Fox and Owl and Drew
Four authors represented by JK Rowling’s literary agency have resigned after accusing the company of declining to issue a public statement of support for transgender rights.
Ouch. Four! Resigned! Will the agency even survive?
Fox Fisher, Drew Davies and Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir said they could no longer work with the Blair Partnership, the London-based agency that represents all aspects of the Harry Potter author’s work, because they were not convinced the company “supports our rights at all avenues”. One other author is understood to have also quit the agency but wishes to remain anonymous.
Who?
In a joint statement, Fisher, Davies and Jónsdóttir said that following Rowling’s recent intervention on transgender rights, they had asked the agency “to reaffirm their commitment to transgender rights and equality”.
“Intervention”? What intervention? She wrote some words. She didn’t intervene in anything. That’s a snide way of implying she was aggressive and “violent” because she wrote some words, words that were partly about her own experience with literal violence.
However, following private talks, they said: “We felt that they were unable to commit to any action that we thought was appropriate and meaningful.”
Oh the horror. They told their agency to do some things and their agency declined to obey. How dare the agency not jump when they said jump.
A spokeswoman said it would always champion diverse voices and believe in freedom of speech for all but it was not willing to have staff “re-educated” to meet the demands of a small group of clients.
Good. Note that the Guardian puts scare-quotes on “re-educated” but not on “intervention.”
The authors’ public resignations pose a challenge for the publishing industry, which has traditionally prioritised freedom of speech but is facing rebellions from staff and clients over the views of authors.
No they don’t. The public resignations of nobodies don’t pose a challenge for the publishing industry.
Earlier this month, it was reported that staff at Rowling’s publishing house, Hachette, were told they could not refuse to work on her new children’s book because they objected to her views on transgender rights.
See? Not a challenge. Just say no – or, indeed, fuck off.
The Blair Partnership – which was founded in 2011 with Rowling as its key client – represented about 80 individuals before the resignations, including the boxer Tyson Fury, the cyclist Chris Hoy, and the former Labour politician Tom Watson.
And now represents about 76 individuals after the resignations, and will continue to flourish. (Tom Watson was a friend of my beloved friend Maureen Brian, so I know he’s good people.)
Jónsdóttir, also known as Owl Fisher, said they were happy with the Blair Partnership on a professional level but had asked the agency to make a public declaration of support for transgender rights following Rowling’s comments. The co-author of the Trans Teen Survival Guide suggested the literary agency should conduct staff training with the group All About Trans but “these requests weren’t met positively by the management”.
Good. Excellent. If the agency had made such a statement it would have been joining the public bullying of Rowling as well as endorsing fatuous bullshit about Magic Gender, so it’s very good that they refused to do so, and to be re-educated.
The Blair Partnership said:
“We are disappointed by the decision that four clients have taken to part ways with the agency. To reiterate, we believe in freedom of speech for all; these clients have decided to leave because we did not meet their demands to be re-educated to their point of view. We respect their right to pursue what they feel is the correct course of action.”
Shorter: don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
What? What does that even mean? Apparently they’re not very good writers.
Owl Fisher apparently writes enbie activist literature, so I’m sure losing that market will be a tremendous blow to their bottom line.
It’s an astonishing sense of entitlement that their demands must be met or else. Or else what? We’ll walk. Bye-bye then. The lowest cunning would tell them that they weigh very low in the commercial balance compared to Rowling. I suppose they will now pose as martyrs, being done out of their jobs by a privileged woman.
Will the Hatchette workers now feel obliged to up the ante by walking out of their jobs because the publisher wouldn’t bow to their demands on not working on her book? The Hatchette heroes are now looking a little shabby compared to the Blair Partnership Brigade.
Two things.
1) That first bit sounds exactly like a Christian’s whinging. Like, almost verbatim.
2) Every queer person? How about woman, man, African, American, Australian, Austrian, Armenian, Argentinian, or Asian? How about nearly every person who has ever lived anywhere ever? This constant victim performance, the “woe is widdle me” pity-mining—it’s such a grating, clumsy sort of manipulation that I honestly don’t know how people get taken in by it.
Yes.
My experience of the Guardian, where I comment under another nom-de-blog, has been that they subject comments to their own in-house political censorship, all under the rubric of ‘moderation’, which I naively assumed originally was about ‘moderating’ the tenor of exchanges between commenters, which of course on certain topics can get heated.
