man's body because of hormone washes in the womb, and that such people were really women in some essential way and lived very sadly until they had sex changes and were recognised as women, and that males and females have similar physical strength but females are socialised not to push themselves as hard, and that trans women were very vulnerable and at risk of violent attack if anyone clocked them as trans so they needed to be in women's spaces for their own safety and only a bigot who was trapped in rigid gender roles would object to that.

And then I thought, "hang on, I don't even believe that men and women have different brains so how does that even work?"

And then Monroe Bergdorf complained about women protesting Trump's "grab them by the pussy" comment in pussy hats because it excludes trans women and I thought "hang on, he still said it, and he said it about us precisely because we have pussies, but you are taking away our language to object to it, so you really don't see yourself as one of us because if you did you'd understand that even if it's not important to you it's important to us and you'd support us"

And then I found out that most trans women keep their penises, and that teenage boys routinely beat women's world records in sport, and just how stark the difference in sexual offending is between male and female people, and that the UK murder rate for trans people is well under 1 a year when for female people it's more than 2 a week...

So like many things I believed when I was young, I stopped believing it because the longer I live, the more I learn and sometimes I realise things I deeply believed were wrong or at best over simple.

Although to be clear, I still support trans people to be the gender they want to be.

I just no longer believe that inner gender is somehow interchangeable with sex, nor that trans women can slip without issue into all the structures that were built for female bodied people and that have no impact on the female people they were built for.

Nicely said, FlirtsWithRhinos