A Rant on Rowling

JK Rowling is a billionaire and a very powerful, mature, white woman and I don’t feel the need to spend much time feeling sorry for her because she felt unhappy in her skin as a child, was once in an abusive marriage, and like many women, suffered a sexual assault. But I do applaud her decision to write about something private and painful in order to speak up for and to women – as a sex – as a time when the very concept of woman as a sex is under attack.

 

There’s probably an army of people who advise Jo Rowling because JK Rowling is not just a woman, she’s a huge brand; she doesn’t just make a lot of money for herself – she makes a lot of money for a lot of other people who will have a vested interest  in protecting the JKR brand and who will have weighed up the advantages and disadvantages  of publishing this essay, at this point in time.

 

Some people have questioned the timing of it – how sensitive was it for a white billionaire celebrity with a massive social media presence to say #MeToo in the midst of one of the most passionate outpourings of outrage over systemic racism and police violence that the western world has seen in a very long time.

 

Maybe the initial toe dipping tweets about the sex versus gender identity debate were her own decision, as maybe her anti-Corbyn tweets prior to the last UK election were also her own decision, but I suspect this essay and maybe even the timing of it were calculated – and I suspect she and her advisors think the gender identity tide is turning.

 

A lot of women who feel like the fight against the gender identity tide has taken over their lives are euphoric because such a massive celebrity has come out in support of them.

 

People who are on the political right who once thought JKR was “too liberal by far”, have elevated her to virtual sainthood, while liberals who once worshipped her as a genius and lauded her liberality now declare her to be a fascist and a literal killer of trans people. 

 

Many of those who now cast JK Rowling as the devil incarnate, once idolised her and those who grew up with her books now call for them to be burned or banned. Some have set to and constructed partial, one-sided, inaccurate analyses of her argument, accusing her of being partial, one-sided and inaccurate, and/or a coloniser. 

 

Others are combing her works for examples of other forms of wrong-think, and some are hurling insults that are threatening and often - in an irony seemingly lost on many of the would-be-woke brigade - crudely phallocentric and viciously misogynistic. The latter approach is especially popular among the less articulate of the misogynists and the many types of troll that are busy obfuscating the issues and fomenting divisions.

 

People who would claim to unequivocally support the #MeToo movement and deplore violence against women have declared Rowling’s disclosure of her own experience of sexual and domestic abuse to be untrue, exaggerated for effect, manipulative, or even evidence of narcissism and any right to sympathy or acknowledgement or solidarity is countervailed by her “transphobia”.

 

The line seems to be - “we deplore violence against women - except TERFs who deserve to be kerb-stomped.”

 

The Sun came to the party with its trademark cynicism – its Union Jack bedecked front page had screamer headlines about Rowling’s abusive ex-husband.

 

This exploitation and trivialisation of domestic violence, whilst claiming to care about it, is a classic Murdoch gutter press tactic and is being deplored by a wide range of people, including journalist Owen Jones, whose outrage over this is somewhat undermined by never having previously spoken out about – indeed has contributed to – the demonization of other gender critical women who don’t have Rowling’s massive buffer of wealth and power.

 

Rowling's essay has served to harden the edges of this most polarised and polarising of debates – one in which there are fervently held views on either side and a lot of apathy, confusion, misinformation, and ignorance in between.

 

For me, the idea that an amorphous collection of disparate individuals declaring biological sex is a spectrum and performatively bending the gender binary back on itself will somehow end Patriarchy, is a stupid one.

 

Even more stupid is the belief that once Patriarchy has been de-binaried and people acknowledge there are at least six sexes, all the myriad oppressive structures, processes, and relationships which have flowed from Patriarchy will also go “Pouf” and be replaced with …um …..on that rather important subject most of them are as curiously silent as they are about how Patriarchy came into being in the first place.

 

As for me – I have my materialist, Marxist views on that, and as a result of which I’m interested in what's BEHIND the profoundly individualistic, essentially superficial and strongly aspirational gender identity movement which claims to be challenging the status quo at a foundational level but actually is doing no such thing. 