At the Grauniad, your language can be as modest as you like, your demeanour pure sweetness and light, (as mine always is, no matter how dumb the contribution of any particular opinionated bastard I might be taking issue with) but if you are not politically correct in the eyes of their ‘moderator’, your comment can get the chop. ‘Tis a pity.
;-)
What a surprise. A commercial enterprise wouldn’t throw a multi-million dollar property under the bus to satisfy four people who probably can’t match combined the sales in one day of the multi-million dollar property. That’s the free market for you, friends.
Someone pointed out that Tyson Fury is also represented by this agency, has stated terrible views on homosexuality and abortion (he has) and nobody criticised the agency or demanded a policy statement or dropped it as a client for that.
Those abhorrent views are just fine, apparently, it’s only truly unforgivable statements such as “only women have periods” that are actual violence and require the purchase of a Pearlclutcher 2000(tm) to clean up the mess.
Naturally, of course, some people responded by criticising Rowling for using the same agency as Fury. Because that’s how everything works now.
Re #6, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but: Wow. That’s infuriating. I was going to call it hypocrisy, but it’s worse, because JKR has not done the things they accuse her of doing.
I suppose some of this is a desire to get one’s name in the media in a “safe” way by joining a pile-on.
And how many agencies haven’t represented men who have written terribly sexist things? If that pin hadn’t dropped at the same time, I’m sure we would have heard the protests.
But that’s what Rowling did. Support means nothing without the required kowtow.
New reader here.
I’m astonished at the difference in tone from your other posts to this one.
Yes you’re right, the authors who quit this publisher are the under dogs. And no, no one has to care about their feelings. But can you not line up this issue with many of the other social issues you write about and see that you fall on the opposite side of the fence on this one?
I’ll help:
“Oh the horror. They told their [president] to do some things and their [president] declined to obey. How dare the [president] not jump when they said jump.”
You’ll say it’s different because of reasons. But have you tried growing as a person to see trans equality as the next movement that you want to be seen as progressive regarding?
I didn’t say the authors who quit this publisher are the underdogs, so I’m not sure what you mean by saying I’m right, they are underdogs.
You mean because they’re not the big sellers Rowling is? Ok I guess that means they’re underdogs. But in other ways they’re not, and that’s part of the issue.
Yes, of course I can compare this issue to others I write about, and I have, and I disagree that I fall on the opposite side of the fence compared to my other positions. I don’t see men who call themselves women as subordinate to women, but rather the other way around. I think it’s the gender-huggers who have things backward, in thinking men are subordinated by women.
See, in order to agree with your take, I would have to agree that people can magically become the other sex (from the one they actually are) by the power of thought. I don’t believe that, and I think it’s absurd.
So yes, I do say it’s different because of reasons – real reasons, not just the imaginary ones you imply by putting it that way. Have you tried growing as a person to see feminism as the next movement that you want to be seen as progressive regarding?
Andy, I don’t think Ophelia “wants to be seen as progressive regarding” any movement.
I think she wants to examine issues and figure out what’s true and what isn’t. Justice isn’t a simple matter of jumping on a bandwagon because “your side” has embraced it.
I think you owe consistency to the arguments you make. That’s what I was trying to point out by quoting from up above, and with the reference to your past posts, as well as your commenters.
Swapping in a different social issue, say racism, and a different “villain”, say Trump, but your same snark and dismissiveness, then imagine that on an alt right blog. The author downplaying the racism and defending Trump. I think we’d agree they had learning to do, societal blinders to take off. I think you and I would say it was ridiculous and infuriating for them to treat the concerns of racism so lightly.
I guess I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, as I try to do with (ok I guess Mondegreen, above, says maybe you’re not progressive, so I’ll say “self described human rights advocates” as though they are very commonly centrist or conservative) self described human rights advocates, and assumed you would want to know if you’re oppressing someone.
The difference I see between us is I used to be where you’re at on this, so I can’t see you changing my mind back. Once we individually or collectively acknowledge the rights for a group of people, we don’t tend to regret that, do we? Like, very few people (greater than zero, though, unfortunately) think we should rescind voting rights for black female adults in the U.S.
