JK Rowling has challenged Scotland’s new hate crime law in a series of social media posts - inviting police to arrest her if they believe she has committed an offence.
The Harry Potter author, who lives in Edinburgh, described several transgender women as men, including convicted prisoners, trans activists and other public figures.
She said “freedom of speech and belief” was at an end if accurate description of biological sex was outlawed.
Earlier, Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf said the new law would deal with a “rising tide of hatred”.
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.
…
Ms Rowling, who has long been a critic of some trans activism, posted on X on the day the new legislation came into force.
Can we just hold one big public figure accountable to the law? Please?
To be honest, justice sometimes DOES happen, but I think it tends to happen to B. Cosby & K. Spacey more than H. Weinstein
Miss Not A Straight White Guy here thinks she won’t be made an example, & she probably won’t ever. But she will never be part of the truly protected class.
Not even if she transitioned 🫠
No.
Sigh. Yeah. Thought so. 😭
Chances are they don’t want to try this on someone with money for the good lawyers. Authorities never try the more questionable laws that way.
You want her to go to jail for her tweet?
You know what’s baffling to me?
She was poor at some point. She lived in poverty off of government welfare. Chances are there are a good amount of children who grew up with her works that transitioned later on. They are part of the same fanbase that lifted her from poverty.
How can you genuinely turn out that unsympathetic for your fellow human beings like that?
I know one trans person who’s a big Harry Potter Adult. They just also happen to be dumb and selfish, just like JK. Being Trans or being Poor doesn’t automatically make someone empathetic.
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I am so fucking sick of these bigots pretending the science of “biological sex” is on their side.
In recent years, multiple studies of the brains of trans people have revealed areas of differentiation from those of cisgender people. And unless these bigots are prepared to argue that brains are not part of biology, they only have two choices: Deny the science somehow or accept that they’re just bigots who want to hate, regardless of the science.
And because unlike bigots, I like to back my shit up:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-020-0666-3
- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2804855
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8955456/
On top of that, there’s some indications of oligogenic causes resulting in various allele differences that wouldn’t necessarily show up on a brain scan.
In conclusion: Fuck bigots and their attempts to co-opt science in order to support their bigotry.
I’m glad you’re backing it up, but honestly, the answer to this whole “biological science” bullshit is simper- it’s none of their fucking business how someone else identifies. I don’t care what “science” says is a man or a woman. If someone says they’re a woman, it’s not my fucking business to tell them they aren’t.
Absolutely agreed. I only bring it up because the bigots like to claim science is on their side (while usually rejecting science to back up some kind of religious nonsense). So it’s nice to be able to throw actual science in their faces.
I’m glad to now have it for myself, so thank you for that, but I don’t know that showing them real science will work because they are not coming at this from a rational position. All they see is “man = penis, woman = vagina” and no amount of science will change their mind. Even bringing up basic things like people born with both sets of genitalia doesn’t phase them. “Well that’s just the exception to the rule,” as if that’s a thing in science. So when they say that they have science on their side, what they mean is that they’ve found some scientific studies that agreed with their preconceived, unscientific notions.
As they say- you shouldn’t play chess with pigeons.
What I’ve heard a lot of people do is not make a whole show to convince the other person but to convince people who may be on the fence or uneducated on the subject. Any third party observer who might just be learning about stuff.
Would you rather trust a random screeching about people birth genitals or someone who is posting scientific evidence to back up their claim and being calm and knowledgeable about the subject.
I get it though, fuck em.
The issue at stake is people’s own fragile identities
Let me clarify: JK Rowling’s childhood learning of “boys have penises and girls have vaginas” runs so deep into her understanding of how she understands being a human that giving it up is scary and threatening.
Everything new to a conservative is scary and threatening.
Tbh I think her hate comes down to two things: she was raped by a man and is paranoid because she never dealt with that trauma in a healthy way and she recognized the right wing as a crop to be harvested. She’s an ideological predator.
Sad that she was raped but immediately declaring all trans people rapists just makes her an asshole. It’s a shame that people actually listen to her crap too.
Exactly, none of this has any bearing on their lives and odds are enormously in favor of the likelihood that these people will never even meet a trans person—and if they did it would make zero difference to them—so the real solution is to let it the fuck go.
All this talk about living rent-free in people’s minds and all that, yet here we are, you know?
They may very well have met multiple trans people and never even known it. Their hatred for trans people is really just for the ones who can’t “pass.” They don’t think about the others. They think of “a man in a dress.” If you showed them a picture of Valentina Sampaio without saying who she was, they’d say she was a woman. And it would be fun to see their reaction when you told them she was trans because at least some of them would see her and be aroused.
