Oooh she follows a wrongthinkist
More finger-pointing hissing venomous garbage from Pink News:
The Harry Potter author JK Rowling has been heavily criticised for following the “self-professed transphobe” YouTuber Magdalen Berns on Twitter.
Berns has uploaded numerous anti-trans videos to YouTube with titles including, “There is no such thing as a lesbian with a penis,” “Gender is NOT a social construct,” and “Non binary bullshit.”
Berns has also called for people to stop using the term TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist), saying it is an attack on free speech.
Berns is a hero. You regular readers here got to know about her well before her videos made her famous. I wrote about her back in October 2015 when she was running in an Edinburgh University Student Association election and people were calling her “whorephobic” for the usual backassward reason. We chatted a lot; I think she’s brilliant. These days she’s dealing with a lethal brain tumor, so Pink News could have decided not to throw any mud on her, but no, of course not, it wouldn’t do to miss a chance to try to punish her some more.
Rowling’s following of the account was discovered by pro-transgender account Trans Advocate, who tweeted a screenshot and noted that Rowling had followed Berns during Pride month.
“Discovered” – as if it were a Mayan temple or how to cure brain tumors. Congratulations to Trans Advocate for searching out who follows whom in order to summon wrongdoers before the Inquisition.
The discovery was met with disappointment from many of Rowling’s fans, who say they cannot support the Harry Potter franchise if she shares Berns’ stance on transgender people.
I don’t think she’ll be giving any refunds.
PinkNews reached out to Rowling’s representatives for comment, and were told: “J.K. Rowling won’t be commenting. However, we know she follows on Twitter a wide range of people she finds interesting or thought-provoking.”
So fuck off and mind your own business you creepy little wannabe cops.
How utterly ridiculous to assume that following someone on Twitter automatically means support or agreement.
Goddamn thought police.
She’s also a billionaire I think? Don’t really think she needs support…
Rowling is a billionaire, yes, but she is the one being accused of doing the supporting, not receiving support.
Sackbut, I think BKiSA is referring to this:
not to your comment above.
Brain tumors. Berns. :(
I don’t think I was ‘here’ in 2015, so I wasn’t aware of Berns until I ‘bumped into’ her videos on Utube. Brilliant young woman laid low because of an awful, awful disease. PN should be ashamed of themselves.
Didn’t Greta Christina make a totally self-blind post about not stalking people’s likes and follows to discover and make assumptions about people’s associations…? If only they’d follow it!
@Holms:
Was that before or after she went on a blocking spree targeting everyone who supported that troublesome Benson woman?
Latsot, if iirc it was before. Apparently it’s ok to do to others as you do not wish done to yourself.
I think Rowling used to be a billionaire. I thought I read last year that she had given away enough of her fortune to fall off the “richest people” list.
Yes, maddog, I remember reading something about that too. I think her wealth then was estimated at about £600m, so she still has a bob or two.
It was after the Great Shunnening which saw Benson leave, and during the next Great Shunnening of… whoever the next wrongthinker was.
I kinda hope they call for a Harry Potter boycott because that would go over so well (ya know like the proverbial lead balloon), and it might be what exposes their nonsense to the masses.
NB: To anyone who regards this as “terf-y”, I fully support all the same human rights for trans-people as every other human deserves, no less, and no more.
P.S. I haven’t read a single book nor have I (deliberately) seen a single frame from any of the movies, but if such a boycott is called for I’ll consider buying and donating books.
J K Rowling really pisses off the right people – Scottish nationalists; Corbynistas; now trans activists. God, these members of the Committee for Public Safety, what miserable curtain twitchers they are.
I read the first two Harry Potter books at an airport once because the plane was delayed for about a day and I apparently didn’t hate the situation and myself enough without making everything significantly worse.
They were – as far as I could tell – identical in every single respect. I should have just read the same one twice. From what I understand, the rest of the books are just the same. New teacher turns out to be evil, old teacher is suspected of evil and isn’t despite all previous exoneration.Or something like that. Evil teachers are encouraged in schools, health and safety is a nightmare. And religious types all over the world were outraged because one of the teachers might have been gay, Right.
This led me to a dislike of Rowling. I was especially enraged when she talked about breaking down in floods of tears when she killed off one of her own characters. Well….. just cross it out then, you idiot, I thought.
But I was wrong about her, I think. She seems nice.
If TRAs don’t like Rowling, then by TRA logic, they are exactly like right-wing, Christian bigots, who also dislike Rowling.
I read some of the first HP when it was still the only HP, and I disliked it a lot, so I didn’t read any more. I read a later non-HP novel and found the…what to call it, the mental world repellent. I don’t admire her as a writer at all, but as a person she seems decent.
(When I say disliked I don’t mean I just found it not good, I disliked the mental world, especially the stupid “this house is for the evil kids, this house is for the good kids” framework. I also disliked the contempt for Muggles – it was much too like contempt for other classes or races or nationalities – too Trumpish before Trump was center stage. That dislike is not a million miles from these buffoons hissing “terrrrrrf” but it is at least based on more than “she followed this one unapproved person on Twitter.”)
