This Week in Barrel Scraping: I’m Ready to Go to Jail for Criticizing J. K. Rowling
Children’s author and named castle-owner J. K. Rowling addressed an anti-trans meeting and fantasized about life in the big house this week.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
photo by Hasan Almasi
Oh, boy! I’ve never written about JK Rowling before! What a treat!
First, though, there’s this “women’s liberation” group, right? They’re called FiLiA, and before you ask, yes, I’ve been trying for HOURS to figure out why they capitalize the F, L and A. Filia is just Latin for daughter, which is not even sort of clever, but what’s up with the FLA? Funky Liberated Asshole? Fiery Lesbian Aardvark? Fish Lovers Argument? I don’t know, and they aren’t telling, so unfortunately that’s a dead end.
But more to the point, FiLiA hosts an annual “women’s rights conference,” and has been doing so since 2013. The blurb on their “about” page suggests they platform women from 49 countries, with “a particular focus on those less often heard or purposefully silenced.”
Now, far be it from me to criticize, but if you take a look at the picture above that blurb—presumably from one of their annual conferences—it seems to be mostly… well… white women. Almost entirely white women, actually! I wouldn’t say white women are incapable of being marginalized, as a white woman who is both trans and disabled, but considering the sort of crap FiLiA likes to put out into the world…
Well, let’s just say that their average member, if I had to guess, is your standard middle-class British woman who’s got a little too much free time on her hands and has decided to spend all of it screaming about how I’m a perverted man in a dress, or whatever.
Circling back to Jo: She was a speaker at FiLiA’s conference this year! Yay! I’m sure she said only normal, non-dog whistle things, so I suppose we can wrap up here—
Oh, right.
You know, I actually appreciate that she differentiates between “trans women” and “males.” That feels like a step in the right direction! What I don’t love, however, is her immediate suggestion that cis women and girls are somehow less safe because of trans women. Or the flat out insistence that “activists”—meaning, I guess, literally any trans person who advocates for their own civil liberties—are in any way “dismantling” women’s rights.
Kinda hurtful, Jo! And anyway, we aren’t the ones regularly showing love for anti-abortion activists and other right-wing nutjobs, are we?
Rowling went on to say to conference-goers that she realized she “[has] to take the hit,” with regards to attacking trans women for existing, or whatever. She says she can “afford it,” and considering she’s worth £875 million, I’d have to agree! I mean, shit, this is a woman whose house has its own name, for crying out loud!
The house even has its own history with transphobic nonsense. Anybody else remember November of 2021, when Jo took it upon herself to accuse “trans activists” of “doxxing her” by posting pictures of themselves holding trans rights signs outside her extremely publicly known, has-its-own-fucking-Wikipedia-page estate?
But apparently we’re the ones making a mountain of a molehill when we talk about all the people who demonstrably want to take our rights away and kill us! No, you’re clearly the one who’s under attack, Mr. Galbraith.
And hey, when Jo says she’ll “take the hit,” she really means it, apparently!
Just a few days ago she was yucking it up on Twitter, talking about how she’d love to go to prison for… misgendering a trans person? Setting aside the fact that no one has proposed jail time for misgendering, that wealthy people tend not to go to prison if they had, and that JK Rowling is certainly not going to be comfortable folding laundry in a penitentiary after spending most of her adult life living more lavishly than any normal person can even comprehend, can we talk about the fact that she’s so committed to hating trans people that she’d rather break the law than just address us with the words we prefer?
Like, I’M an activist for wanting to live a peaceful, happy life, but she’s completely normal? Come on!
And I have to say, it’ll be hard to beat the accusations of transphobia with Tweets like this, Jo!
I guess there’s a reason the kids who practically grew up around her and starred in the films based on her books are so outspoken against her and her needless bile.
Every time Rowling is in the news for shit like this, all I can think about is how damn easy it would have been to quietly retire. To stop fiddling with her IP, to leave well enough alone, and certainly to avoid embroiling herself in the most wrong-side-of-history debate of our time.
Mind you, Rowling’s oeuvre is chock full of racism, antisemitism, and extremely baffling pro-slavery sentiments, among other extremely problematic content that was turning marginalized readers away long before she outed herself as a transphobe.
Even still, Jo could have quietly retired and maintained a fairly unblemished public record.
Why she’s decided to fight so hard so that she can be remembered as a horrible bigot, I’ll never understand.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who hails from Appalachia but lives, laughs, loves in Rapid City.