Except it is important in competition where lines must be drawn if we are to enact protected classes. If we don’t need to then that is a different discussion, but for now there are many segregated competitions of all types that exist, which means you’re wrong.
By “competition,” do you mean sports? A form of entertainment?
Why should I even care? Sports are not important to the way the world functions.
Deny the science
Sure thing Bob, let me just stack that in-between “Evolution” and “climate change” on my shelf of “Things that don’t fit my bigoted, hateful, and selfish worldview, so I just conveniently ignore them.”
Biological sex exists, it’s just not binary, and the mental part of this has a massive psycho-social component to it that few take into consideration. Brain research on this is still in the chicken vs egg stage it seems based on those papers.
They will always find a fallacy to argue you that they are right. It’s a belief. You need to bring them to realize they are wrong.
Hard fact, evidence based fact isn’t the bast practice to change these beliefs.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but why would you link to an article that mentions “biological sex” in the first sentence when trying to prove that there is no such thing as “biological sex”? I’m almost certainly missing something, so please excuse my ignorance.
You are misunderstanding. They are saying that biological sex is not the same as gender and it’s clear that a trans woman’s brain is much closer to their identified gender than the one assigned to them at birth.
So biological sex is real then? I keep being told that I fell for a lie that there is a such thing as “biological sex” and that there is no such thing as male and female humans. Is this not the case? Is “biological sex” a real thing?
I’m not sure how you think reproduction works…
I’ve always been under the impression that there are males and females. I know that sometimes they feel like they are in the wrong body, but I thought they were still males and females. I am repeatedly told by people in the trans community that this is a lie and that sex is not male and female and that this idea is part of their systemic oppression. I’m just trying to get a solid picture of what is going on exactly.
sex != gender
Biological sex determines the bits you have in your pants - gender on the other hand is the social construct we humans have created, on top of that, to assign social roles and expectations to individuals.
The main issue TERFS (or FARTS) have, is that they argue the only thing that matters is what bits you have in your trousers. Which completely ignores the reality of people everywhere that are societally expected to behave in certain ways because it aligns with what society has deemed “manly” or “girly”. They argue that by wanting rights for trans people, that means, we, as a society, end up entrenching the gender norms feminists have fought so hard to dismantle.
However, that fully relies on the idea that gender has already been abolished and everyone presenting the way they truly feel is just “men” co-opting the feminist movement for their own “deviant” benefit.
Which
A. Completely misses the point about equality and solidarity (why does it matter if AMABs present as women if we all have equal rights?)
B. Disregards the reality of transmasc, transfemmes, enby and anyone else that just wants to live life in a form they feel comfortable with (feminine women and masculine men are just as valid as the opposite)
C. Absolutely dismisses the experience of transmasc individuals as “confused girls” - which is not only bigoted but extremely sexist, it implies that AFABs have no agency and are fully controlled by society - “you see they’re not smart enough to understand social constructs and how their lives fit into them - no! they’re just trying to pass as male so they get the patriarchal benefits the current system provides!” - again completely missing the point of equality.
You may think these are strawmen but if you’re familiar with JKs rethoric you’ll see these are genuine beliefs she holds.
This way, the “Trans Movement” (ie. people presenting and behaving in ways not directly assigned to their birth sex) becomes a hill to die on.
Not because of the purported “safety of girls” in bathrooms, sports and prisons (which JK will gladly demonize in her own fictional worlds of trans criminals and rapists (spoilers - people of any sex or gender expression can be awful human beings - saying they’re the reason sex crimes occur just dismisses the reality of abuse perpetuated by hurtful people))
But because it’s an ideology of absolute societal constructs (how can a man pretend to be a woman if the only thing that makes a woman is her genitalia?)
And look, I too am a gender abolitionist - if we lived in a genderless society that didn’t have gender reveal parties or gendered shoes or clothes or interests or literally anything that divides people into binary groups - I’d be on that shit - but that’s not what folk like JK are fighting for.
They see sex as this immutable quality that not only determines your reproductive organs - but how society should perceive you. You have a penis - you are a man. Oh, you don’t like being perceived as a man and you feel you relate to women in a way that other men don’t? Well, too fucking bad, in the man-bin you go. Rooster between your legs says you’re not allowed to sit in a female-only cubicle - get the fuck out.
