Perspective: A podcast promised clarity from Harry Potter author on how she feels about trans issues. But it falls to the audience to fact-check her, Monica Hesse writes.
He’d already been a loud misogynist ringleader in the GamerGate controversy starting in 2014. He’d already helped spearhead a Twitter charge against the actress Leslie Jones. He was already a Breitbart editor; he already had a speaking career. College campuses didn’t pluck him from obscurity just to ban him; they wanted to ban him because of whom he already was and what he’d already done.
Listening to “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” is exhausting. It’s exhausting because it requires constant vigilance.And it’s exhausting because the phrase “constant vigilance,” I’ve just realized, entered my own lexicon via Mad-Eye Moody, a beloved Harry Potter character. Because Rowling is a brilliant and beloved storyteller who is astonishingly good at entering lexicons, manipulating language and telling fantasy stories. It’s how she became famous.
There, truly, is the whole issue in a nutshell. If your bar for bigotry requires Rowling to say out loud, “I hate trans people,” then that bar will never be cleared. Even if Rowling feels that way, I doubt she’d ever say it that way; even conservative pundits know not to say it that way. There is simply nothing to be strategically gained by uttering such an obviously prejudiced sentence.Journalism is a business for sticklers.
Her communications have implicitly conflated being trans with being a predator. Her communications have made unsupported claims about transitioning, and detransitioning, and what demographics are transitioning, and why . The communications have implied that many trans men are confused, and that some trans women are actually just dangerous men in drag .She has retweeted an article from an online magazine called Reduxx, which bills itself as “feminist news and opinion.
But engaging with Rowling’s tweets on that particular news story requires getting in the weeds about a single, high-profile, messy-as-hell case that needs to be addressed with a scalpel, not a bludgeon. A situation that doesn’t really tell us anything useful about how trans women generally and overwhelmingly behave in female spaces.
As for “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling”: New episodes of the podcast are released every Tuesday, but none of the three released so far have delved much, as promised, into “debates on gender and sex.” The most recent episode ended with audio clips of transgender rights activists yelling in protest, so maybe the next installment will finally ask Rowling to provide a full and thorough accounting of the things she’s said and the harm she’s caused.
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