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Edited by Mrph1 on Dec 1st 2023 at 6:51:29 PM
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Ugh. Things like that make me glad that my family's home country of Taiwan is more progressive when it comes to LGBT rights.
JK Rowling’s latest book is about a murderous cis man who dresses as a woman to kill his victims
The first review for Troubled Blood describes it as a “book whose moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress”.
According to The Telegraph, the “meat” of the 900-page novel is an investigation into a cold case: the disappearance of a woman in 1974, believed to be a victim of a cis male serial killer whose modus operandi is dressing as a woman.
“One wonders what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues will make of [the] book,” writes reviewer Jake Kerridge.
Quickly, Troubled Blood was criticised on social media.
Troubled Blood is the fifth entry in Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series, penned under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
The second in the series, The Silkworm, has previously been criticised over its depiction of a trans character described as “unstable and aggressive”.
In the book, the woman, Pippa, stalks Strike before attempting to stab him.
After the attack the titular detective manages to trap Pippa in his office, where her trans identity and deadname are revealed. At this point, JK Rowling describes the character’s Adam’s apple and hands, with the Strike character warning her that prison “won’t be fun for you… Not pre-op”.
Trans journalist Katelyn Burns reviewed the passage for them in 2018, writing: “It’s an entirely common though insulting trope about trans women – that they are aggressive and unable to overcome their masculine nature, not to mention villainous – that has become all too common from cisgender authors with only a passing knowledge of trans people.”
Pink News has contacted JK Rowling’s representatives for comment.
Wow, she is really going off the deep end... .
This answers the question (at least in her case) whether or not someone can seperate the author from his/her books.
Hopefully this finally pushes the Labour Party to expel her.
To rub further salt to the wound, Rowling has the murderer specifically disguise themself as a Muslim woman.
"Assuming someone really did enter the house on the fourth, I've got to say a burqa's a bloody good way of getting in and out without being recognized. Can you think of another way of totally concealing your face and body that wouldn't make people challenge you?"
"And they were carrying a halal takeaway?"
"Allegedly. Was their last meal halal? Is that why the killer removed the guts?"
"And this woman -"
"Could have been a man..."
On a related note, Cynthia Nixon's (Sex and the City) latest interview with the Independent notes how "her 23-year-old transgender son Samuel was devastated after hearing Rowling’s views. 'It was really painful for him because so much of his childhood was tied up with Harry Potter.'"
Edited by XMenMutant22 on Sep 14th 2020 at 8:14:35 AM
Was she always like this and we just didn't notice till now?
Industrious Incisors
There were signs, but the worst of her behavior wasn’t apparent until recently, possibly due to transgender issues not being so visible in the past.
How long has she been writing under a pen name based on a conversion therapist, would be the question, I guess.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she always had some level of bigoted beliefs then got further radicalised online, Twitter is not a healthy place.
Tief girl with eartude
This to be honest.
It's tempting to look back on her work and find the transphobia, but she was clearly no more transphobic than any other GenX middle class cishet white person in the 90's (which, to be fair, is still quite transphobic).
But the fact of the matter is, there came a point where she had to decide between being better, and being validated by the hardcore little cult of transphobes.
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Yeah. That reporter lady in Harry Potter was a transphobic caricature, but the openly radical transphobia is only a few years old.
She was? She always seemed like a caricature of the British press in general, what went over my head?
Honestly Rowling seems like a pretty prime target for online radicalisation, older, has existing trust issues, rather isolated (due to her fame) and with a tendency to spend a lot of time on the internet. But that must be wishful thinking on my part.
Tief girl with eartude
Her behaviour as a paparazzi is, but other stuff is rather transphobic. She dresses like a straight person's idea of a drag queen, her hands are described as "mannish", one of the characters discovers she's been disguising herself and blackmails her. Said disguise is a government regulated transformation which she's done off the record.
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She/Her Pronouns
x3: Holy crap, I think I missed that. It rings familiar, but I don't quite remember...