That’s why this type of thinking is harmful, the goal isn’t to see who gets the “most rights”, the goal is for everyone to get the same amount of rights, always - so it doesn’t matter if you call yourself a man, a woman or any other label you may choose - what matters is that if you give out love and respect you should receive the same in return.
Edit: Sorry for the massive essay, but assumed you might be interested in the context around sex and gender
Thank-you so much for writing this. I really, really appreciate the time you took to lay this out for me. It is amazing how hard it is to get clear answers on this topic. It seems like it is just constant insults and name-calling for anyone who wants to try to understand. You’re so wonderful for putting so much effort into explaining this. I can’t thank you enough.
Are there any books or recommended reading that you would suggest to go any deeper?
Thanks again!
No, they’re telling you that gender is not sex.
Of course biological sex is real. It’s just a lot more complicated than ‘male’ and ‘female’ because biology is not that simple. So yes, there are XY and XX humans and they can generally, but not universally, reproduce with each other. But that’s not all there is. For instance XXY and XYY are both possible, although often come with a host of other genetic problems (but not always). There are also people born with both types of genitalia, sometimes functional and sometimes not. On top of that, there are conditions like Swyer Syndrome, where someone with XY chromosomes has female genitalia and maybe even a functional female reproductive system.
If trans people are telling you that biological sex is not male and female, that is what they mean.
I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this. It is refreshing to get answers when I ask about this stuff instead of just slurs and attacks.
Is it definitionally correct to say that male and female are two of the biological sexes, but there are more? Or is it not even the case that male and female are biological sexes at all? If not, then what is the proper term for xx and xy people?
Do you know what the reason is for the down votes I am getting for the question i asked you? Obviously I don’t care about the score or whatever, I just want to know what it is about my question that is offensive.
“It’s basic biology” mfers when they see advanced biology 😣
I’m glad that Harry Potter wasn’t my favourite series growing up, knowing how bad of a person she is. With that said, it’s still possible to separate the art from the artist, so it’s okay either way but personally I just feel better knowing it wasn’t my number one favourite series growing up.
I think the general argument against separating the art from the artist is that shes still alive and when we buy HP products, she gets that money and uses it to harm trans people.
Hp lovecraft iirc is known as a racist, but we can still purchase his books without funding him cause he’s dead.
Buy your HP merch secondhand, i guess?
🏴☠️
I believe that it’s not as simple as that. I think that derivatives of “Harry Potter” and the characters within result in her giving a hefty cut, but I believe that the “Wizarding World” doesn’t, as it is owned by WB and fully owns the rights.
Oh ill have to look into that some, i didn’t know about that. Maybe i can play the game! Lol
I got them all (english versions) except n 1, free if you get them. Bordeaux France.
I personally completely disassociate my harry potter experience from her, I’m not gonna let her ruin my happy childhood memories. But I also don’t go out of my way to spend money that goes to the franchise either, didn’t get the game, don’t buy goodies etc. We might visit the UK park some day if the chance arises just because my wife loves these kinds of parks and I’d rather that than Disney.
the movies are way better than the books anyway and her name is nowhere near the movies.
Unfortunately her bank account is, and she uses that money to harm trans people.
Depends who you ask. There isn’t a single HP movie I like more than a book and the only decent movie adaptions in my eyes were first 2.
Tbh, it’s a badly thought out “law” that seems to be just a case of letting the police decide whether to act on it or not, letting them deal with things based on their own prejudices (e.g. weed is illegal in the UK, but if you were a racist copper you could arrest some black youths for smoking it and not some white kids). It’s cowardly politics, and avoids actually defining anything or drawing any lines in the sand.
Also, it’s not a crime to be a moron on Twitter. One might argue it’s where they belong.
Yes. Now if you expand this thought process you’ll find that the majority of laws are exactly this. Pretty much everything you do is both legal and illegal according to different laws. Which means you can be arrested, detained, etc for basically any reason at any time. It’s all down to if “they” (the cop you interact with, the DA, the judge, the high ranking official who just doesn’t like you, the media rallying against you, etc) want something to happen.
It’s a hallmark of fear based authoritarian governments.
… so arrest her?
People who use biology as an excuse to hate on people have no grasp on how biology even works. You should know that gender disphoria, gender transitions and other genders as well come in fact with small noticeable differences, such as the way the brain is wired and even the many mechanisms inside your body. Unfortunately, such differences are not noticeable right off the bat. But they exist. Also FFS, she could have just enjoyed her harry potter money, maybe she could go silent after the first tweet but come on! There’se no reason to go any further, no reason. She now dwells with the likes of her conservative friends - She’s no victim. There’s more money there than many of us could see in a lifetime. She actually has too much -
Absolutely agree with you!
