Change your tone
Philip Pullman really is very entitled.
I guess “change our tone” in the sense of saying he’s got it all right instead of wrong? But he has got it all wrong. Despite being perfect and a sage and a magus and so on, he has got it all wrong. I know that’s hard to believe, when it’s women saying so, but there it is.
I’m not saying it’s shrill.
I guess he wants people to stop complimenting his books. Which actually makes sense, as the quality of his fiction has no relevance to the matters of sex and gender.
Remember when tone policing was considered a crime by the Horde? I seem to recall that if you were righteously angry at someone you could swear, cuss and abuse all you liked and it was egregious thing to do to object as to tone. The strongest users of “don’t you dare tone police me” were those commentators who now form the core of the FTB commentariat.
I’ve never read any of Pullman’s books so I won’t blow smoke up his arse. He’s tried fence sitting and now he’s pretending to be the victim because people who are being harmed have pointed out that he’s wrong, and for shitty reasons. And Phillip, if by any chance you read this comment, no you can’t respectfully ask me to do anything you cowardly tone policing ass.
Who is this dude? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sorry, never heard of him and too lazy to google. :P
Pullman is an author. I like his work, and am eagerly awaiting the final volume of his Book of Dust trilogy after the second volume ended on an excruciating cliffhanger.
I suspect Pullman is like a lot of people who don’t quite see the issues with trans ideology quite yet. The magic words sound kind and reasonable, nobody wants to be phobic, can’t I just express support for someone who’s been attacked without examining the issue closely? People rightly don’t accept that, and raise issues and ask questions, and, rather than think, he complains he’s being unfairly characterized or the “tone” is wrong. It’s just so much easier to say the magic words TWAW TMAM, why isn’t that OK, who could possibly object?
I don’t think it can be quite as simple as “The magic words sound kind and reasonable” though, because no one would just wave them through with no idea what the referent is. “Just be kind to murderers” – well wait a minute.
Ophelia: right, and it’s always the case, isn’t it? Gender bullshit gets special treatment (NO DEBATE!) in every single case. So much that it has just become a background assumption.
Pullman is just doing what virtually everyone else with a blue tick or a hint of celebrity is doing: sitting on the fence leaning waaaaaaayyyy over into the gender camp, but clenching on with all force so they can ease their way slowly back over to the other side when all this nonsense calms down and some sense temporarily returns.
He knows gender bullshit is bullshit. He knows he has to say it isn’t if he wants to sell books. He probably knows that people are being harmed because of the bullshit and either doesn’t care, cares in principle but not enough to cause him to jeopardise his income, or doesn’t quite understand the harms, despite his claims to be the Wisest Sage Of All. Most likely, it’s a patchwork of all of them.
And it’s fucking shameful.
All the religious zealots in His Dark Materials disapproved of Lyra’s “tone”. They thought she was a disrespectful snotty lying brat, but off she went anyway and saved all of humanity from the prison of the afterlife because she damn well knew right from wrong.
Also, I don’t suppose Pullman would prefer it if people were “reasoning” with him in the same tone that the TRAs are using to “reason” with JK Rowling.