 

What it is doing helping to divide and divert and turn natural allies into sworn enemies. I wonder who might benefit from that?

 

Overall, excluding Trumpist basket-case USA, the zeitgeist in the western world at least is broadly pro-transgender rights, especially here in NZ - despite hyperbolic claims to the contrary and despite the term transgender now covering a wide and increasingly eclectic range of gender identities that have seeped out beyond trans woman and trans man into non-binary and further. 

 

Unlike movements for national liberation, civil and human rights, against racism, and the peace and environmental movements - all of which have been surveilled, infiltrated, repressed, vilified, and demonised to varying degrees - the trans rights movement actually enjoys very high levels of corporate, governmental, institutional, and media support. 

 

Almost every major charity, trade union and professional association is fully supportive – on paper at least; all major political parties fully and openly support trans rights as defined by the current transgender orthodoxy, or at least say nothing critical or oppositional; all government departments and almost the entire media are on message.

 

This signals a degree of institutional capture that is unheard of for any other movement for progressive social change, and it cannot be explained away by the internet effect or the trans movement standing on the shoulders of all those who went before.

 

This is what interests me – along with how and why this has become the most divisive and polarising issues on the Left – ever.

 

Women had to fight inside the trade union and labour movement and the Left more widely for recognition of the need to fight for women’s rights and on women’s issues; black people had to also fight in the Left and in the women’s movement for recognition of the need to fight for black and minority ethic women’s rights and issues - but there was never this amount of polarisation, division and diversion away from pressing issues and common interests. 

 

Never.

 

Anyone with any real commitment to the Left and to progressive politics more widely who is not engaging with that is either on the wrong side of the barricade – or is in the grip of Overactive Amygdala Syndrome – or is a shitty little misogynist using trans rights as an excuse to attack dissenting women.

 

Frankly, I’m sick of the pile-ons and the social media ping pong. I’m appalled by the abusive and the crudely sexist insults that get tossed around like so much confetti but I’m more offended by the politically infantile calls from the would-be woke for the righteous to prove their righteousness by combing through their Twitter followers and Facebook friends looking for ‘mutuals’ with JK Rowling so they can block or unfriend them. #GTFU

 

I’m fed up with the logical and ethical contortions performed by some people who claim to be on the Left to justify some pseudonymous plank, very likely a troll, calling a young lesbian a “terf cunt who needs to be learn to cope with cock” because her vagina essentialism, transphobia and TERF rhetoric literally kills trans people.

 

But I’m also fed up with some of the extremists on the other side - the actual biological determinists who deploy their own forms of harmful reductionism and lines of crude and hurtful abuse - including rejecting trans women who have stood as allies with women. 

 

However, I’ve said this before – I’ve been watching this movement for years now and the ugly misogyny came out first and hardest. If anyone is reacting – if anyone has the excuse of having been provoked - it is gender critical women. And frankly, compare the worst a so-called TERF says about trans people with the worst that’s lobbed the other way – and the trans rights regiment win the abuse stakes by a country mile.

 

A self-serving opportunist on Twitter lectured all who could bear to read the interminable thread, about the awfulness of Rowling’s essay; he cited a tweet by Magdalen Berns – a feisty little left wing, radical feminist, lesbian Londoner who – fed up with being told trans women are literally women even if they still have a penis and testicles and that trans women who fancy women are lesbians– retorted with some abuse of her own. Even dying tragically young from brain cancer and being left wing and lesbian – doesn’t count when the scales of righteousness are being deployed by the trans rights regiment of the would-be-woke brigade.

 

For the WBWB even the suspicion of being a TERF, even being “TERF adjacent” (yes, there is such a thing) weighs so much – it doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve done, what else you believe in, or how good a person you are – the weight of the TERF label is such that the scales of righteousness tip all the way against you. 

 

And what’s more, they will stay there despite anything else you might do or achieve or demonstrate – the only way out of the resulting blanket condemnation is to publicly renounce the TERF heresy but even that might not be enough for some of the truly fervent - for the label leaves a stain and once branded, forever suspect.