People who use biology as an excuse to hate on people have no grasp on how biology even works.
“There’s only two sexes, that’s biology 101”, yes, it’s literally 101, it’s what you get taught before you learn the specifics, the exceptions to the rules and the finer details of the multi-dimensional spectrum that is the impact of our biology on sex and gender.
It’s like “there’s only 3 states of matter, that’s basic science!”
Wait until you learn about this extreme thing called sublimation, it’s going to blow your mind…
Oh it’s not directly one of the three states? Plasma isn’t real? I better learn my basics again.
Whooosh
This is a case of tone not coming across text well 😅
I’m agreeing with you
This is mental illness by now! Seriously wtf? Why is this so important for her that she can’t stop talking about it? If I had some irrational hate for trans woman, I would not go on about it in public all the time.
Don’t we have more important problems then to bash people that are so unhappy with their body that they are willing to take hormones and let people operate on their genitals?
This is such a simple thought, everybody should be able to think it, right? But on the other hand, she is not the only one hating transgender women or men. I mean it is not right to hate people for that. But if I would hate trans people then I would just not invite them for dinner and would stop talking about them all the time.
It must be some form of mental illness I have no other explanation.
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have bigger problems than someone else getting bodily autonomy.
Except her problem doesn’t seem to be with people having bodily autonomy, her problem seems to be with trans women in what should be safe spaces for women.
I’m not saying I agree with her views, but it seems all nuance has been lost from public debate.
Trans women are women. This is not complicated.
Lol, you think you can believe her words? She’s a Nazi, dear. The noises that come out of their mouths are wind. She’s just saying a less objectionable thing to popularize it, then she’ll take it a step farther, again and again and again.
She is so lost in her own transphobia, that she now hangs out and financially support people who are not only transphobic but openly homophobic, conservative, misogynistic and fascist, things i still believe she is against. But she is so blinded by hate that she is willing to ignore all those things to support transphobia
her problem seems to be with trans women in what should be safe spaces for women.
She claims that that is her problem, but her solution isn’t “let’s make sure that we harshly prosecute those who abuse the goodwill of other’s trusting in your own self identification to invade and attack women”, is “all trans women are really perverts trying to invade women spaces to attack women”
So, really, her problem seems to be with trans people existing at all…
Hitler’s problem with Jews seemed to be was what should be done about them destroying the German economy.
I’m not saying I agree with his views, but it seems all nuance has been lost from public debate.
Ah, at last. Godwin’s Law.
Believe it or not, “Godwin’s Law” doesn’t mean “no one should ever mention Hitler during a discussion.”
https://gizmodo.com/godwin-of-godwins-law-by-all-means-compare-these-shi-1797807646
Also, Rowling is a holocaust denier. https://www.salon.com/2024/03/15/jk-rowling-trans-nazis-holocaust-denial/
Should Hitler not be brought up when people defend a holocaust denier?
I know what it means. And, by all means, people can and should talk about Hitler and the Nazis in their historical context. WW2 was the defining conflict of the 20th century, after all. But you used it in the reductio ad Hitlerum sense. It’s just so boring to constantly see every Lemmy thread devolve into calling people Nazis or comparing them to Nazis, which is just the former with an extra step. It becomes meaningless after a while. So, when we are faced with an actual proto-fascist like Trump, the comparison has been exhausted and has little impact.
Not a reduction at all. The beginning of the Holocaust was when the Nazis destroyed the Institute for Sexual Research and burned all the books. I used Jews as an example rather than that because people were making the same “he’s keeping Germany safe” argument about Hitler persecuting the Jews that the person above is making about “they’re keeping women safe.” And I would not be at all surprised if they made the “they’re keeping women safe” argument about persecuting trans people then too.
It is encouraging genocide while defending someone who denied the Holocaust.
Why you think that is a reduction, I don’t know. It seems like a pretty close 1:1 comparison with Germany in 1933 to me.
Hitler didn’t start the death camps the second he came to power. You know that, right?
I have another one.
After enough time has passed since the initial conflict, it becomes less about the subject of the conflict and more about the conflict in itself. The reason becomes secondary and instead the goal becomes winning against the other side or at least making it hurt.