Yeah, you want to read a school for wizards book you go to Ursula Le Guin.
You’re right about that sorting business, it’s awful. And then there’s the decidedly middle-class mistreatment of the randomly anointed golden child. Oh, he had to sleep in a small bedroom, did he? How fucking terrible. And of course the racially abused – what are they called? mudbloods? – turn out to be brilliant if annoying anyway, so… that’s…. grand…?
I dislike Rowling’s writing intensely but despite that she seems to be kind of decent. She’s pissed off several awful people, which goes a fairly long way with me.
Or you read T. H. White, despite a strong thread of misogyny. Merlin and the owl and Wart’s adventures as a goose, a pike, and other animals make up for it.
The first two HP books are very, very obviously for quite young children. The third book on, the series starts exploring some deeper themes and shows that the unpleasant aspects of the world aren’t just taken as read by everyone. The high water mark is the fourth book, I think, though the subsequent three are still very good and quite on the ‘adult’ side of Young Adult.
Either way, though, Rowling doesn’t deserve to be shunned for following some rando on Twitter.
But very very young children too shouldn’t be taught that people are either Good or Bad and should be sorted into living spaces accordingly, or that it’s good to feel broad contempt for people if they’re in some Bad category like Muggles. And weren’t the Muggle family also described as physically unattractive and thus all the more contemptible?
I never made it through more than one chapter of HP. I was subjected to that at a family gathering where my brother-in-law was reading it out loud to his children. I thought it was boring.
That stuff you talk about – the sorting, the xenophobia, etc – would likely go unnoticed by too many people. That’s partially because we give that stuff to kids to read, so they grow up thinking it’s normal.
I prefer Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches for very young children.
Harry Potter is a hero and to be admired!
Why? Well, his magical abilities are unremarkable. He’s not an especially good student. He assumes the worst of his friends at every opportunity and treats them quite badly as a result without ever really apologising. He and his friends are members of the most privileged class possible who live a literally charmed life and don’t seem to care about bad things that happen to other people such as, oh I don’t know, wars, which the magical community could stop with the waving of a stick. Having to sleep in a small room and a teacher not liking him is the most terrible thing that could happen to anyone. Good job he has a vault full of magic gold, I guess, and all the the good people and some of the bad people are on his side.
I don’t have heroes any more but I pay attention to people who try to go to sleep every night having helped someone or something. I wish that included me.
Terry Pratchett was one gagillian times better at writing books for and about children. His Tiffany Aching books were his best work, I think, brilliant as much of his other stuff was. They were the opposite of patronising and one unholy fuck closer to empowering for children and especially girls, I think.
I loved the books, all of them, some more than others.
The houses were not good versus bad. A key point in the books is that people are complicated, not always easily tagged. Harry Potter himself would have been put in Slytherin were he not simply opposed to it. Many characters who appear evil early on in the story become heroic later on.
Muggles were only hated by the bigoted magic people. There were others who disagreed. There were as many rifts within the society on social justice issues as there are in the real world.
It’s a rich and nuanced story. I agree with Seth that this largely came out as the story expanded significantly in the later books.
I was little. Even then, they bored me. I think I read five? Maybe six? I couldn’t be arsed to finish the series when it ended in my teens. Friends admonished me.
I didn’t take issue with the content so much as found I just didn’t care about any of it. Rowling’s writing isn’t engaging to me.
Sackbut, apparently we read different books with the same title.
The weird, magical hat sorts people into houses. Who asked it to? The one and only person it has a bit of an issue with is Harry because….why? Nobody says. It certainly isn’t because people are complicated, it’s because…well, I have no idea why, it isn’t even necessary for the plot. It’s absolutely certain about everyone else who isn’t the Mary Sue.
But the story certainly doesn’t present the message that people are complicated. Everyone in that one house is bad. Everyone in another is brave, or clever, or whatever the fuck it is. The various people in charge – who are explicitly portrayed as either good or evil – are pleased at the various decisions made by the hat. If there really were good or evil people, you’d think responsible teachers would mix them up a bit rather than reinforcing those tendencies. That is *not* nuance, it’s crappy, formulaic writing.
People who had non-wizards for parents were discriminated against, especially by the people you say weren’t evil. This prejudice and bullying was endorsed and even encouraged by the teachers. Sometimes murderously so and nobody seemed to care. If that’s nuance, it’s so nuanced that it’s way beyond me.
There were no “rifts on social justice” that I could see. The “good” people were good and the “bad” people were bad. They were sorted so and they played their roles admirably.
I think you’re reading things into the books that simply were not there.
latsot,
That’s probably a fair critique of the first two books, but things get more complicated in later books. (And even in the first two books, it’s not clear whether Snape is meant to be a hero or a villain. And Dumbledore, for example, ends up being a much more complicated and morally complex character than you might expect from the first few books.)
I’m not fond of Rowling the writer, but her overall story isn’t as simple as you make it.
But the first books are presumably the first ones most people read. It’s a bit late to decide to be more morally nuanced 3 or 4 books in.