That’s where I’m at after learning about, and getting to know personally, transgender individuals.
I’m feminist, too, and I hope you’ll realize as I did that that doesn’t get in the way of supporting trans folks in their struggle.
What is it that you’re substituting “racism” for though? I get that Trump=Rowling in your metaphor but what does racism =? What are the “concerns” you’re talking about? Don’t just use canned slogans and catchphrases; be specific.
Lady M does not say “maybe [I’m] not progressive,” she says my focus isn’t on how I’m seen. I am indeed a proponent of human rights, and I’ve written quite a lot about it.
You seem to think I oppose human rights for trans people? Of course I don’t. Trans people should absolutely have human rights.
You seem very confused.
I despise people who worry about being “seen as.”
People who were worried about being “seen as”, let gangs of rapists sexually enslave little girls in the North of England, because when the rapist is Muslim one has to worry about being called racist.
And this isn’t a knock on the Muslim community, the Catholic Church covered up child rapers for decades if not centuries, because it was worried that if word got out that they were basically a giant pedophile and money laundering ring their moral credibility would be undermined.
During all this time, they didn’t stop raping kids or embezzling money the Irish state gave them to run orphanages, they just covered it up because they were more worried about being “seen as” than actually doing anything about the abuse. The abuse you see, made them money.
Fuck the optics, reality matters, and reality requires that people are free to disagree. That’s what this all boils down to.
JK Rowling doesn’t agree with all of trans ideology, there are bits she disagrees with, there are bits she questions and because of that there is this tremendous pressure to shut her down.
Oh, but she’s rich and powerful, who cares? Well, its like this, if Rowling can be shut down, anybody can be shut down. If a publisher can be pressured to give up an author who nets them billions of dollars, what about all the critical authors who don’t?
A while back, I read a few Wild Cards stories, its a series of short stories curated by George RR Martin. One of the stories was about “Golden Boy” – a superhero during the setting’s version of the McCarthy trials.
The whole point of the story was how HUAC broke the titular character, and why did they break him? Because if they could break him, they could break anybody. Because he broke, nobody was safe from the witch hunts.
That is the case with Rowling. I personally don’t actually like the Harry Potter books, but I have to stand by her for the sake of all the good authors who might come along who don’t buy into what is a modern orthodoxy.
This isn’t even really about trans issues. This is the same issue that hit Amelie Wen Zhao, a native of Beijing who had the temerity to write a novel involving slavery in a non-western, non-racial context. You see to the “seen as” crowd, popularly known as the woke, not being racist pile of trash is less important than not being “seen as” a racist pile of trash.
So forcing their cultural lens onto writers who do not share that lens isn’t being colonialist bastards its tooting their virtue horn. She’s “anti black” because she was more influenced by the history of China, where she’s from, than Alabama.
And if they can toot that horn so loud Rowling falls, they’ll toot that horn at anybody over any perceived slight to their holy wokeness (provided the person has a vagina, you’ll be amazed at the shit you can get way with if you’ve got a penis) just to demonstrate that they can.
One doesn’t give bullies a pass because you think they’re “punching up” – there are a lot of much smaller people who get flattened if Rowling falls.
Andy, it is impossible to have consistent views on every issue simply because they are different issues. You have used one of the most dishonest of rhetorical devices with your ‘substitute trans for black people and see how it looks’ bullshit. There is only one way of honestly conflating transgender and race: men were born male, women were born female, black people were born black, white people were born white and no amount of ‘identifying as’ or ‘being one’s authentic self’ can change those realities.
It is only the TRAs (and not-to-be forgotten allies’ who are demanding rights that others don’t have, or demanding rights that take away from the rights of others, and it’s that same group that is demanding that society in general must accept a lie: the lie that any individual can choose what sex they are (which is a different concept to how one expresses one’s gender identity).
There are blogs out there whose owners and commenters accept your argument as sound: this ain’t one of them. Sorry.
[…] a comment by Bruce Gorton on Fox and Owl and […]
No, I didn’t say that.
Do you realize that it is possible to examine claims popular with your own political side? To question your own beliefs?
And has it occurred to you that it’s possible that acknowledging sex and refusing to define “woman” as a “gender identity” is not actually incompatible with believing in the human rights of trans people?