Yes I think you are right. And I think this is borderline a mental illness if you can’t stop lashing out. As I understand it, she somehow thinks by bashing trans women she is doing something good for women. Trans women are somehow taking away her womanhood or something like that. I have read something like this several times from Rowling but I have no clue how trans woman could do that. But Rowling is obsessed with that, for what ever reason.
Following this train of thought, what I gathered from other comments is that she had a bad experience with a man in the past, her targeted social media experience likely concentrated the bad news in that direction and her view is now that the trans movement is just evil men looking to invade women’s personal spaces in order to abuse them.
If you look at her as someone bombarded with Fox News type of content, then perhaps that kind of paranoia and fear is what makes her so vocal in her opposition.
Yeah. And it’s important to understand that the pipeline she followed does a swap. Once she became convinced trans women were the problem she began associating with men who are misogynists and support the harm to cis women that she fears. By the time she’s standing with Matt Walsh and funding groups that also oppose abortion access protecting cis women is no longer her primary concern, it may be what she thinks is her primary concern but if so she believes that trans women are a larger threat than those who oppose the right to choose to stop being pregnant or men who want to relegate cis women back to traditional gender roles.
“Strange bedfellows” comes to mind in this regard.
Repressed self hatred.
The whole projecting thing that people like this do.
Nah its the female equivalent of white knight syndrome. They think they’re saving womanhood from impostors.
No its straight up fascist misogyny bullshit.
They genuinely believe women are worse than men. So they invent a magical mystical quality to womanness that let’s them keep believing that, and live like they’re roughly equal with men at the same time
Trans people fuck all that shit up by forcing us to actually look at gender, putting all that shit in contact woth reality amd forcing us to really look at it, which invalidates their magical mystical shit they invented to call themselves feminists while still being archaic repressive misogynist pieces of shit who passionately hate women.
Flattening the territory until its as featureless as the map they drew.
Why not both, M’lud?
Operative word in your post is “irrational.” If she were being rational, she would probably shut up about it. She’s not either, unfortunately.
f I had some irrational hate for trans woman, I would not go on about it in public all the time.
Even when I was a homophobic theist shithead I knew better than to say anything.
OR, and hear me out, you could just not be a total asshole? Maybe have a baseline of tolerance and respect for the people who made you a billionaire? No? Then fuck right off and accept the consequences of your hatred.
It seems billionaires have really wacked out midlife crises. Instead of buying expensive cars and cheating on their partners, they come out as terfy nazis, build hate platforms, and crash companies. I mean to be fair, at this point the sample size is only two, JKKK Rowling and Musk, but it’s still surprising that it’d happen twice.
Bill Gates started a charity.
Steve Jobs killed himself because he thought he knew better than his doctors. Well, that’s wacked out too, but at least it’s not being a Nazi…
Bill gates didn’t start the charity as a midlife crisis.
It’s a tax dodge and a lot of other ways of protecting his money while also doing a little reputation washing/ morality banking
It’s a tax dodge
Have you ever worked with the Gates foundation? Because calling it a “tax dodge” like that is completely baseless, they’re a really reallyngood charity, like honestly one of the best in the world, and also that’s very ignorant of how taxes work.
Steve Jobs killed himself because he thought he knew better than his doctors. Well, that’s wacked out too, but at least it’s not being a Nazi…
Steve Jobs was always a piece of shit, and he had that diet well before he got cancer. But yeah the fact he continued to double down in the face of death shows how much of a narcissist he was.
These guys need to get on John McAfee’s level
John McAfee’s poop hammock is perhaps the best story about him.
For the uninitiated:
Have you seen the (censored) GoPro footage he released?
Oh you son of a…
I think a factor with some of them, probably both the ones you mentioned, is that they can’t handle criticism. So when they get any push back they double down. Then they get drawn into conservative nonsense that reinforces their beliefs. Then it’s a downward spiral as they get radicalized far beyond their original positions.
To be fair, you just described my mother to a tee. She’s a narcissist and has managed to alienate everyone from her life.
So you would like it to be enshrined in law that it is acceptable for whoever holds power to arrest people whom they believe to be assholes?
No, not even a little bit. There is a difference between being an asshole and committing a hate crime. Hate crime laws, when properly crafted and enforced, are an important component of a functional society. They can act as a deterrent, but they are also a way for those materially harmed by a hate crime to get justice. Free speech is never a universal right, anywhere in the world. There are always legitimate restrictions to ensure the public’s overall health and safety.
What is the difference?
No, not even a little bit. There is a difference between being an asshole and committing a hate crime.
I’m not sure there is a difference with this law.