Come to think of it…I wonder if that explains some of the fanaticism of current trans activism…I wonder if most young adults grew up on that awful moral sorting mechanism and thought it reflected reality.
latsot,
I appreciate that you didn’t like the first two books, or the first book, or the first paragraph of the first book, whichever it was. There are books I don’t like, certainly, and authors I don’t like, despite their popularity or acclaim by people whose views I respect.
I take exception to being told I read things into the books that aren’t there. Excuse me? I read the books. It’s there. You didn’t see it, particularly in the small portion you read, and that’s fine, but please don’t assume I’m making up content of books you haven’t read.
Harry Potter is not to everyone’s liking, I get that.
I read Cixin Liu’s trilogy Rembrance of Earth’s Past, loved it (indeed, some of the best SF I’ve read), and recommended it to a friend. A friend of his complained that he gave up partway through the first book. It, too, wasn’t for everyone. I’m glad he didn’t try to convince me how lousy the trilogy was based on his limited knowledge of it.
Ophelia,
No argument there. I was just reacting to latsot’s dismissal of Sackbut’s claims, despite the fact that he’s admitted to only having read two of the seven books.
@Sackbut:
Please don’t take offense, none was meant. It appears *to me* that you read more into the books than I found in them, that’s all. It’s just an opinion and I’m assuming nothing about you, really.
I’m not offended, just surprised. Thanks for the clarification.
I’m wondering why this comment thread seems to be about two totally different sets of books. I’m with Sackbut; there is a lot in the books which seems to have been missed by some readers, and I’m left wondering if the US editions were abridged (as well as having been given a different title). The films were a very short précis of the books and omitted even more of the stories.
A lot of what was in the books only had to be referred to obliquely, because she was writing for a British audience who would understand the culture described in the books. A cupboard under the stairs isn’t a small bedroom – it is a tiny triangular space, big enough for some small household appliances and some wellies and nowhere near big enough to stand up in. Literally no-one would actually put a child in one, especially not to sleep.
I do understand the cultural references passing some people by; I have a lot of friends in the US, and they love books which I find baffling and shallow, probably because I am missing the cultural context which the authors only have to hint at for their target audiences.
tigger, latsot isn’t in the US, he’s part of that British audience Rowling wrote for. Sackbut on the other hand is. I don’t think it’s a UK/US divide.
And everybody knows a cupboard under the stairs isn’t a small room! We have cupboards under the stairs here too, honest. It’s generally a mistake to read latsot too literally.
As for me…I grew up on Mary Poppins and Winnie the Pooh; later I loved Arthur Ransome; I probably read more British than American fiction to this day. I disliked the little I read of HP not because I was puzzled by the references but because I thought it was morally simplistic and prone to hating outsiders, plus not well written.
I’m certainly prepared to admit that I might have missed nuance in those books, I’ve missed nuance all over the place in the past. I’ve also been enchanted by stories or worlds created by an author and later realised that I’ve defended them against reasonable criticism without really having a leg to stand on exactly because I really enjoyed immersing myself in those worlds.
I’m not suggesting anyone in particular here lacks critical judgement (although I can see why my previous post looked like I did). I’m saying we all do.
I really didn’t see any nuance in the Potterverse I’ve looked at. I didn’t really buy the superlatives from the media, glorifying the idea that “at least kids are reading *something* now” as if they already weren’t. And I still roll my eyes at the particularly cartoonish bullying that some characters received in the first books.
I’m aware of cupboards under stairs and I’m hardly alone in having had to sleep in worse places in fear and discomfort. And having almost all the other children at my school and some of the teachers making life as much of a living hell as my family did at home.
I don’t see any nuance in the bullying of Harry Potter. It’s a cartoon.
So with the best will in the world i suspect that the much-vaunted nuance is an artifact of enjoying the world. Which we all do.
I used to follow some of the Potter fan sites. There are some extreme examples of reading into the story; all kinds of analysis and extrapolation. It’s fun, I’m sure, and it gets used by people to show how incredibly deep the Potter story is. I think it is largely nonsense.
I do, however, think the books have more depth than is being claimed here. The treatment of prisoners, the welfare of house elves, relationships with Muggles, sacrifice for the greater good, the ambiguity of loyalty, how people can be multifaceted, these are some of the topics touched on in the series. Most particularly in the last book, which was possibly more complex than all the preceding six, in an effort to tie up a lot of loose ends. It’s a dark story, getting darker as the series goes on.
I don’t think it’s great literature, but it’s good, and I agree with those who think it’s wonderful to have actual full-length novels that engage kids. My kids grew up on Harry Potter; we pre-ordered most of the books, even went to a nighttime release event once. I would read the book within 36 hours of receiving it, but sometimes my ex insisted on buying two copies of the book to allow for simultaneous reading. Is Potter better than Goosebumps or The Babysitters Club? I don’t know, but I’d venture a yes, and those, too, are fine for kids to read.
OK, Sackbut. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t enjoy the books or that they are of no use in encouraging children to read.
The same could be said in my generation of Enid Blyton. Great stories, lots of adventure and derring do, but horribly sexist and racist.
We can still enjoy the stories, we can look at them as nostalgia and we can criticise them for being absolutely fucked up.
Which is my point.