“DIRT BAG”

Oh goody – another man on a site purportedly for women, raging about a woman who writes something he dislikes.

Remember went J.K. Rowling went fully mask off about her transphobia in June, publishing an essay on her personal website about how she thinks trans women pose a threat to cis women’s personal safety? And how she, the second-highest paid author in the world worth at least $670 million, feels “police[d]” by trans randos on Twitter who don’t like her tweets (and all while failing to mention the concurrent worldwide uprising against the actual police that was just getting started at the time, to boot)? I know! Truly bananas! If I were a multimillionaire who hated trans women, I would simply go be rich and transmisogynistic in my Scrooge McDuck-style money vault in peace. The derangement! Unhinged!

But he’s not, he’s a trans woman who hates women, and does it noisily at Jezebel. Harron Walker, he calls himself, and there’s a nice little thing next to his byline where it says “Filed to: DIRT BAG” with a more arrow, under which it lists JK Rowling, Mariah Carey, and the target of his current rage, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Isn’t that cute? Isn’t it winsome? If he didn’t identify as a woman he probably wouldn’t do that, but he does identify as a woman, so I guess calling women he disagrees with “DIRT BAG” is fine. In other words same old same old: trans activism is the new misogyny.

What’s his problem?

Well, at least one person thought the Harry Potter lady’s essay was good: novelist and writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of Half of a Yellow SunAmericanah, and, probably most notably slash perhaps most ironically now, We Should All Be Feminists. In a new interview with The Guardian, Adichie refers to Rowling’s screed as “a perfectly reasonable piece,” calling its author “a woman who is progressive, who clearly stands for and believes in diversity.”

I don’t think feminism needs men like Harron Walker pontificating about the feminism of women like Adichie or Rowling, much less calling them DIRT BAG and sneering at the “irony” of their feminism.

Adichie’s comments are disappointing, obviously, but they’re not exactly surprising. Three years ago, the author faced deserved criticism for saying that she finds the idea that trans women are women “difficult” to accept, countering that “trans women are trans women” and that “gender is not biology.” Hemming and hawing over this for years on end is so mind-numbingly dull. Just call me a dude and let us both get on with our days!

You’re a dude – and a foul-mouthed woman-hating dude at that.

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