Huh. Rita Skeeter as a transphobic caricature. Makes an unfortunate amount of sense.
Edited by AzurePaladin on Sep 14th 2020 at 8:21:53 AM
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -Fighteer
Yeah, as well as comments about a “strong jaw” and shit.
That's interesting and disturbing/suspicious. To the extent, I had a mental image of Skeeter it was the attractive-looking version from the movies. I'd like to think that the book description is just a general "unpleasant characters are ugly" thing (itself troubling), but given Rowling's currently expressed opinions...
I would also like to think that her pen name is not deliberately taken from the "gay conversion therapy guy". On one hand, she is supportive of gay rights (although as with other terfs, I wouldn't be surprised if that changed). On the other hand, it's kind of suspicious that she says she got the Galbraith name from a supposed childhood imagined identity rather than say John Kenneth Galbraith.
My general sense (hope?) is that Rowling started out as basically well-intentioned and thought of herself as progressive, but had a decent amount of unexamined shitty opinions. Unfortunately, when she was called on them, she started doubling down and since bigots were receptive and welcoming towards her, her views got worse and continued to do so. The same thing happened with Graham Lineham.
I really am curious though why there is such a prevalence of terfs in the U.K.
Honestly, I think at some point we should stop giving a person the benefit of the doubt.
That's the impression I get as well. Perhaps progressive relative to the 90s she got her start in, and the Second Wave Feminism she grew up in, but well, Society Marches On, and rather than update her views to match in a reasoned way she preferred to just opportunistically coast off of the most superficial and haphazard understanding of them. That characters like Hermione and Mc Gonagall incorporated a lot of "girl power" tropes typical to post-Second Wave feminist media makes it a lot less surprising. Lesbianism
My opinion on the Rita Skeeter issue is that it was originally more of a case of casual transphobia (in the sense that trans women are Acceptable Targets seen as ugly and shady, rather than an existential threat) that has since crystallized into a more radical and virulently toxic form.
In my experience progressive-TER Fsnote tend to be very pro the LG part of LGBT. And many TER Fs are themselves lesbians, especially political lesbians. It's possible Rowling is being radicalized into fullblown rightism, but I'd be more concerned about her understanding of homosexuality being surface-deep and trapped in the 80s than her opposing it outright.
Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 14th 2020 at 9:45:56 AM
She/Her Pronouns
British Feminism specifically was largely dominated by the Second Wave, and still is to this day. Rowling picked up a lot of that, including its opinions on femininity and gender identity (ie toxic to some degree with both).
For all her talk on liberation, Rowling's writing has been hostile to women being perceived as too masculine (Pipa and Rita) or too feminine (Dolores). IE Dictating how feminine a woman must be and how she must act to count, ironically what feminism was supposed to fight against.
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -Fighteer
Prescriptive standards of women's behavior (which was responsible for the now-defunct Girls Need Role Models) were indeed one of the major criticisms towards Second Wave activism and later feminist media heavily influenced by Second Wave values, relative to the cultural libertarianism of the Third Wave. Namely the concept that women should have the freedom to be as feminine or masculine as they want; the goal of feminism should be about having the option. I remember countless flamewars over whether fictional women were appropriately Strong Female Characters or not in my LJ days, or real-life women criticizing each other and female celebrities for being bad role models, only dying down as the latter view became more commonplace in the 2010's.
Although, the impression I got from Umbridge's depiction was more about Tastes Like Diabetes and Bitch in Sheep's Clothing than a critique of hyperfemininity itself. Femininity is good but a candy shell can't hide a rotten center. Something Rowling herself should listen to.
Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 14th 2020 at 10:48:32 AM
Not unexpected. The Gender Critical crew keeps trying to frame their bullshit as defending women even as they get into bed with the Heritage Foundation who very much do want to take away women's rights.
"Yup. That tasted purple."
Considering the UK Guardian's history of transphobia I am entirely unsurprised. It's sickening to see bigots hiding behind accusations of bigotry.
Hence why I refered to it as "clever".
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes