“A Huge Amount of ‘I Want Her to Choke on My Fat Trans Dick’”
A fairly boring, padded out episode of “The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling” concludes that internet culture is mean, and 4chan and Tumblr are two sides of the same coin.
by Evan Urquhart
At the opening of the third episode of “The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling” podcast, host Megan Phelps-Roper asks Rowling to talk about threats she’s recieved. Rowling responds: “There’s been a huge amount [of threats]. A huge amount of ‘I want her to choke on my fat trans dick.’ You know, like, very sexualized abuse. Attempts to degrade, to humiliate, and people will say that’s not really a threat, and you know, you’re probably right.” The author goes on to talk about how there have also been threats the police considered legitimate, focused on her home address.
Being threatened and harassed online is terrible, particularly being harassed in aggressive, sexual terms. Any trans person can empathise with that, because we’ve all experienced it too. But this is a podcast episode, edited together in an intentional way, and the quote about fat trans dick is used as a frame for the episode to come. Let us ponder, for a moment, the placement of this quote, and its specific content. What purpose does this serve? What precisely is it doing, here?
Julia Serano’s 2007 primer on transmisogyny includes this passage:
For example, the media not only regularly depict trans women’s bodies and experiences in a titillating and lurid fashion, but they also sexualize trans women’s motives for transitioning—e.g., by portraying them as either sex workers, sexual deceivers who prey on unsuspecting heterosexual men, or as male “perverts” who transition to female in order to fulfill some kind of bizarre sexual fantasy.
Is Serano a time-traveller? How on earth did she predict the exact trope this podcast would use to introduce an episode which winds up not being about the harassment Rowling faced, or the reasons for it, at all? Why is that trope used to introduce an often boring ep that spends most of its time rehasing arguments about cancel culture and complaining there are too many genders on Tumblr?
I honestly wouldn’t have harped on the opening quote if the actual episode had been more related to it. Instead, after a brief portrayal of trans women as sexually aggressive that makes explicit mention of their anatomy, the ep veers into the vague. The full hour-and-change is spent delving deep into the history of Tumblr, adolescent identity exploration, and social justice activism online. There’s a lot of innuendo that people on Tumblr have gender identities that shouldn’t be taken seriously, and it combines this with the fact that many of Tumblr’s users are female, raising the spectre of a very particular stereotype of a person whose adolescent gender exploration should not be taken seriously. Then it moves on to the main thesis, which is that cancel culture on the left creates an aggressive mob-mentality that is disproportionately harsh, an idea that could probably have been dispensed with in a sentence, since it represents the conventional wisdom of our time.
Tumblr is a social media site with a lot of young people, many of whom are considered silly or excessive by outsiders. It’s been mocked for the creative words some users have found to describe their genders. Its culture has a focus on social justice which has sometimes resulted in overzealous crusades that seem nit-picky or obtuse. If the production team behind Witch Trials had been so incliined, they could have dispensed with all that in five minutes and done something substantive with the rest of their time. Instead, for the most part this is an incredibly boring rehash of things reactionaries think, and it’s hard to imagine even an audience composed mostly of other reactionaries will find much meat left on this bone.
The only really disturbing part of the podcast is how the ‘cast treats 4chan. A site which has spawned mass shooters is described here primarily as being the opposite side of the Tumblr coin. 4chan has excesses, Tumblr has excesses, and the implication here is that the excesses of 4chan are in large part Tumblr’s fault. How could the boys of 4chan not react more and more strongly to the provocation of teenage girls being a little ridiculous? Despite Rowling later raising her concern about the treatment of people she refers to as “feminists” sexism is, oddly, never raised as a motive for the behavior of channers mocking Tumblr users. Instead the reaction of 4chan as growing ever more extreme and hate-filled is seen as a sort of arms race with Tumblr, an unavoidable reaction to the excesses of social justice that would not exist on its own.
Bizarrely, there’s also a lot of talk about how J. K. Rowling is a crusader for empathy, against bullying. There’s no hint that the start of the rumor that she was transphobic came after she liked a tweet calling trans women “men in dresses,” which is surely a clear cut case of a bullying mentality online, but once which Rowling endorsed.
If this podcast is ever going to grapple with the question of whether Rowling has encouraged and engaged in bullying online behavior herself, it’s certainly taking its time. For this episode, apart from a few hints of transmisogyny at the beginning and end, and the spectre of social contagion theory gently hanging over discussions of young people’s gender discussions on Tumblr, there’s really nothing new or interesting here.