Hate crime laws, when properly crafted and enforced, are an important component of a functional society.
I’m not sure that’s true. Freedom of speech is an important component, and sometimes that means tolerating distasteful speech.
They can act as a deterrent, but they are also a way for those materially harmed by a hate crime to get justice.
What constitutes harm though? The UK tends to include offense (or offence) as a harm.
Free speech is never a universal right, anywhere in the world. There are always legitimate restrictions to ensure the public’s overall health and safety.
Absolutely, but being offended by a bigot probably shouldn’t be criminal without some component of advocacy for violence.
A person commits an offence if they communicate material, or behave in a manner, “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive,” with the intention of stirring up hatred based on protected characteristics.
We don’t have to tolerate the intolerant, they refuse to abide by the mutual contract of tolerance so they don’t deserve the protections of a tolerant society.
JKR isn’t just doing a little bit of free speech she is a billionaire advocating for hate on a massive platform and donating to hate groups, she has influence and power. She is absolutely advocating for the restriction on trans peoples rights, that is violence. Especially in a time when anti trans hate is on the rise we should be even more skeptical of claims of free speech, right now across the world hate crimes against trans people are going up and our rights are being stripped away.
Arguments about free speech are just a way to ignore the issue and do nothing as transphobia continues to thrive and spread. Stop defending hate.
Until the intolerance of the intolerant is applied to not tolerate you… You see hate crime laws being used to defend religions from criticism for example.
Oh my what ever might that be like, having to deal with intolerance. I never have to deal with that nope. Nope it’s definitely not a daily occurrence for pretty much all trans people.
But the transphobes get to advocate for my erasure and that’s just free speech… yep makes sense… totally fair and balanced
What? I think you missed what I was saying. For example they could argue criticism of their religion is itself intolerant and should therefore be illegal.
Are you seriously arguing against hate crime laws??
You know it doesn’t work that way but spout nonsense anyway.
I’m utterly befuddled by this woman; somehow she hates the idea of trans women so much that she’s now closely allied with Posie Parker, a woman who hates women, hates suffrage, has advocated for the removal of women’s rights for years, and shares closely held opinions from just right of Goebbels.
Somehow Jo has become so utterly single-minded, she’s paired with the antithesis of all the other things she believes in (and still claims to believe as justification of her anti-trans nonsense).
It’s becoming harder and harder to be a Harry Potter fan nowaday.
I don’t really understand what it is about X Formerly Known as Twitter that turns previously respectable people into, well, this.
Everybody should take a break from social media once in a while, it’s better for your health.
It doesn’t turn these people, they were shitty all the time, they just get a platform on X so it becomes visible
Part of it is that having a large captive audience hanging on to your every word really starts to amplify toxic characteristics in those with the predisposition for shittiness. Like Musk or Trump, their descend only came when they became active on social media.
Twitter is a horrible thing.
Trump thought the day the Twin Towers fell was a good time to mention his property was closer to the tallest building in New York. That very evening, on the news, in 2001. Here’s a link.
I really dont think Rowling started off this shitty. From what I’ve heard it sounds like she has baggage regarding men she hasnt dealt with and its led her down this incredibly shitty path
The books have some really problematic themes that add up over time. If HP ended with the first book, they would be a curiosity, but they add up and JK had a really crooked world view when she wrote them. It’s likely her editor soften them in the beginning, but they had less control as they got more popular.
sorry to join the little dogpile, but its not X, those are her beliefs.
There are a LOT better books out there then childrens books about wizard school, which she absolutely lifted from Jill Murphy.
They were always awful. They just needed a platform where they could blossom into the terrible people they always were.
Yeah Rowling has been a notorious TERF for many years now.
Have you read the books as an adult? If that wont kill your fandom, I don’t think anything will.
I mean tbf, the books were written for children. If you don’t like them, then maybe it’s because they’re not for you anymore. Or are you referring to something else?
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Oh yeah it was definitely Twitter that made her a bigot. She was an upstanding and progressive citizen before a website made her bad! /s
That’s like saying “I don’t really understand what it is about alcohol that makes people racist”
If I remember correctly, it all started when she retweeted something that was a bit ignorant and was called out for it on Twitter, but then she kept doubling down until it got to this point, when she could have just stopped talking about it.
It’s not that Twitter suddenly turned her into a bad person, but it definitely brought out the worst in her.
