Oh no, not critical and sarcastic!
BBC dutifully repeats that JK Rowling is bad awful horrible outrageous and above all of course transphobic.
The presenter tells us, in full BBC RP smug confident style:
…and now with a series of pretty explosive social media posts campaigner and provocateur on free speech. In response to the Hate Crime and Public Order Act coming into force in Scotland yesterday Ms Rowling posted critical and sarcastic comments about ten transgender women, rounding off her series with the remark “The people aren’t women at all but men every last one of them.” She ended by saying “Arrest me, Hate Crime Act Scotland.” As culture war interventions go, this was no holds barred.
Easy for him, isn’t it, just as it’s easy for Jolyon Maugham and Owen Jones and all the rest of them. Not their problem. No threat to their rights. How dare all these stupid bitches try to hang on to their hard-won rights! Gather ’round to sneer and frown at the bad woman with her culture war intervention. Meanwhile let’s ask a man what he thinks about it. Let’s ask the very cool Katie Neeves.
Male voice:
I thought ‘Oh I’m gunna get a ton of hate now,’ and sure enough that’s exactly what happened, and that’s exactly what she wanted to happen –
And it’s exactly what “Katie” wanted to happen too. It’s what they live for, this fake martyrdom.
Presenter asks him if he thinks Rowling committed hate crime.
Yes, I do actually, and she’s definitely inciting it – she knows she’s pushing the boundaries, and that’s why she made it very clear that she wasn’t in the country when she did it.
Yes, she is pushing the boundaries: the boundaries that men like “Katie” Neeves have set up to prevent women from talking about women’s rights as opposed to the rights of men in skirts.
She doesn’t do it for the hell of it, or to shock prissy BBC presenters, or to annoy guys like “Katie” Neeves. She does it because the brainless ideology that says men are women if they say they are is a locomotive running over women’s rights.
Maybe my expectations have been beaten to the floor, but I call the appearance of the above quote progress. Reporting Rowling’s actual words rather than just saying that she wrote something “transphobic” (which they’ve done in the past) allows millions of people to get her message. This lets them see just how ridiculous the Hate Monster law is. And her deliberate, direct violation of the law gets more people to question and oppose it.
Guardian: JK Rowling will not be arrested under new Scottish hate law, say police
They say:
But the article also says:
But someone from Stonewall says:
Hey, now, there is a really huge difference between violence and derogatory comments. Is it or is it not a hate crime, under this law, to say something bad about someone, when the speech contains no threats and no violence has been committed?
Hey, great, then maybe your lot can stop calling statements of fact “transphobic.”
As for trivializing violence, trans activism has done more of that than anyone else, calling misgendering “actual violence,” accusing critics of inspiring murderers and encouraging suicide. Anyone defending women’s rights is really only interested in harming trans people, and that Rowing and other high profile opponents of trans incursions into women’s spaces are fomenting “trans genocide.” Holocaust envy is not a good look. The continued, strained portrayal of one of the very safest demographics as being on the very cusp of extermination at the hands of children’s authors, television comedy writers, and sportswomen is beyond parody. There’s so little “very real violence” against the trans “community” that you feel compelled to inflate the mildest resistance and criticism (and limericks, and ribbons, and stickers…) into unspeakable expressions of hatred and bigotry. In fact there’s a good deal more violence (and intimidation, and bullying, and no-platforming…) coming from your “community” and its “allies” and supporters than is going in the other direction. Your side seldom condemns any of this, but more often lauds and encourages it as “defence” of a “marginalized community.” So yes, I’m all for ending the trivialization of violence. All I have to say is after you.
Not to mention, not Bruce, they are trivializing slavery, terrorism, and the treatment of women in other countries by calling themselves the most marginalized. Their refusal to acknowledge that only women menstruate is trivializing the very real risk of women who are isolated in dangerous conditions every month. Their use of “menstruators” “vagina havers” “front holes” is trivializing the ‘lived experience’ of real life women who have suffered from the dangers and oppressions inherent in being a woman.
My personal opinion is that we should marginalize them; allow them their fetishes, sure, as long as they don’t hurt anyone, but reduce their political influence down to nothing more than anyone else…they get to vote, contribute, etc, but they can’t dictate policy.
For now, at least, this thread by JK Rowling is preserved here.
I note that throughout much of it she uses the literary device of irony: she speaks for a clued-up audience who will understand not to take everything she says at face value. This would, I think, make it quite difficult for the police and the courts to nail her for so-called ‘hate speech’. How do you prove that what is meant is not what is actually said?
The only statement to which she commits herself unequivocally is that all of them are men, “every last one of them”, and that cannot be challenged. It is only a few weeks since Willoughby reported her to the police for ‘misgendering’ and was told that this ‘did not “meet the criminal threshold”‘.
Thanks for posting the link to the full thread, NightCrow! I hadn’t seen it, and Willoughby’s response calling everyone else on the list a sex offender is the icing on the cake. I wonder if he’s been reported yet.