TWIBS: Rowling Can’t Quit, So Stop Begging!
Infamous hackish fiction writer J.K. Rowling admits in a collection of essays by transphobes that her family begged her to stop obsessing over trans people. Like any other brain rotted transphobe, she simply can’t help herself!
Humor, by Alyssa Steinsiek
She’s back, baby!
Our favorite hack fiction writer, who absolutely cannot stop herself from publicly espousing transphobic dreck, has once more publicly espoused some transphobic drek. Believe it or not, J.K. Rowling has penned an essay in a newly released book, The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht—Scots slang for shutting your pie hole—about how important it is that she continues espousing transphobic dreck.*
The collection of essays, put together by authors Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn and released yesterday, purports to be about “how a grassroots women's movement, harking back to the suffragettes and second wave feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, took on the political establishment - and changed the course of history.”
The “grassroots movement” the book’s synopsis is referring to is “the five-year campaign to protect women's sex-based rights,” a novel concept wholly detached from the more traditional feminist goal of equality for women without checking what’s in their pants. And please forgive me if I doubt the grassroots nature of that movement, considering the heavily documented interconnectedness of anti-transgender activists and the suspiciously well funded groups they work for.
Rowling’s anti-trans bender has lasted years by now. She denies that her persistent mocking of trans people constitutes transphobia, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Maybe she means it in a “trans people are an illegitimate category of person, so nothing is transphobic” sort of way? You know, rather than expressing any actual concern that her words might be bigoted. In her crusade against the trans community, Rowling has denied aspects of the Holocaust, proudly supported anti-trans activists who openly associate with Nazis, and inexplicably dared the police to arrest her for misgendering trans people.
Many of the actors associated with the film adaptations of Rowling’s most well known work, the Harry Potter series, have spoken out against her obsessive focus on the trans community in recent years. Most notably, Daniel Radcliffe—who played the titular hero of the movies—has repeatedly expressed support for the trans community, and openly disavowed Rowling’s views.
Perhaps most pathetically, however, Rowling admitted in an interview with The Times that her family “begged” her to keep her mouth shut about trans people. Does this sound familiar to anyone else? Does the song truly remain the same? Though it’s clearly impacted him quite a bit more than Rowling, I can’t help but think of Irish has been, unemployable writer and second most divorced man on earth, Graham Linehan, whose wife left him and took the kids because of his obsessive transphobia.
I just can’t get my head around it. Why distress the people who love you over a harmless one percent of the population? Why ruin a marriage of sixteen years to bleat compulsively about shit you don’t know anything about? I appreciate the opportunities I’ve been given to inform and celebrate my community with my writing, but I have to be honest: I don’t really want to be doing this. I want this asinine culture war to close out—you know, with a W in our ledger, not theirs—so I don’t have to keep writing about how much pundits and irrelevant celebrities hate my guts for being trans. Or about yet another violation of my community’s civil liberties.
So why do these losers refuse to call it quits, no matter how much their friends and family beg them to be fucking normal? Rowling offered some insight.
“I believe that what is being done to troubled young people in the name of gender identity ideology is, indeed, a terrible medical scandal,” she explains in her essay. “I believe we’re witnessing the greatest assault of my lifetime on the rights our foremothers thought they’d guaranteed for all women. Ultimately, I spoke up because I’d have felt ashamed for the rest of my days if I hadn’t. If I feel any regret at all, it’s that I didn’t speak far sooner.”
There’s enough passive aggressive transphobia in that passage to make your head spin. Gender identity ideology? She means, I believe, the mere existence of trans people, and in particular young trans people. She tries to paint gender-affirming care—widely accepted as safe and necessary—as a “medical scandal,” like many of her peers of late. She attempts to draw a line between the rights of women, hard won by feminists across generations, and the trans community, as if we haven’t been part of that fight from the start.
As if women’s rights aren’t important to us, because we’re not the kind of women Rowling wants to accept.
I’ll say what I always say when some fading celebrity makes a desperate bid for relevance via transphobia: Please keep your obnoxious, ill-informed opinions to yourself. Listen to your loved ones and shut the hell up for a change, Jo.
* All references to J. K. Rowling’s transphobic dreck represent the opinion of our writer, Alyssa Steinsiek.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