No it just revealed her beliefs to a wider audience. Twitter like all social media doesn’t bring out anything - it’s just a lens that gives the viewer a perspective they might never have seen and these view are then amplified by others who share them. Rowling was always this person, social media just allowed her to share and amplify her views.
I possess the books and movies, and never interact with the fandom or the author. There is zero need to. Let the art exist in isolation.
NEXT POINT: the stories have their own issues regarding certain portrayals but that is aside from the context of “new developments” a la the author’s modern opinions on things outside the plot of the books.
I miss when my biggest problem with JK Rowling was her desire to keep writing new material for Harry Potter, but instead of ya know… making spinoff books, maybe do a TV Show, maybe get in touch with Archie at some point for an expanded universe comic: I mean God knows they need the money after Sonic went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back… oh right Warner Bros. owns the franchise… so I guess DC could have done the Expanded Universe comic?
No instead of doing any of that she just randomly dripped out plotpoints from the internet, and always stuff that made no fucking sense… like
“Dumbledore was gay the whole time, despite the fact that I NEVER HINTED AT THIS! Also Wizards don’t have toilets! They shit themselves and magic away the poop! By the way, Hermonie was always black despite the fact I always described her as being pale skinned!”
The “Dumbledore was gay” was especially infuriating because she wrote the “Fantastic Breasts” movies, and instead of expanding upon the Dumbledore’s gay thing at all, they just use the “They’re just really good friends!” cover, ya know, the one that’s an amazing progressive way to imply that without running afoul of the “Moral Majority”… in 1992…
But the medal ultimately goes to “Hermonie is black!”, because the only reason she came up with it was to try to better canonize the “Cursed Child” play… which wound up having a black actress play Hermonie.
Instead of doing the adult thing and admitting that most writers accepted by the mainstream are white, and therefore an overwhelming majority of characters in fiction are white, and that’s… kind of not good as it shows the bias we’ve given in favor of one specific group over all others, and that maybe in the future we’ll have more racially diverse character casts… but until then, because we have more white characters than white actors, sometimes white characters are going to be played by non-white actors, and even if that’s not how we typically envision the character… Get over it.
No instead of doing that, she just felt the need to make another fucking retcon and claimed she intended to have Hermonie be black the whole fucking time! I hope they fired the moron who cast Emma Watson for the role in the movie then… that talentless hack who knew nothing of the books… checks notes Joanne Kathleen Rowling
I’m sorry but it takes a special kind of narcissim to attempt to retcon, not just a fictional work, but reality itself!
That’s squarely in the realm of “doesn’t matter”.
The works are done, anything said after never happened
if you ever have a couple hours to spare, i think shaun made a really great video on this topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-1iaJWSwUZs
he talks about JK rowling and harry potter, and how many of JK rowlings beliefs/worldviews are embedded into harry potter. he’s very thorough.
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I don’t like Harry Potter to begin with, but I don’t really have a huge problem separating the artist from the art if the only thing they did was be hateful.
Roald Dahl was a major antisemite, but I still think he wrote great children’s books and suspense/horror stories. H. P. Lovecraft was bigoted about pretty much anyone who wasn’t a white man. Again, a really good writer.
Where is becomes hard to separate them is when they actually do something about their disgusting ideas. Roman Polanski and Woody Allen are pedophiles. I will never watch either of their movies. And I think both have made very good movies. I feel that I was wrong to watch the ones I did.
So yeah, Rowling is an utterly contemptible piece of shit, but if you like Harry Potter, it’s okay.
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There were always questionable elements from the books, like the depictions of goblins and elves. But knowing what we know now, these elements cannot be brushed off any more.
The Elves were directly based off of “Brownies”
It’s also highly unusual that elves were depicted this way, considering most fantasy stories hold them in high regard as being magical beings seeing themselves above humanity for reasons that are normally geniunely sound (Better moral compass, natural magical talents… Whereas in Harry Potter it’s the exact opposite, humanity seems to be the highest creature and Elves feel like to squabble before them…
There’s no way the “Brownie” similarity is unintentional
So what’s a Brownie? Well it was a way of explaining slaves to young children back in those days, to brush off the casual cruelty by lying to kids. Essentially the myth of the “Brownie” was to re contextualize the suffering of the black slave as a magical event, a beautiful mysterious thing to be observed not with horror, but with wonder. A big part of the myth claimed that you can’t give a Brownie anything nice like proper clothing, or else this “breaks the contract between Man and Fae” and they run back into the woods never to be seen again.
