Trans People Launch High Street Protest Against Sale of Harry Potter Merchandise

[IwantToRetire]

Trans rights activists launched a peaceful protest outside Waterstones in Guildford this afternoon (May 16), chalking messages on the pavement to draw people’s attention to the company’s marketing of Harry Potter merchandise.

Protest group Defund Transphobes says Harry Potter author JK Rowling uses money from the sale of merchandise to fund what they describe as her “anti trans campaign”.

Continues at https://guildford-dragon.com/trans-people-launch-high-street-protest-against-sale-of-harry-potter-merchandise/

That's the point. I think this is about curbing free speech.

Are you actually for real?
Have you heard yourself?

I think Rushdie has more reason to be "islamaphobic" than most, wouldn't you say?

Ah I see the issue, you think JKR is actually Voldemort's wife. Don't worry lovely she's actually not, Harry Potter is just fiction. No one in it is real and so none of the characters will be lurking in the bookshop ready to make anyone feel unsafe.

I'm sure Waterstone will be taking all your concerns very seriously but you do need to be a little wary of blindly trusting other people's judgement.

I think people are being very harsh on poor Bella, he's obviously very young and still needing a lot of guidance. #BeKindToSnowflakes

Honestly, you need some more stock phrases - nobody believes this is ‘unsafe’ nonsense anymore.

Oh good.
An echo chamber reading group. How very progressive. I reckon that falls under bigotry, yes?

We learn from the past. We also learn from things we don't agree with.
You are ill informed and closed minded.

It’s very unusual for young women to want to go into the men’s. They campaign for mixed sex designs -either unregulated private cubicles with shared washbasins or the universal design. Then, when they get it, they go back to using the women’s at times when they feel so unsafe it overrides their original wish and there’s some women’s toilets left. I have read so many accounts of girls/women complaining that the ‘gender-neutral’ labelled toilets are dominated by boys/men and they feel uneasy/scared. It’s sadder when they feel they have to keep using these designs, which they describe as smelly, dirty, and misused.

It is similar to what will happen to the Hampstead Ponds. Their solution at the moment is to spend hundreds of thousands to make all the facilities designs very private, individual designs so men and women mix in that environment. They haven’t the critical thinking skills and awareness to realise how that will play out.

This is yet another example of where 'Operation Let Them Speak' will simply do wonders.
If there is anyone left in Britain who hasn't already peaked, then they'll definitely get the picture seeing a bunch of protesters wailing that having Harry Potter in Waterstones is unsafe.
I find it hard to find the difference between trolls and parody and real life lunacy sometimes, simply because I've seen so many people earnestly arguing for batshit. However, Bella's last post on not bothering to look into Rushdie crossed that line for me. It is possible we have a poster who is that staggeringly dim but it's more likely we're being deliberately wound up.

Totally.

I wouldn't mind if it was funny.

Oh and just to refute some of the absolute nonsense written on the pavement ie about the ban on puberty blockers quadrupling suicides -

Following claims by campaigners and legal bodies that stopping puberty blockers at the Tavistock Centre caused an "explosion" or "surge" in patient suicides, the UK Department of Health and Social Care commissioned an independent review. Led by Professor Louis Appleby, the national adviser on suicide prevention, the review looked at data from 2018 to 2024. It concluded that there was no significant rise in suicides after the restrictions were put in place. Specifically, among under-18s, there were three suicides in the three years before restrictions and three in the three years after. The full Review of suicides and gender dysphoria at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust concluded that causal links to care policies could not be supported by the data.

So many lies and so much misinformation spread by these people, I don't think they even care if it's true or not as long as it pushes their agenda.

I saw a ‘die-in’ once with people lying on the pavement pretending to be dead.

I have often said I want to stage a ‘die-in’ in ‘gender neutral’ designed toilets to see how long it takes before anyone notices the private cubicle hasn’t opened. Then I would do this again with a single sex design that can have door gaps. However, that would require me to spend a lot of time on toilet floors to get a decent sample size! And I already know the answer (from common sense and research).

Some ideas are so seditious they cannot be allowed into the building, let alone 'entertained'. That is, ideas which, despite being grasped with no difficulty by the proles, run contrary to the received wisdom of the establishment elite.

The idea of Capitalism in Communist USSR.

The ideas of Protestantism under Mary Tudor.

The idea of secular pluralism under the Taliban.

The irony is that these protesters actually have the elites (politicians, public and third sectors, academia, bien pesant media) on their side. They are the oppressors, not the oppressed, and it's the fear of losing power that drives their rage.

Imagine it was the other way around, Biological sex is the only official marker, and trans people are struggling to have their voices heard. Would I be protesting against them? No! I'm the idiot who would take their side, because I wouldn't realise they were planning to abolish biological sex altogether.

Wait... That actually happened 🤦‍♀️

This x 💯

I saw a ‘die-in’ once with people lying on the pavement pretending to be dead.

Me too. People were walking round them to go about their business 😀Nobody was interested so they had to get up and walk off!

The photo in the OP is typical of the movement. One older bloke with lots of students.

I was tempted to try and educate them about toilet regulations and enclose one of them in the cardboard they had, then lift it up from the floor 15cm. And say to their friends ‘is it better the first, or the second?’. Health and Safety. If they really were dying in a loo it’s much better to be in a single sex design.

You are not a serious person.

Can you imagine if the TRAs sent their worst rather than their best to “debate” on here!

And some people still say this isn't a cult. I don't see the difference: older, unhinged "personalities" (for lack of a term that won't get my post deleted) leading/influencing younger, impressionable, and hopelessly naive (and often not in the best mental health states) people to acts of criminality and/or ridiculousness (crickets, anyone?). All in the name of a cause that no one can really define, and which embraces everything and nothing, as long as the older "personalities " get what they want.

These young people are being used, and if they ever grow up, they will realize this.

I'm sorry, am I missing something, why would one not read Mein Kampf, it's a historical document. When I was a student in the 70's it was required reading, every other person had a copy. Why would you not want an insight into the mind of someone like that. What is wrong with so called left wing people these days, they are scared of their own shadows. Contrast in life is what makes us decide what we want and what we don't want.

In those days we were properly left wing. I'm not now. I will have no truck with extremism on either side. I despair sometimes.

Strikes (see what I did there?)me that Bella hasn't looked "too deeply" into anything! Has she/he even read what JKR wrote about womens' rights/TP?
No I guess not. Not the brightest bulb in the spares drawer
As for unsafe in a bookstore! Please. Get a Grip

I would congratulate Waterstones on maintaining free speech in that case and standing up to those who keep trying to kill Rushdie. Unlike you who clearly believes free speech should be curtailed by mob rule.

An echo chamber reading group. How very progressive. I reckon that falls under bigotry, yes?

I would have said brain washing rather than bigotry tbh, especially since OP admits they do the no thinking, only following type of "reading".

Wow you are just so ignorant in your comparisons it’s crazy

I thought they were a satire account???

This is a really important observation. Often when there is a group or TRAs at an event irl or in a photo it is worth scanning the crowd and the edges of the crowd. The crowd usually contains a good number of very vulnerable looking young people and the periphery will be home to several much older men looking shifty and menacing.