So I was was reading my daily email from Digg wherein they round up and link to the previous day's most up-voted articles shared on their site just now when I noticed that this article authored by Jessie Earl for Game Spot appeared among them. It's called "JK Rowling's Anti-Transgender Stance and Hogwarts Legacy".
Yep, it's back! Though Rowling had nothing to do with the game's development, nevertheless now that a new Harry Potter video game is being released, it's time for a revival of the "J.K. Rowling is a terf bigot" mantra and question amongst the gaming public. (To these ends, I thought about naming this thread something more sarcastic like "Harry Potter and the Half-Wit Libs", "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Stupid", or "Harry Potter and the Order of the Dumbshits", but narrowly resisted the temptation in favor of a more literal description of this thread's simple content so as to avoid being accused of click-baiting people.) I find it difficult to get very far into pretentious hit pieces like this because...well let me just illustrate the matter for you real quick by example. Early on, Earl writes that...
...and then, literally the very next sentence is...
Critiques of J.K. Rowling's feminist approach to gender identity politics always look like this. The above sentence to me sounds sort of like saying "XYZ's words have garnered them the support of women, who are sometimes known as cunts or hos", yet I am expected to not only take this opinion seriously, but to consider it a professional statement of objective fact, apparently, and not just a lame, melodramatic political hit piece. Yes, I instantly come to the conclusion that I am indeed being told how to feel about the issue in question, and in kind of a demeaning way that drains me of motivation to proceed. I therefore opt to simply skim the rest and find that later on the article helpfully embeds a video with the title "EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TERFS" printed in gigantic, all-caps lettering. I click the X button at the top of the tab, then start writing this thread because I already know what the rest says. My point being that this is an excellent example of how NOT to communicate with your critics. Maybe someone with more pain tolerance than me would bother reading the rest in detail, but I feel like I've heard all the arguments already and am not a masochist.
"Terf" is the main and most common descriptor that gender ideologists use to describe the critics of their program, as if they were not only all women, but also composed entirely of "radical feminists" specifically, and furthermore of a bent to cause trans-identified people harm. Earl's hit piece in fact describes Rowling's supporters, such persons, as "a small but vocal movement", as if to posit that opinions like his are broadly popular and are questioned only by a tiny, bigoted fringe. I just wanted to take a brief moment to clarify today that the "terfs" being referenced here are, in reality, most of the U.S. public! According to the most recent survey results, for example:
-56% of Americans lean toward the view that "whether someone is a man or a woman is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth".
-75% of Americans believe that "there are only two genders", i.e. that there is no such thing as being "non-binary" or "queer-gendered".
-Most Americans are against allowing men transwomen to compete in women's athletics and also believe schools should be required to inform parents if their child requests to go by different pronouns in school, while just 27 and 28% disagree with those respective positions. Wonder why!
-Just 28% think parents should be allowed to provide their children with puberty-blocking drugs, while 49% think the practice should be outlawed. So, in other words, yeah people are more inclined than not to believe there is something abusive about the practice.
(Most of this data can be found at on pages 246 through 257 at the first link above and the rest can be found at the second link.)
In other words, the American public ain't half as woke about this shit as Earl portrays and doesn't generally buy into the concept of gender identity at all, let alone support the corresponding policy agenda. However, the Economist/YouGov survey does find that, nevertheless, the public does balk though at the idea of schools banning books featuring transgender characters. Censorship ain't something most people support. That's really the only notable caveat there is to public opinion on these matters here though.
J.K. Rowling's personal take on these matters is, in fact, more liberal-minded than that of the average American. Her highly-publicized essay on the subject of gender identity and her gender critical feminism expressly states her personal belief that gender identity is, in fact, a real thing, for example, whereas your average person in this country, as you can see here, is inclined to disagree. She accedes to trans-identified people's preferred pronouns and all that, but insists on an acknowledgment that people's biological sex is relevant to public life and that the basic integrity of women's sex-based rights and spaces be maintained and respected. In other words, she views trans rights and women's rights as compatible, not mutually opposing forces. It's her opponents who seem to disagree.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 20 March 2022