“No it’s okay children, they’re magical forest people called Brownies! And they LIKE doing that work for us! Oh and we can’t give them anything nice, or they’ll disappear forever! And you wouldn’t want that to happen! No no, really, they’re faeries, and they like being whipped like that!”
Feeling disgusted? Good, that sickness in your stomach is proof that you’re a better person than JK Rowling.
tl;dr Harry Potter elves are a resurrection of Pro-Slavery Propaganda used to indoctrinate children into thinking it’s okay to treat people like shit. They had to GASLIGHT LITERAL CHILDREN into thinking that black people were magical elves, in order to stop them from feeling bad about slavery… and JK decided to bring that back for her kid’s book.
As much fun as Hogwarts Legacy is, I hope she rots in hell and then is reborn as a transgender woman to learn basic empathy.
It’s also highly unusual that elves were depicted this way, considering most fantasy stories hold them in high regard as being magical beings seeing themselves above humanity for reasons that are normally geniunely sound (Better moral compass, natural magical talents… Whereas in Harry Potter it’s the exact opposite, humanity seems to be the highest creature and Elves feel like to squabble before them…
Have you never heard of Santa’s elves? Or Elves in Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’?
I’ve been meaning to read the latter, and we’re all aware of the former, but there’s a lot of conflicting legends of Santa’s Helpers
Well, there’s elves, then there’s Elves.
I think the mistake we make is thinking that people are better than they are. I probably have some hidden bigotry that I am unaware of right now but given a space to be exposed to it someone would notice and point it out. If you only know of someone from one thing they did you can form an opinion of them based on very limited information. Get to know them better and you find that hidden awful. Twitter is a tool of constant broad interaction and it preserves bad takes long enough to see them. Add a culture of never admiting to being wrong and filtering by who you agree with and you have a cycle of awful that turns perfectly boringly not great but OK people into monsters defending genocide. Maybe we shouldn’t know anything about the author, replace their name with a serial number or pseudonym and let the art stand on it’s own. Though the racist jewish, wait no goblin, bankers was fairly intense tbh.
While I am not defending Twitter by any means. I feel like what actually breaks people’s brains is becoming a billionaire. You lose all empathy for other humans.
Ironic: She tried to insert herself as Hermoine/McGonagall, but she really was Umbridge all along.
Who knewa serial plagiarist would be a shit person
Can you point me at where to learn about this? Not being snarky, I’m out of the loop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_disputes_over_the_Harry_Potter_series
There’s a lot of gray area in the whole Young Adult Fantasy Wizard space. Case in point:
In June 2009, the estate of Adrian Jacobs, a children’s author who died in 1997, sued Rowling’s publishers, Bloomsbury, for £500 million, accusing her of having plagiarised “substantial parts” of his work in writing the novel Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In a statement, Jacobs’s family claimed that a scene in Goblet of Fire was substantially similar to Jacobs’s book The Adventures of Willy the Wizard: Livid Land.
Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures
Is it possible that Rowling (or one of her ghostwriters) lifted passages from another Wizard Adventure novel with a similar theme of deadly puzzle games? Certainly. Is it possible that there’s simply some overlap in how a couple of authors with relatively limited creativity can compose a cliche of the genre? Also certainly.
There’s not any material evidence to suggest Rowling straight copypasta’d text from a prior copywritten work. But that would be devilishly hard to come by. As it stands, I’m open to the theory that Rowling’s writing team cut corners by pulling a bunch of low-circulation published works and mining them for ideas. But I have relatively little confidence in their ability to prove any of it.
Also Gaiman’s Books of Magic was a huge “influence” on her work.
Well, sure. But if we’re going to chase after every author who was influenced by Neil Gaiman, we’re burning down half the modern fantasy fiction produced in the last 30 years. If we rope in Anne Rice, I think we’ll get the other half.
It’s written in the stars.
If I had her money, I wouldn’t spend my time bullying people and starting fights with the police. She’s clearly insane in the most fundamental way.
The more I know about rich people, the less inclined I am to think that they’re usually well adjusted.
Hoarding is usually considered a mental illness, unless it’s money. Maybe we should consider that a problem too.
Why not start fights with police/government?
But strange enough, her insanity mostly damages others and has no negative impact on her life. How comes?
Money.
Correct
It’s not money, money makes you get out of situations easily, it doesn’t create the situations. And she is creating those situations in ways that don’t require insanity. They only require bad intentions.
Friendly reminder that Scotland’s freedom of speech laws are different from those in the US.
And the US laws should be more like Scotland’s. Hate speech is implicitly violent and should be treated as such.
