James Kirkup on JKR

[CaveMum]

Brilliant article!

“This isn’t a column about Rowling’s views on sex and gender. It’s about her anger and her refusal, her unflinching, unapologetic and utterly glorious refusal to be kind.”

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/j-k-rowlings-glorious-refusal-to-be-kind/

Fabulous. James K has always been so good on this issue.

Totally agree

JKR really is channeling Sam Vimes right now!

JKR 'glorious', eh? Maybe you could add 'happy' and 'victorious' to that, and make up a song about her

Well done, James. Glad someone has said it.

That was very satisfying!

"But in the end, some things are more important than being nice. Telling the truth is one of them." 🎯

Incredible, isn't it. A woman wasn't kind, hold the front pages!

"But in the end, some things are more important than being nice. Telling the truth is one of them."

This is so much how I feel. It gets to the heart of the issue.

The other thing is, Rowling offers kindness & empathy & sympathy in bucketloads. It’s all over her Twitterfeed. She just reserves the right to direct it as she chooses & it’s that that has people so riled up. She’s “being unkind” to “The Most Vulnerable” - while being kind to rape victims; Iranian women; disabled girls; the bereaved; & a great long list of other people.

What a delightful article to start my week! He’s right, of course. She was great when she was treading more gently, she’s bloody magnificent now she has no fucks to give.

Courage calls to courage

In homage to Magdalen Berns who memorably said "I'd rather be rude than be a fucking liar".

It's an interesting point as to where the boundary between being unkind and being truthful lies. Of course you don't say to your delightful great aunt that the scarf she bought you for your birthday is hideous. But there is Grand Canyon-sized chasm between that and saying that men are women just to be kind.

That's true, and of course one of the key differences is the element of compulsion. It's one thing to decide to pretend that a man is a woman out of kindness, quite another to be forced to do so, on pain of losing your job, being beaten up, sent to prison, all the things that we get threatened with or that in some cases actually happen.

The other difference is the magnitude of the lie and hence the stakes involved. Pretending men are women has terrifying real-life consequences.

I’m so glad to see this article laying it all out and praising JKR for her advocacy and candour. Especially since Hayton wrote an article for the Spectator which bemoaned JKR wasn’t being nice enough 🙄

The woman is just being herself and is being a great role model for girls. I’m fed up to the back teeth with media pundits saying JKR might have a point but why can’t she be more nice and kind in expressing it. No-one listened when we were nice and TRAs treated us just as viciously when we were polite as when we were factual and blunt - they don’t want any opinions from women full stop, irrespective of tone.

Brilliant article. Worth remembering that James (back in 2019) exposed to a horrified world the dodgy tactics of trans lobby groups as recorded in the Denton's report:

www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-document-that-reveals-the-remarkable-tactics-of-trans-lobbyists/