She really is the most extraordinary woman.
I volunteered in an orphanage in my early 20s and spent a couple of months taking care of abandoned babies. There was no safeguarding at all. I actually feel quite bad about it now because at the time I thought I was helping and yet I look back and wonder whether I might have done more harm than good. Perhaps all I did was contribute to the perpetual cycle of abandonment those poor children suffered.
But if you try and think of how better to help, it's overwhelming. If you can afford to donate money, who do you donate it to? Big, well-known charities based in western countries where you know that a significant proportion of your donation will go towards paying the salaries of people based in London? I also feel like I've lost a lot of faith in some of the most well known charities, such as Amnesty International for example. So then what? Do you give directly to small local charities? But then how do you decide which ones? And how do you check the money is actually being used properly? We were told not to donate clothes and toys to the orphanage where I volunteered because the staff (who mostly lived in poverty themselves) would just take it home to their own families.
I think most of us either just donate to big name charities or ones we have a personal connection to and hope for the best, or feel so overwhelmed we switch off and don't do anything at all.
And here we have a woman, an extraordinary, remarkable woman, who used her own talent and creativity to work her way out of poverty and become one of the highest earning women in history, who has done all this. Who has set up at least three charities of her own to ensure that the money she and others donate goes right where it is needed.
She really is the embodiment of "if you want something done, you've got to do it yourself".
All these silly, spoiled trans activists really could not have chosen a less worthy target for their stupid little hate campaign.
I'm not saying she's perfect. I think sometimes her tweets go a little too far and she really does need to just block that gobshite India Willoughby rather than engaging in a public slanging match with someone so many leagues beneath her. You can see she's a flawed person like the rest of us.
But my god, look at what she's done.
Even without the philanthropy, even if she'd done nothing more than write Harry Potter, she'd still have brought happiness to millions of people and inspired generations of children to read. But when you consider all her other work for various worthy causes, this witch hunt against her looks even more insane. Like, yes, OK, you believe in gender identity and she believes in biological reality. Even if you think she has harmed trans people in some rather nebulous way, why not just ignore her. All the people in the world doing genuinely awful things and you decide you want to cancel this woman? Really?